Wait, why did they say "Latin@"? What does that even mean?
@ has elements of both an 'a' and an 'o' in the way it looks so it's intended to be a (sadly unpronounceable) gender-neutral shorthand for situations where for whatever reason people don't want to use the word 'Hispanic'. I'm seeing it more and more often these days.
Huh. I only see the a, thus defeating the purpose. Can't they just say Latino/a?
The irony is that in Spanish, the male pronoun is always used when dealing with mixed genders or an unknown gender. A group of male and female Hispanic Americans is always going to be referred to as Latinos. So in their ham-handed attempt to be politically correct, they willfully disregarded another culture's linguistic conventions. RACISTS!
These student activists would no doubt point to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and link the notion of machismo to the Spanish language's treatment of gender. You are (speaking to the collective of Atlas here, not just IndyTexasTexasIndyTexas) quite surprisingly uptight about a simple ampersand, along with other minor points of contention, to such a degree that it suggests subtle unconscious fear of these strange ideas you don't understand.
I think it's pretty nifty, it looks like an A and an O at the same time so you don't have to put either gender in front of the other! I've never seen it before but I'm going to start typing Latin@.
Well I'm 1/64th Native American. Does that mean I should get mad at the other 63/64ths of me for oppressing that 1/64th of me? (Really 31/64th actually since my father's family are very recent immigrants).
This is the whitest possible comment: discussion of racial fractions as if your blood quantum suddenly means you're not racist, a cheap joke automatically discarding these strange and apparently silly ideas, and a display that indicates utter ignorance at how oppression functions. I don't mean to pick on you Mr. Texas because others miss the point just as much as you but your posts make good examples to respond to. I am speaking to all y'all whities and that phrase includes Simfan who has assimilated quite skillfully into the cultural hegemon and can maintain the perfect facsimile of a middle aged white dude.
I don't understand the problem people have at all. Sure, some of the points aren't very well thought out. You could criticize that, but that's honestly just splitting hairs when the big picture here is honestly pretty impressive. These are kids, basically, and the level of cringe is comparable to any of the essays anyone that age writes for their classes. But these are kids who have
done something, who have
taken action to make sure their voices are heard, to an extent that nobody here has ever done about anything. This group composing of a lot of white guys has lodged a very loud protest in favor of gender, racial, and cultural equality. The tides are turning and these beliefs are becoming mainstream in tomorrow's leaders: like it or not but we're about to give way to the tumblr generation
