Latinx is a political training exercise and power probe. It’s a trick the people who are black for a living picked up fifty years ago. Whitey is made periodically to learn a new name — negroes and coloreds became Afro-Americans, blacks, and African-Americans, and a subset of “People of Color,” not because any of these terms is “better” than any other, and, once Afro-American was introduced by blacks, not because any one of them came from a better source, but simply because its uptake was a test of political clout. I mean really, what does “African-American” add over Afro-American? And isn’t “black” really as good as any of them?

I call it the “syllabification tax,” a performative apology that squanders the opportunity for real recompense for the depredations of slavery. Latinx is a shibboleth, a way for the woke to test wokeness. It’ll be a secret handshake until it isn’t, and then something new will be found. I doubt that abuelitx finds it at all useful. But they are viejx, so what do they know?