forbidden words: black and latinx

black

black adj. 1 a black cat crossed our path: coal-black, jet, raven, ebony, sable, inky, swarthy. 2 It was a cold black night: dark, murky, lightless, stygian, sunless, moonless, unilluminated, unlighted. 3 Often Black. Jackie Robinson was the first black major league baseball player: negro, colored, dark-skinned. 4 Cynics have a black outlook on the state of the world: gloomy, grim, dismal, sombre, dim, calamitous. 5 The bus driver stopped short and gave the pedestrian a black look: sullen, hostile, dark, furious, angry, threatening. 6 The villian had a black heart:  evil, wicked, bad, nefarious.
—n. 7 Black is the most somber color: ebony, jet, raven, sable. 8 Often Black. Martin Luther King was the first American Black to win the Nobel prize:  Negro, Afro-American, black man, colored man, man of color.
Ant. 1 white, snow-white, chalky, whitish. 2  bright, white, sunny, moonlit, illuminated, lighted, well-lighted, lit. 3  white, Caucasian.  4 optimistic, bright, happy gay. 5 friendly, amiable, amicable, congenial, warm, pleased. 6 good, virtuous, wholesome, righteous, moral, honorable, upright, exemplary, pure. 7 white 8 white, white man, Caucasian.

from – Family Word Finder: Reader’s Digest. The Reader’s Digest Association, 1975.

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black¹

black, adj

1. relating or belonging to any of the various human populations characterized by dark skin pigmentation, specifically the dark-skinned peoples of Africa, Oceania, and Australia.

2. relating to or noting the descendants of these populations, without regard for the lightness or darkness of skin tone.

3. African American.

   The exhibit featured the work of young Black artists from New York.

black, noun

Often Offensive. (Use as a noun in reference to a person, e.g., “a Black,” is often considered offensive.)

1. a member of any of various dark-skinned peoples, especially those of Africa, Oceania, and Australia.
2. African American.

Black²

Black, noun

1. Hugo Lafayette 1886–1971, U.S. political official: associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court 1937–71.

2. (Sir) James Whyte 1924–2010, English pharmacologist: Nobel Prize 1988.

3. Joseph 1728–99, Scottish physician and chemist.

4. Shirley Temple Temple, Shirley.

black³

blacker, blackest, adj

1. being a color that lacks hue and brightness and absorbs light without reflecting any of the rays composing it.

   They labeled the boxes with a black permanent marker.

   Synonyms:

   ebony, sable, inky, sooty, dusky, dark

   Antonyms:

   white

2. characterized by absence of light; enveloped in darkness.

   a black night.

3. soiled or stained with dirt.

   That shirt was black within an hour.

   Synonyms:

   dingy, dirty

   Antonyms:

   clean

4. gloomy; pessimistic; dismal.

   a black outlook.

   Synonyms:

   funereal, mournful, doleful, somber, depressing, sad

   Antonyms:

   cheerful, hopeful

5. deliberately harmful; inexcusable.

   a black lie.

6. boding ill; sullen or hostile; threatening: black looks.

   black words;

   black looks.

   Synonyms:

   calamitous, disastrous

7. (of coffee or tea) without milk or cream.

   I take my coffee black.

8. without any moral quality or goodness; evil; wicked.

   His black heart has concocted yet another black deed.

   Synonyms:

   villainous, traitorous, treacherous, nefarious, horrible, atrocious, monstrous, infernal, devilish, fiendish, inhuman, sinful

9. indicating censure, disgrace, or liability to punishment.

   a black mark on one’s record.

10. marked by disaster or misfortune.

    black areas of drought; Black Friday.

11. wearing black or dark clothing or armor.

    the black prince.

12. based on the grotesque, morbid, or unpleasant aspects of life: black humor.

    black comedy;

    black humor.

13. (of a check mark, flag, etc.) done or written in black to indicate, as on a list, that which is undesirable, substandard, potentially dangerous, etc..

    Pilots put a black flag next to the ten most dangerous airports.

14. illegal or underground.

    The black economy pays no taxes.

15. showing a profit; not showing any losses.

    the first black quarter in two years.

16. deliberately false or intentionally misleading.

    black propaganda.

17. British. boycotted, as certain goods or products by a trade union.

18. (of steel) in the form in which it comes from the rolling mill or forge; unfinished.

black, noun

1. the color at one extreme end of the scale of grays, opposite to white, absorbing all light incident upon it.

