In this episode of “The Opinions,” the linguist and Opinion writer John McWhorter and David Leonhardt, an editorial director of Opinion, debate the politics of how we talk about race and identity and discuss whether “Latinx” is a thing.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
David Leonhardt: My colleague John McWhorter wrote a fascinating recent column arguing that it’s time to retire the term “African American” and return to using “Black” loudly and proudly, as John put it. I kept thinking about that article after I read it because it reminded me of so many other debates we have about the politics of language, especially involving questions of identity.
John, in addition to writing for Times Opinion, is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, and he spent years mulling over many of these questions. So I asked him to come on the show this week and talk through a list of hot-button linguistic issues. John, welcome to The Opinions.
John McWhorter: Happy to be here, David. Thank you.
Leonhardt: You write so much about identity and language and politics. How did you get interested in that intersection?
McWhorter: David, to tell the truth, the kind of linguistics work I do as an academic is pointy-headed stuff about how languages all over the world change and what happens when they come together — the kinds of things that I don’t usually write about, for example, in The Times.
The reason I write about language and identity is because those are the language issues in society that people are most interested in. And frankly, very few people are going to care about my work on the indigenous languages of the island of Flores. What they’re going to be more interested in is things like Latinx. And so therefore I become interested in them too. And just try to give a sense of how somebody who’s trained in linguistics and lives in a society might approach issues like those.
Leonhardt: That makes a lot of sense. You’re basically meeting the readers where they are. So let’s dive into one of these areas. Can you summarize for me the background and the history of the debate between African American and Black?
McWhorter: In 1988, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson had a massive influence on the Black community, he basically declared that we need to start calling ourselves African Americans rather than Black, because Black was too crude and general to capture all the different shades that we are.
And I think the idea also was that to add the African part was to give a note of pride, a note of heritage. And so it happened very quickly. If you were alive and mature at the time, it was as if all of a sudden one week you were supposed to say African American rather than Black.
I never much liked it. I didn’t rail against it, but it never felt right to me because I’m Black. I’m a Black American, but to me the African connection is too long ago. It’s too abstract. It didn’t feel right. Italian American is one thing. Your mother, your grandmother speaks Sicilian, and you’re eating Italian food and you have a certain way of talking. There’s a whole culture.
Black American culture is not African in that way. It’s Black American. But time has gone by and the problem is that the term “African American” has become so awkward that it was time to start asking some questions. Because back in 1988, there weren’t nearly as many immigrants from Africa in the United States as now. That number has truly skyrocketed.
And so it’s at the point where — well, what about the African Americans who are like Italian Americans, where Africa is just a generation or two away? You speak one of the languages or you halfway speak it. In other words, you are an African American person. Is that person really the same thing as Eddie Murphy or me? And it was time to start asking some questions.
Leonhardt: To me, the best argument for “African American” is that it is similar to the case for both Latino and Asian American — in that, of course, Latinos and Asian Americans are large, very diverse groups, and so any term that tries to encompass all of them flattens a lot of diversity, much as “African American” does. But the vast majority of Black Americans do have African ancestry in their family, even if it comes through the Caribbean. And so in a way, there’s an apples-to-apples quality of African American to Asian American and Latino, which are terms we use comfortably. Why do you find that idea unpersuasive?
McWhorter: Because for one thing, personally, I feel Africa in our case is just too far away.
And so for example, to my knowledge, my African ancestry would be about in the 1840s, and that’s at the very latest. And so I don’t feel terribly African. And that’s not just because I’m kind of a starchy, white-sounding college professor.
This is the thing: A great many Black people have never particularly liked “African American.” And so if there’s a significant number of Asian Americans who start to feel that, what is Asian, especially when you deal with South Asian, or I’ve known Southeast Asians who really don’t feel comfortable being grouped with Chinese, Korean and Japanese Americans, well then I think there’s something to that as well. These labels can be crude. But with the African American one, a lot of my feeling is that even within the Black community, there has often been a sense that it was not appropriate to who we actually are here in the present tense.
Leonhardt: I think that’s a theme that we’re going to hit on a few times, which is that when we’re using words to describe a group of people, we owe some deference to the preferences of that group of people.
McWhorter: Definitely.
Leonhardt: Let me make a prediction and then let you react to it. I think you’re going to win this argument. I don’t mean you personally, but if you asked me to predict 10 or 20 years from now, I would guess that “Black” will be the dominant term and “African American” will be less common than it is today. “Black” is just simpler, in addition to all the arguments that you’ve just laid out. Do you share my prediction?
