The thing I find scary is what I call the "LatinX" phenomenon--(overwhelmingly white) progressives being able to dictate policies affecting minorities over the preferences of those minorities: https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
A sobering example: if Justice Thomas votes against race-based college admissions in the Harvard case, white progressives will call him "racist" for adopting a view shared by 62% of Black people.
the latinx term is interesting, because ... it's purely made by whites for whites to be sure that they are not accidentally discriminatory in their language. because whites won't call out a latino person for using the term latino. (at least this is how I understand it.)
and even if latino folks have spoken up against it ... it's no use, because it's not about them, it's about (virtue signalling :D and partly) about a slightly justified ignorance of the needs of minorities. (and nowadays everybody writes to every single person on the planet at once - thanks to twitter - so maximal inclusive language became a proxy for actual inclusiveness.)
I don't think there's any conceit that it's about Hispanics qua Hispanics; isn't it supposed to be about gender? Like, I don't think a white progressive would claim they say that to make a Hispanic person feel comfortable, I think it's more about a) women and non-binary; b) a more abstract notion that this somehow makes the language less "sexist"
It was made up by a Puerto Rican academic, or so I’m told. But it was made popular by white people, who have the institutional power to decide which ideas coming from minority communities to promote or not, and which minorities to platform and not. Academic and activist ideas relating to minorities largely become popular based on how appealing they are to the white people who control the institutions, donor networks, and platforms.
To use a different example, my dad remarked the other day he was upset that Ilhan Omar had “become the face of Islam in America.” Of course, it’s white progressives in the media decide who gets used in stories as a proxy for minority groups. (There’s almost certainly more Muslim Republicans than Muslim DSA members, but you’ll never see one of the former be given the mike to speak on “Muslim issues.”) Likewise, it’s white liberals in university faculties that decide who gets tenured as an “Islamic Studies” professor. It’s also white liberals who bankroll most political activist groups claiming to speak for Muslim Americans. (CAIR might be an exception given foreign funding.)
Barring a recreation of the Muslim-GOP alliance of 2000, it’ll be white liberals who have the biggest say in appointing the first “Muslim” Supreme Court Justice. It will be no surprise that this person will think white liberals are right and the vast majority of Muslims are wrong on every issue where the two disagree.
I'm Muslim, and not particularly a fan of Ilhan Omar (though I also agree with her on many things). But she's not the "face of Islam in America" because "white progressives in the media" decided that. She's one of like 3 Muslims in Congress, all of whom happen to be very progressive. She's the only one who wears a hijab (i.e. she's more obviously Muslim and probably more genuinely religious than Ellison or Tlaib, as far as I can tell). I would bet Republicans would want her to be the face of Islam in America too--she unites two conservative bogeymen: Muslims and progressives.
> It’s also white liberals who bankroll most political activist groups claiming to speak for Muslim Americans. (CAIR might be an exception given foreign funding.)
??
What your dad is complaining about also represents a generational gap within the Muslim community. There are a lot of young Muslim Americans who are quite religious (more personally pious and abiding by the dictates of the religion than me, certainly) and simultaneously very comfortable identifying as progressive and allying with groups who hold views contrary to our religion's beliefs. For example, I was briefly the president of the Muslim Law Student's Association at Columbia. Our year and the previous year were not that practicing, but the year I was president, we had two incoming 1Ls join who were two hijabi girls who were simultaneously very religious and very progressive. They wanted to partner with all sorts of organizations whose beliefs are, in my view (and your dad's), inconsistent with Islam (i.e. pretty left LGBTQ groups). They also wanted to lobby the law school for prayer space within the building because they pray 5x a day.
What's more, plenty within the Muslim community, irrespective of age or views on social issues, believe that far-left positions on economics and also the environment are more consistent with Islam than moderate or conservative positions on those issues. Shit, I know a Muslim guy who voted for Trump because he hates feminism who agrees that market socialism is the most consistent economic position from an Islamic perspective.
> It will be no surprise that this person will think white liberals are right and the vast majority of Muslims are wrong on every issue where the two disagree.