2. black clothing, especially as a sign of mourning.

   He wore black at the funeral.

3. Chess, Checkers. the dark-colored men or pieces or squares.

4. black pigment.

   lamp black.

5. Slang. black beauty.

6. a horse or other animal that is entirely black.

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latinx

latinx, adj

of or relating to people of Latin American origin or descent, especially those living in the United States (used in place of the masculine form Latino, the feminine form Latina, or the gender-binary formLatin@ ).

Community members celebrated at the Latinx Pride Parade.

Etymology

Origin of Latinx
First recorded in 2000–05; Latin(a) ( def. ) or Latin(o) ( def. ) + x ³ ( def. ) in the sense “unknown quantity or variable”; Latin@ ( def. )

from — dictionary.com – Definition of Latinx. (n.d.). 

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latinx

Latinx is an U.S.-based neologism used to refer to people with Latin American cultural or ethnic identity in the United States. The term aims to be a gender-neutral alternative to Latino and Latina by replacing the masculine ⟨-o⟩ and feminine ⟨-a⟩ ending with the ⟨-x⟩ suffix. The plural for Latinx is Latinxs or Latinxes. The term was first seen online around 2004; it has since been used in social media by activists, students, and academics who seek to advocate for non-binary and genderqueer individuals. Related gender-neutral neologisms include Xicanx or Chicanx as a derivative of Chicano/Chicana.

Latinx does not adhere to conventional grammatical gender rules in Spanish, is difficult to pronounce for Spanish speakers, and is criticized as showing disrespect towards the Spanish language as a whole.^[1] In Latin America, terms such as Latine and Latin@ have been used to indicate gender-neutrality; however, the Royal Spanish Academy style guide does not recognize gender-neutral language for the Spanish language as grammatically correct.^[2] In English, Latin without a suffix has been proposed as an alternative to Latinx.

Reception of the term among Hispanic and Latino Americans has been overwhelmingly negative, and surveys have found that the vast majority prefer other terms such as Hispanic and Latina/Latino to describe themselves with only 2–3% using Latinx.^[3][4] A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that roughly half of U.S. Hispanics were not aware of the term Latinx; of those aware of it, 75% said it should not be used to describe the Hispanic or Latino population, preferring instead the terms “Latino” and “Hispanic” by large margins.^[5][6]

Latinx as a group identity term denotes individuals in the United States who have Latin American roots.^[7][8] Other terms for this specific social category include Hispanic, Latino, Latina, Latine, and Latin@ (combining the letters “a” and “o” into the character @).^[9][10] Yet another term is simply “Latin”, a gender-neutral alternative, and can be stated in the plural as Latin peoples.^[11] Latinx is used as an alternative to the gender binary inherent to formulations such as Latina/o and Latin@,^[9][12][13] and is used by and for anyone of Latin-American descent who does not identify as either male or female, or more broadly as a gender-neutral term for such.^[14][12][15]

Pronunciations of Latinx documented in dictionaries include /ləˈtiːnɛks, læ-, lɑː-, –nəks, ˈlætɪnɛks/ lə-TEE-neks, la(h)-, -⁠nəks, LAT-in-eks.^{[16][17][18][19]} Other variants respelled ad hoc as “Latins”, “La-tinks”, or “Latin-equis” have been reported.^[20][21] Editors at Merriam-Webster write that “more than likely, there was little consideration for how [Latinx] was supposed to be pronounced when it was created.”^[12]

The first records of the term Latinx appear in the 21st century,^[17] but there is no certainty as to its first occurrence.^[22] According to Google Trends, it was first seen online in 2004,^[9][23][24] and first appeared in academic literature around 2013 “in a Puerto Rican psychological periodical to challenge the gender binaries encoded in the Spanish language.”^[22][25] Contrarily, it has been claimed that usage of the term “started in online chat rooms and listservs in the 1990s” and that its first appearance in academic literature was in the Fall 2004 volume of the journal Feministas Unidas.^[26][27] In the rest of the United States, it was first used in activist and LGBT circles as a way to expand on earlier attempts at gender-inclusive forms of the grammatically masculine Latino, such as Latino/a and Latin@.^[23] A similar use of ‘x’ in the term Mx. may have been an influence or model for the development of Latinx.^[12]