McWhorter: Actually, yeah, I don’t think it’s me that’s going to win. I think that the general sense of “African American” as the right term to use, I think that that’s going to fall away. I think there’s something that’s easy to forget now unless you are at this point elderly — I caught just the tail end of it: “African” American had been tried before. There was a mini fashion in the late ’60s and early ’70s of saying “Afro-American” never caught on because it didn’t feel right. And I don’t think “African American” has really been much different except that there was more media by 1988 than there had been in 1972.
So yeah, I can feel something falling away. And despite my reputation as being a quote unquote contrarian, part of why I wrote that article about African Americans is because I could feel that there’s a current going on. I didn’t write it to stir up the pot. I wrote it to report on what’s going on in the pot without it being stirred.
Leonhardt: You mentioned that the change from “Black” to “African American” happened very quickly — and I remember it, I was in high school at the time. Another change that is much more recent and also was very rapid was the switch to capitalizing “Black.” After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, a whole bunch of institutions in American society switched to doing so, including The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal and our own New York Times,
All those institutions, interestingly, do not capitalize white. They capitalize Black, Latino and Asian American, but not white.
I read a fascinating essay by the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah in which he argued for a different approach. He says we should capitalize both Black and white. He pointed out that both Blackness and whiteness are social constructs.
Here’s a quote from an article of his in The Atlantic: “Without the theory and practice of racism, there are neither Blacks nor whites.”
So, John, I’m interested, where do you stand on the capitalization question?
McWhorter: David, it’s interesting. You have to change your mind sometimes. It can be hard and I don’t like it. But the truth is, when the capitalization started, I found it trivial, and I did not follow it myself. I didn’t find it offensive, but I even wrote a piece in the Times about how I think that we have bigger fish to fry than whether or not we’re going to capitalize something.
But it’s funny how this has happened. Writing for The Times, I’m writing for an organization where the house style is to capitalize and it is unseemly of a writer, my editor very justly informed me, to keep on submitting copy with the lowercase that the editor then has to make uppercase. And so you know what? Damn it, I’ve gotten into the habit of using the capital letter and I must admit that I’m now doing it when I write other things too. I don’t mind it. It feels right.
In 2020, to me, it felt forced — as, frankly, an awful lot of things that happened in 2020 felt forced to me and made me angry. Different topic. But with this, I’m beginning to think we’re talking about people, and if we’re going to avoid the idea that we’re just talking about some damn color, then yeah, capital B.
And then the idea five years ago was don’t capitalize “white” because that’s what many white nationalists do. But Appiah, in that article, makes a very good point — I’m all the way with it — which is that if all of the rest of us start using the capital W, then that negates the white nationalists doing it. It takes away the distinction that they’re trying to make, and they’re going to have to come up with some other way of being obnoxious.
I would go with capital B, capital W, and I would never have imagined myself saying this five years ago, but sometimes you have to go with the times.
Leonhardt: Appiah didn’t specifically say this in his article, but he made me think about the notion that there is a way in which the current convention of capitalizing everything but “white” treats white as normal and — to use a phrase that has become popular — others everyone who is not white. That makes me a little bit uncomfortable.
McWhorter: I would completely agree. If you’re going to have a Black person, then to have just lowercase “white” implies that Blackness is a departure from the norm. Whereas really to the extent that we’re going to have these inconvenient — but frankly necessary — labels for the races, why don’t we capitalize them all? So we acknowledge all of them as unfortunate but indispensable artifices.
Leonhardt: Well, if we’re going to talk about uncomfortable linguistic subjects, we have to talk about Latinx, which has had a little boomlet of becoming a symbol of how parts of the progressive left, particularly the academic elite progressive left, have become out of touch with parts of America. So at this point I have to turn it over to Senator Rubin Gallego, the first-term senator from Arizona here. We’re going to play a clip of him on “Real Time With Bill Maher.”
Maher: I’ve quoted you on this show a number of times because you’ve been talking about this term, Latinx, which sounds — I don’t know what it sounds like — it’s something that white liberals made up, right?
Gallego: It’s something that’s used largely by white liberals and small amount of Latinos, but largely is to satisfy white liberals ——
Maher: And you said, stop doing this because we have polling on it. An extraordinary number, sometimes up to 99 percent of Latinos, either don’t know it or when they hear it, don’t like it.