Whose fault is that? Why fault liberals for appointing an ideologically-aligned justice instead of faulting Christian conservatives for their bigotry and short-term thinking w/r/t Muslims?
With due respect to you given our back-and-forth in this thread, what you're saying does not strike me as logically tenable, and instead seems more driven by a kind of emotional response. I agree with the general sentiment of being against this stuff, but I think you want to see what basically amounts to a kind of "conspiracy" here that doesn't exist. A huge part of why all of the issues raised in this thread exist is because of a dynamic where this country has tended to skew heavily conservative (compare us to the rest of the Western world) and biased, and substantive change seldom happens. IMO, there's a huge backlash factor at play that makes contemporary progressives more extreme than they should be.
Yeah the latinx thing is really dumb (REALLY dumb), but also harmless, esp since almost no actual Hispanic person says that shit.
Luckily Dem voters reject far left candidates in broader elections; see Biden, Eric Adams. Dems currently seem to elect moderates at a higher rate, whereas Republican moderates tend to have to retire (Flake, Kinzinger) or suffer vicious attacks and get voted out (Liz Cheney)
> Yeah the latinx thing is really dumb (REALLY dumb), but also harmless, esp since almost no actual Hispanic person says that shit.
It's harmless if you consider it in isolation. But I think it reflects a troubling power dynamic. At Northwestern they renamed "Hispanic Heritage Month" to "Latinx Heritage Month" (https://www.northwestern.edu/msa/programs/heritage-months/la...). Big deal, sure. But it shows that white progressives and their allies have tremendous power over issues relating to minorities--down to what to call a group of minorities--and minorities have very little power to assert their own preferences. I don't think that's harmless.
> Luckily Dem voters reject far left candidates in broader elections; see Biden, Eric Adams.
I think this illustrates my point, though. In the primary, Black and Latino New Yorkers overwhelmingly supported Adams, while Asians supported Yang. But the Black, Latino, and Asian progressive activists mostly opposed both and sided with the candidates preferred by white progressives. Matt Yglesias wrote an excellent article addressing the disconnect between Asian actvists and asian voters: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang?s=r.
But there's a whole lot of things--especially the things addressed in this article--that are not put to a popular vote. Do so-called "people of color" actually want the ABA to change well-worn principles of color-blind justice in favor of affirmative anti-racism? Do "people of color" want hospitals to send white people to the back of the vaccine line? Do they want hiring policies that expressly consider race? It doesn't matter because they don't get a vote.
One of the great things about Islam and also one of the problems where race and law are involved, is muslims have an extremely diverse racial distribution.
When somebody says Muslim, a particular race doesn't come to mind amongst the informed.
So their experiences and perceptions in a society where race has historically been a reasonably large part of weighting can be drastically different.
> It's harmless if you consider it in isolation. But I think it reflects a troubling power dynamic. At Northwestern they renamed "Hispanic Heritage Month" to "Latinx Heritage Month" (https://www.northwestern.edu/msa/programs/heritage-months/la...). Big deal, sure. But it shows that white progressives and their allies have tremendous power over issues relating to minorities--down to what to call a group of minorities--and minorities have very little power to assert their own preferences. I don't think that's harmless.
Our Latino law school classmates at places like Northwestern and Columbia are by and large progressive, and thus that change likely reflected the preferences of the Hispanic student body at Northwestern Law. I'm not sure why the preferences of moderate Hispanics who aren't there should matter in that context.
> I think this illustrates my point, though. In the primary, Black and Latino New Yorkers overwhelmingly supported Adams, while Asians supported Yang. But the Black, Latino, and Asian progressive activists mostly opposed both and sided with the candidates preferred by white progressives. Matt Yglesias wrote an excellent article addressing the disconnect between Asian actvists and asian voters: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang?s=r...*It doesn't matter because they don't get a vote.*
Bro, as you stated, they literally voted in the mayor in one of the most important--if not the most important--cities in the country lol. While the academic bubble is getting more progressive, New York went from having a progressive dodo for a mayor to having a moderate ex-Republican ex-cop as the mayor.
