The first time I heard of the term “Latinx” I was the curious newest member of a local Dungeons & Dragons group about to explore a gold mine in some far away mythical land in the back of a bodega. We had crates for chairs and the air was musty in keeping with the underground scenario prepared for us on our table — also a crate.
And we didn’t know it at the time, but the evening would become such a pivotal moment in our idea of identity that we have since described it as our racial coming out party.
There were five of us in total; four players (varying degrees of Afro-Latinx, with prominent but not complete west coast Black identification in one), and one GameMaster (queer as can be, but white; although she did sometimes claim to have a Cherokee princess somewhere up in her lineage, a white-fragile nervous tic we tended to shut down real quick whenever it bubbled up).
What does the word “Latinx” mean?
Pronounced “la-teen-ex” (although a few prefer “la-tinks” or “latin-x”), the term Latinx was originally developed as a tool to avoid gendering members of the LBGTQ-Latin community, as part of a broader movement to recognize the need for language and culture itself to stand in solidarity with transgender folks. While the word worked really well as a gender-neutral alternative to the Spanish language’s gendered suffixes Latin-o and Latin-a, Latinx has since developed into more than just a word: it has become the world’s fastest growing recognized identity.
As the newest member of this ragtag team of dwarves, elves, and warriors, it was time to create a character. Before playing Dungeons and Dragons, I hadn’t thought about my identity all that much. Many Afro-Latinx women grow up with internalized racism, and I was no exception. But even though I wasn’t educated on the widespread systemic oppression of marginalized groups and how these oppressions intersect, there was one thing that I knew for sure: people generally don’t think of dwarves as badass independent Afro-Latinx women.
I didn’t know it when I walked into that bodega for the first time, but the fact is that Dungeons & Dragons is inherently white supremacist. In fact, nerd culture as a whole is inextricably linked to the modern alt-right movement, thanks to a series of events stemming from the GamerGate movement (that’s a story for another time).
So there I was, behind enemy lines in the deepest trenches of nerd culture, staring a blank character sheet and being confronted with my own identity.
I was faced with a tough decision: I could give in to my internalized racism and make my fantasy character the stereotypical white dwarf, or I could embrace my badass Afro-Latinx identity. Obviously, I knew what the morally correct decision was, but I didn’t have the words to verbally express how I was feeling. I didn’t even know what the phrase “Afro-Latinx” was at the time! Thankfully, someone came to my aid.
One of the other players, Camilia, who was a trans Black woman, plainly asked me “are you going to make your character Latinx as well?” I didn’t know what to say because I had never heard that word before. I knew that Camilia was highly educated with a Master’s degree in Africana Studies, so I wasn’t surprised that she was using language that I didn’t understand.
But before I could respond to Camilia, the GameMaster spoke up. Her queer white face was stern even though we had known and considered her almost like a friend for two years. She looked at Camilia and said, “I thought we talked about this already. Human races don’t exist in Dungeons and Dragons. Just because I’m part Cherokee doesn’t mean I can make my character Native American.”
That’s when I realized that we were having a discussion about race, which were discussions that I usually tried to shy away from growing up. It turned out that “Latinx” was a gender neutral term to refer to people with Latin American heritage.
Related: Diversity and Dungeons & Dragons
But it wasn’t enough for our GameMaster to just be problematic regarding PoC representation in fantasy. They went on to say something deeply transphobic: “And ‘Latinx’ isn’t even a real word.”
You could have heard a pin drop.
Camilia then shot fact after fact at our white GameMaster in quick succession. She explained that first of all, focusing on realism in games is exactly the kind of racist dog whistling that Trump supporters use. Secondly, race doesn’t and shouldn’t matter in mythical fantasy lands.
Dungeons & Dragons teaches that diversity is strength, for only a diverse group of adventurers can overcome the many challenges a D&D story presents. In that spirit, making D&D as welcoming and inclusive as possible has moved to the forefront of our priorities[…].
One of the explicit design goals of 5th edition D&D is to depict humanity in all its beautiful diversity by depicting characters who represent an array of ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations, and beliefs. We want everyone to feel at home around the game table and to see positive reflections of themselves within our products. “Human” in D&D means everyone, not just fantasy versions of northern Europeans, and the D&D community is now more diverse than it’s ever been.
She went on to explain that even if the world of Dungeons & Dragons was based on european myths and culture, it didn’t matter because there were still people of color all over medieval europe. I learned that european cultures like the vikings, celts, british, and romans were racially diverse societies much like USA today, and featured tons of impactful people of color — a fact that white people still have a hard time accepting.