Gallego: They are offended by it. Yeah.
Leonhardt: So how did we end up with the phrase “Latinx,” John? And how do you think about it?
McWhorter: That is a very 2010s thing. I remember first hearing it at Columbia from students around 2014. And I thought, OK, it’s clever. It avoids the gender binary.
But the simple truth is it’s been a long time now, and very few actual Latinos are ever going to embrace the term. Partly because X is awkward. It’s not very aesthetically pleasing given that Spanish words so often end in vowels, which the human ear likes. Then, more to the point, there are an awful lot of Latinos who don’t want to get rid of the gender binary. That is, however you feel about it, generally a minority opinion among human beings.
That means that it’s highly imposed, but I’m not angry about “Latinx” the way many people are because I live in a very Latino neighborhood in New York and I hear Spanish daily. I have never heard a single person ever use it.
What “Latinx” is is academic and activist jargon. There are academics, including Latino ones — not just white liberal ones — mostly humanities and social science academics, and activists and artists, that like that term. And as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing wrong with them liking it. But there is no way that that term is going to be embraced by people beyond that rarefied realm.
To the extent that anybody makes anyone feel bad about not saying “Latinx,” that would be inappropriate. There are times when you have to stop telling people what to say, and that’s one of them.
Leonhardt: That reminds me of what Senator Gallego has said about this at more length, which is that if someone wants to be called “Latinx” themselves, and I know that, I will call them Latinx because I’m not a jerk. I think he may have even used a saltier term than “jerk.” But I’m not going to use it myself, and I actually think it offends many, many more Latinos and Latinas than the phrase “Latinx” helps.
To me, there is a larger point here that’s important because one of the things you sometimes hear people say is that this is a manufactured issue. Republicans are using it to distract from all of the bad things that Donald Trump is doing — and regular listeners will know I think Donald Trump is doing many bad things — but I don’t think it’s just a distraction.
First of all, it does offend some number of people. And second of all, it is a symbol of something larger, which is that a lot of Democrats made this mistake of thinking that people in academia actually represented the views of large numbers of working-class Latinos and other groups.
So in many ways, I think the “Latinx” debate is a stand-in for the debate on immigration — which clearly does matter.
Democrats thought if we enact a more and more and more open border policy, as Joe Biden did, we will win more Latino support. In fact, the opposite happened because when you look at actual public opinion, Latinos have views on immigration, much as they have views on “Latinx,” that look much more like American society as a whole, and not like the views of academics that you are hanging out with presumably, John, at faculty meetings.
McWhorter: [laughs] One of the hardest things for humanities and social science academics is that they are often under an understandable and sincere impression that their views on matters like on what Latinos should be called, on immigration, on frankly any social issue, are truth rather than an opinion.
Yes, they do tend to have the idea that any good minority must certainly agree with this.
Leonhardt: So, let’s test the limits of some of the ideas that you and I have been talking about here by talking about another thing in the news and another thing you’ve written about — which is sports teams names.
For a very long time, we’ve had a bunch of team names that certainly seem offensive on their face. I will confess, I’m going to struggle to say this right now, even though I’ve said it hundreds of times in my life as a football fan: The football team in Washington used to be called the Redskins. They changed their name to Commanders.
Now Donald Trump has come out saying that they should change it back — along with the Cleveland Guardians, who used to be the Cleveland Indians. He said they should change it back.
Trump has written, without any evidence, “Our great Indian people in massive numbers want this to happen.” So, how do you think about what sports teams should be named, and how does that help you think about when we do actually need to change common usage because it’s offensive?
McWhorter: Well, what Trump is going from is a poll that’s about 10 years old that suggested that most Native Americans, the vast majority, didn’t mind the usage of Redskins.
But there’s a more recent poll from 2020 that was subtler and asked real questions in a way that the first one didn’t. And it turns out that no, most Native Americans don’t want there to be a football team called the Redskins. What it gets down to is you would never call someone a redskin to their face.
Sports play no role in my life whatsoever, but I remember when I was 10 — local Philadelphians will remember Gino’s, the fast-food restaurant — they were beginning to go under. So they had this thing where whenever you went to Gino’s you would get this plastic football helmet and some decals. And if you went to Gino’s enough, you had all the teams and all the helmets.
I managed — I don’t remember how we were going to Gino’s so much — but I got all the helmets and I remember the Redskins and it reminds me of the ’70s and cereal and Bugs Bunny and pajamas.