Use of x to expand language can be traced to the word Chicano, which had an x added to the front of the word, making it Xicano. Scholars have identified this shift as part of the movement to empower people of Mexican origin in the U.S. and also as a means of emphasizing that the origins of the letter X and term Chicano are linked to the Indigenous Nahuatl language.^[22][28] The x has also been added to the end of the term Chicano, making it Chicanx. An example of this occurred at Columbia University where students changed their student group name from “Chicano Caucus” to “Chicanx Caucus” in December 2014. The following year, Columbia University changed the name of Latino Heritage Month to Latinx Hispanic Heritage Month.^[22][29] Salinas and Lozano (2017) state that the term is influenced by Mexican indigenous communities that have a third gender role, such as Juchitán de Zaragoza, Oaxaca (see also: Gender system § Juchitán, Oaxaca, Mexico).^[30]

Between 2004 and 2014, Latinx did not attain broad usage or attention.^[9] Awareness of the term grew in the month following the Pulse nightclub shooting of June 2016; Google Trends shows that searches for this term rose greatly in this period.^[9]: 60 The term was added to the Merriam-Webster English dictionary^[16] in 2018, as it continued to grow in popularity in the United States, and to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2019.^[14] Between 2019 and 2024, awareness for the term doubled among those who self-identified as U.S. Latinos or Hispanics.^[6]

Despite the increase in awareness, use of the term to describe oneself has not greatly increased over time.^[6] As of 2018, use of the term Latinx was limited nearly exclusively to the United States.^[31] Manuel Vargas writes that people from Latin America ordinarily would not think of themselves using the term unless they reside in the United States.^[31]

A 2019 poll (with a 5% margin of error) found that 2% of US residents of Latin American descent in the US use Latinx, including 3% of 18–34-year-olds; the rest preferred other terms. “No respondents over [age] 50 selected the term”, while overall “3% of women and 1% of men selected the term as their preferred ethnic identifier”.^[3][32]

A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that only 23% of US adults who self-identified as Hispanic or Latino had heard of the term Latinx. Of those, 65% said that the term Latinx should not be used to describe them, with most preferring terms such as Hispanic or Latino.^[4] While the remaining 33% of US Hispanic adults who have heard the term Latinx said it could be used to describe the community, only 10% of that subgroup preferred it to the terms Hispanic or Latino.^[4] The preferred term both among Hispanics who have heard the term and among those who have not was Hispanic, garnering 50% and 64% respectively.^[4] Latino was second in preference with 31% and 29% respectively.^[4] Only 3% self identified as Latinx in that survey.^[4]

A 2020 study based on interviews with 34 Latinx/a/o students from the US found that they “perceive higher education as a privileged space where they use the term Latinx. Once they return to their communities, they do not use the term”.^[22]

A 2021 Gallup poll asked Hispanic Americans about their preference among the terms “Hispanic,” “Latino” and “Latinx”. 57% said it did not matter, and 4% chose Latinx. In a follow-up question where they were asked which term they lean toward, 5% chose Latinx.^[33]

A 2021 poll by Democratic Hispanic outreach firm Bendixen & Amandi International found that only 2 percent of those polled refer to themselves as Latinx, while 68 percent call themselves “Hispanic” and 21 percent favored “Latino” or “Latina” to describe their ethnic background. In addition, 40 percent of those polled said Latinx bothers or offends them to some degree and 30 percent said they would be less likely to support a politician or organization that uses the term.^[34][35]

A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that awareness among U.S. Latinos and Hispanics increased from 23% to 47%, but those who self-identified as Latinx only increased from 3% to 4%, roughly equal to 1.9 million people.^[5][6] Demographic groups including age, sexual orientation, and Afro-Latino identity show the largest distinction between users and non-users. Nonetheless, 75% of U.S. Hispanic adults in the survey opposed the use of Latinx to describe their respective population. When asked which term they preferred be used to describe people of Hispanic or Latino origin, 52% of respondents chose Hispanic, while 29% preferred the term Latino.^[6]

Latinx has become commonly used by activists in American higher education and the popular media who seek to advocate for individuals on the borderlines of gender identity.^[30] Herlihy-Mera calls Latinx “a recognition of the exclusionary nature of our institutions, of the deficiencies in existent linguistic structures, and of language as an agent of social change”, saying, “The gesture toward linguistic intersectionality stems from a suffix endowed with a literal intersection—x.”^[36] Some commentators, such as Ed Morales, a lecturer at Columbia University and author of the 2018 book Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture, associate the term with the ideas of Gloria Anzaldúa, a Chicana feminist. Morales writes that “refusal to conform to male/female gender binaries” parallels “the refusal to conform to a racial binary”.^[9]: 61