But no, that kind of nostalgia is inappropriate here because you would never say, “Hello, Redskin.” And frankly, we also have to think of something else — and this is something that I had not actually really thought of myself until my editor mentioned it — which is that the whole idea of there being this Native American as a mascot is something we would never consider with any kind of white person. Certainly you wouldn’t have the New York Negroes — that would’ve stopped eons ago by now.
So what really is that? With that one, I think it’s pretty easy. Polling: It doesn’t work. It’s dehumanizing. You would never actually say it to someone’s face. And so, Redskin, no, that does not work.
Leonhardt: I find that totally persuasive. But I also want to offer what I think is the best counterargument, which is that we do, in fact, have teams named for entire groups of people. We have the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, which is a beloved team name. We have the Boston Celtics. We have the Montreal Canadiens. We have the Vancouver Canucks. So why are those names not offensive?
And I don’t think anyone’s arguing for changing those names in any meaningful numbers. But Cleveland Indians — and I presume Chicago Blackhawks, a team name that still exists — are offensive.
McWhorter: Well, to tell you the truth, I would assume that a lot of those are going to be on the chopping block soon. For example, the Fighting Irish. I can imagine people deciding that that is playing into a notion of the Irish as exotic. I wouldn’t be surprised, and I wouldn’t argue against it.
But I would imagine that there’s going to be a kind of a mission creep here where we question whether teams should be based on people.
Leonhardt: I will gently disagree with you there, by saying I would expect the Notre Dame Fighting Irish and Montreal Canadiens to exist for at least the rest of my life. The reason I feel that way highlights an idea that you brought up before, which is context matters and public opinion matters.
Huge numbers of Irish people root for Notre Dame. Obviously, huge numbers of Canadians root for the Montreal Canadiens. I think when you have a situation in which the opinion of a group being described says, “Hey, we’re OK with this. We like this,” that’s a fundamentally different situation than we have with Native Americans, who have endured horrific discrimination. There are not huge numbers of Native American fans of these teams. It really is other groups using it. Who knows what’s going to happen. I expect those names will change.
But I want try to get to a McWhorter doctrine here. It actually reminds me of some of the larger ideas you’ve been saying, which is, as we think about these things, we shouldn’t think about them in isolation. We should think about them in historical context and we should show some respect for public opinion. So that ends up applying to whether we should use “Black” or “African American.” It ends up applying to whether we should use “Latino” and “Latina” or “Latinx,” and I think it ends up applying to this team name debate as well.
McWhorter: David, you have me thinking in real time, which I really enjoy because sports is very much my weakest subject.
I agree with what you said, that there are sensitivities that must come into question on these things, and it’s not a weak or performative reflex to be sensitive about these things. One doesn’t want to overdo. One doesn’t want to be recreationally demonstrative. But there are things that we need to think about when it comes to language and names and what’s going on in the surrounding society.
Leonhardt: OK, so if I’m trying to spell out a McWhorter doctrine, one is that context matters, history matters, public opinion matters. I would say another part of that might be don’t reach for comprehensiveness. You are never going to come up with terms that fit absolutely everybody equally and manage to capture the diversity of a group. Do you accept that idea?
McWhorter: Absolutely. There’s always going to be fuzz. No term is going to be perfect because humanity and history and geography are so complex. But we also have to be open to general societal consensus that something is too imperfect and that maybe we need to hone things a little bit.
Leonhardt: And maybe to be a little bit mischievous, I would say the last item on the McWhorter doctrine is don’t confuse arguments that you hear coming from academia with views that are widely held among the American public. Maybe they are, but there’s a good chance that they are not.
McWhorter: [laughs] That makes me sound so disloyal to what I think of as my tribe, but I’d have to come clean and say yes.
You do have to beware of a tendency for people with Ph.D.s in humanities and social sciences to think that they are representing the view from below, as you might unfortunately put it. When, very often, especially these days, that’s not as true as it used to be — and frankly, it never was as true as people often thought. We are in special times, though.
Leonhardt: John, I think of you as the loyal opposition to your academic tribe rather than disloyal to it.
McWhorter: I’ll take it.
Leonhardt: John McWhorter, thank you so much.
McWhorter: Thank you, David.
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This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Efim Shapiro and Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Isaac Jones and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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David Leonhardt is an editorial director for the Times Opinion section, overseeing the editing and writing of editorials. @DLeonhardt • Facebook
John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @JohnHMcWhorter
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