The term appears in the titles of academic books in the context of LGBT studies,^[37] rhetoric and composition studies,^[38] and comics studies.^[39] Scharrón-del Río and Aja (2015) have traced the use of Latinx by authors Beatriz Llenín Figueroa, Jaime Géliga Quiñones, Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, and Adriana Gallegos Dextre.^[40] The term has also been discussed in scholarly research by cultural theorist Ilan Stavans on Spanglish^[41] and by Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher Gonzalez on Latinx super heroes in mainstream comics and Latinx graphic novels such as United States of Banana.^[42][43][44] The term and concept of Latinx is also explored by Antonio Pastrana Jr., Juan Battle and Angelique Harris on LBGTQ+ issues.^[37] Valdes also uses the term in research on black perspectives on Latinx.^[45][46] Despite the extensive use of the term across academic texts, Salinas and Lozano (2019) write that authors often lack definitions for the term within their texts.^[22]

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera writes that in Puerto Rico, the “shift toward x in reference to people has already occurred” in limited academic settings and “for many faculty [in the humanities department at the University of Puerto Rico] hermanx and niñx and their equivalents have been the standard … for years. It is clear that the inclusive approach to nouns and adjectives is becoming more common, and while it may at some point become the prevailing tendency, presently there is no prescriptive control toward either syntax”.^[36]

Several student-run organizations at academic institutions have used the word in their title.^[47] At Princeton University the Latinx Perspective Organization was founded in 2016 to “unify Princeton’s diverse Latinx community”^[48] and several student-run organizations at other institutions have used the word in their title.^[47] The University of California, Berkeley, has established the Latinx Research Center, “a faculty-led research hub…that is home to cutting-edge research about the diverse Latinx community of the U.S.”^[49] Conversely, a 2020 analysis found “that community college professional organizations have by and large not adopted the term Latinx, even by [sic] organizations with a Latinx/a/o centered mission”, although some academic journals and dissertations about community colleges were using it.^[50]

Some U.S. Republicans argue that the word is a product of liberal “wokeism“.^[51] In January 2023, Republican Governor of Arkansas Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued the Executive Order to Respect the Latino Community by Eliminating Culturally Insensitive words from Official Use in Government, banning the use of Latinx in official Arkansas government communications.^[52]

Some U.S. Democrats argue that the term disfigures the Spanish language and is an act of cultural appropriation.^[51] In February 2023, a group of Hispanic Connecticut lawmakers, including five Democrats, proposed a similar ban on formal state documents, calling the term offensive to Spanish speakers.^[53] State Representative Geraldo Reyes Jr., who introduced the measure, called the term “offensive and unnecessary”.^[51] Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego, who represented a majority-Hispanic congressional district in Arizona before 2025, advises Democrats not to use the term.^[54] Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus are hesitant to use the term until after usage continues to evolve to make it more common, according to California representative Raul Ruiz.^[55]

Democrats have utilized Latinx far more often, particularly on social media where 47% of Democrats of the 116th Congress used the term across Twitter and Facebook posts compared to just 1% of Republican lawmakers.^[56] On June 26, 2019, during the first 2020 Democratic Party presidential debate, the word was used by the presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, who is not Hispanic or Latina,^[57] which USA Today called “one of the highest profile uses of the term since its conception”.^[58]

Matthew Yglesias of Vox, discussing Donald Trump‘s gains among Hispanic voters in the 2020 United States presidential election, stated that for Democrats, while other factors played a larger role, the term “is, if nothing else, a symptom of the problem, which is a tendency to privilege academic concepts and linguistic innovations in addressing social justice concerns.” He says that “[t]he message of the term … is that the entire grammatical system of the Spanish language is problematic, which in any other context progressives would recognize as an alienating and insensitive message.”

Reception

Latinx has been the subject of controversy.^[8] “Linguistic imperialism” has been used as a basis of both criticism and support and the term has been rejected by many members of the Hispanic and Latino or Latin communities.^{[59][60][61][62][63]}

In 2018, the Royal Spanish Academy rejected the use of -x and -e as gender-neutral alternatives to the collective masculine -o ending, in a style manual published together with the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (ASALE).^[58][2][64] Regarding this decision, Darío Villanueva, RAE‘s director said, “The problem is we’re confusing grammar with machismo.”^[65] According to HuffPost, some refuse to use the term on the grounds that Latinx is difficult to pronounce in the Spanish language.^[1]

Linguists Janet M. Fuller and Jennifer Leeman state that some people reject the use of Latinx to refer to people regardless of gender because they see it as a one-size-fits-all term that erases diversity, preferring to switch between -o/-a/-x when referring to specific individuals.^[66] Those who oppose the term in its entirety have argued that the -x is artificial, unpronounceable, an imposition of English norms on Spanish, or overly faddish.^[66]

Many non-binary Latinos whose first language is not English have also criticized the term on the basis that it caters more to Latin Americans who are fluent in English and can pronounce the -x ending easily while ignoring gender neutral alternatives already employed by Latin American activists, such as -e (Latine).^[67]

Linguist John McWhorter argues that, in contrast to other neologisms such as African American, Latinx has not become mainstream as of 2019 because the problem of implied gender it aims to solve is more a concern of the intelligentsia than the “proverbial person on the street”.^[32]

According to HuffPost, “Many opponents of the term have suggested that using an un-gendered noun like Latinx is disrespectful to the Spanish language and some have even called the term ‘a blatant form of linguistic imperialism'”.^[1] Defending usage of the term against critics arguing linguistic imperialism, Brooklyn College professors María R. Scharrón-del Río and Alan A. Aja argue that the Spanish language itself is a form of linguistic imperialism for Latin Americans.^[40][1]

Another argument against Latinx is that “it erases feminist movements in the 1970s” that fought for use of the word Latina to represent women, according to George Cadava, Director of the Latina and Latino Studies program at Northwestern University.^[58]

Writing for Latino Rebels, Hector Luis Alamo describes the term as a “bulldozing of Spanish”.^[9] In a 2015 article published by the outlet as part of a debate on the term, Alamo wrote: “If we dump Latino for Latinx because it offends some people, then we should go on dump

Similar gender-neutral forms have also arisen. One such term is Latin@,^[78][40] which combines the written form of the ⟨-a⟩ and ⟨-o⟩ endings.^[79] Similar terms include Chicanx^[80] and the variant spelling Xicanx.^[81]

Latine (plural: Latines) as a gender-neutral term is less prevalent than Latinx within the U.S.,^[78] although the opposite is true throughout the Spanish-speaking world.^[82] In the U.S., “Latine” arose out of genderqueer speakers’ use of the ending ⟨-e⟩; similar forms include amigue (‘friend’) and elle (singular they).^[83] In Argentina, efforts to increase gender neutrality in Spanish have utilized both grammatical genders together, as well as ⟨-@⟩ and ⟨-x⟩ endings. According to The New York Times, the ⟨-e⟩ ending has been more widely adopted because it is easier to pronounce.^[84]

In Portuguese, the use of Latino(a), with parentheses, is preferred over Latino/a, with a slash.^[85][86]The use of the at sign has been registered since, at least, 1990s in Brazil.^[87] The -x inflection is proposed in 2006.^[88]

ing words forever since there will always be some people who find some words offensive.”^[68]

Wayne State University professor Nicole Trujillo-Pagán has argued that patriarchal bias is reproduced in ostensibly “gender neutral” language^[69][70][71] and stated, “Less clear in the debate (as it has developed since then) is how the replacement silences and erases long-standing struggles to recognize the significance of gender difference and sexual violence.”^[72]

A 2019 National Survey of Latinos found that only 3 percent of Hispanic-Latinos have ever used “Latinx” to describe themselves.^[73] The League of United Latin American Citizens announced in 2021 that it would stop using the term in its official communications, calling it “very unliked” by nearly all Latinos.^[74][75] A 2024 study found that use of the term Latinx by Democratic politicians alienates Latino voters from the party, and that Latino voters are less likely to support Democrats who use Latinx than those who use Latino in their otherwise identical messaging.^[76]

Skepticism behind the term’s inclusivity has also been posited. Florida Atlantic University professor Cristobal Salinas Jr. argues that, despite being connected to Indigenous cultures and languages, the term is not inclusive of Indigenous cultures outside of Mexico, where the letter “x” is not part of their respective vocabularies.^[77] Additionally, Salinas Jr. contends that the term’s inconsistent usage across texts defending the term’s inclusivity of LGBTQ people “has created confusion between gender and sexual identity”.^[77]

from — Wikipedia contributors. (2025u, November 25). Latinx. Wikipedia.

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