Camilia delivered the final blow to our white “ally” by ending her speech with: “Oh, and you’re a fucking transphobe.”
We need and we deserve Afro-Latinx characters in Dungeons & Dragons. We need and we deserve Afro-Latinx characters in movies. We need and we deserve Afro-Latinx characters in video games. This is existential. Embracing and normalizing the term Latinx is a necessary step on the road to a future full of representation for all positive identities.
Ultimately, white people don’t understand what it’s like to be racialized or have internalized racism. Before I joined that D&D group and met Camilia, I was afraid to even have a character that represented my own identity in a fantasy game. I didn’t even know there was a word like Latinx to verbally express what my identity was — the system had made sure of that. This is why it’s so important to reduce white representation in these traditionally white male spaces, and recognize the colorful and vibrant power of LATINX!
I left that D&D group as a changed, racially awoken, woman. Oh, and we found a new GameMaster.
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Sod off gringx.
I am trans. I am not transphobic for rejecting a term imposed upon me by people who refuse to understand that the word is not pronounceable in the language it’s being shoehorned into.
Begging gringo queers to use Latin/Latine instead. They are gender-neutral terms that are real Spanish, in stark contrast to the forced, clunky Anglicism of “Latinx”.
Absolutely, solid moronic article.
Then don’t play white supremacist roleplay games. MAke your own Latinx phantasy worlds, who nobody would ever try XD
dumbass
hahhahaha you hate brown people dam kinda based… cccccccccccc:
It’s terribly ironic how in their fevrent attempts to be inclusive, the Left still can’t shake off Western imperialism. Latinx is imperalist unto itself because it follows English linguistic conventions and not Spanish ones. In Spanish, it’s impossible to pronouce “latinx” because an “x” is pronounced differently in Spanish than in English (think the way how “Mexico” is said in Spanish) and doesn’t flow at all with the concluding “n”. This implies that English and its Germanic cousins are superior languages, as we can accomodate for gender neutrality, yet Spanish and other Romance languages cannot because they’re gendered. As I’m sure we all learned in high-school Spanish class, a mixed group of people is always referred to as “male”, no matter if there’s 99 men or just one, so the correct term would be “Latino” anyways. If we are this desperate for a gender-neutral term for Hispanic people, “Latin” should be the obvious choice, and “Latine” is gaining traction as well.
According to this study (https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/05/us/latinx-gallup-poll-preference-trnd/index.html) only 4% of Hispanic people use the term Latinx. Most folks south of the border would have no idea how the word was even pronounced and would simply laugh at your gringo BS.
100%
The fact that there are people that embrace this dog shit tells me that there are about 3% of the population that need to be locked up and thrown away.
No one could be this uneducated. The term LatinX itself is racist. First, it tries to change the O and A suffixes from Latino/Latina, implying that English is superior to Spanish. Second, it implies that all Latinos are the same. Every country in LatAm is very different and gluing them together because they speak Spanish is racist. Assuming that all Latinos are brown is also racist since they range from white as milk to black as coffee.
White w*man moment
White w*man moment
Referencing a “white-fragile tic” is kind of hypocritical behavior when one stresses this kind of political correctness. Also, I really thought this WAS a parody article. Also “Latin” actually exists as a somewhat “genderless” adjective if we really must.
Suck on a car exhaust
I’m pretty sure if you go south of the border and Call yourself Latinx, people will assume you’re retarded but when you use the womans restroom down south and pull out your dick telling the everyone They’re transphobic, I’m positive They will give you a free sex change then and there, Afterwards they’ll cut off your tongue so you can stop saying retarded stuff and Deport you back to the U.S. You are an embarresment to Latins everywhere by swallowing Jew propaganda to give you a “Us vs Them” mentality, But then again You were an easy target since you are already mentally ill.
Is the goal of “latinx” to remove all gendered terms from gendered languages? Is Spanish going to be full of words ending in x now?
>¡Hola amigxs y familiarxs!
Anglophones are so confused now that they think their language having 3 genders (male, female, neuter) makes the English language inherently morally superior to languages with 2 genders (male, female) because people literally cannot express themselves without the superiority of English and now want to introduce neuter words to Spanish claiming that we need to do so to protect trans people because Anglophones cannot conceive that the same people that call themselves “gender neutral” in English call themselves “Feminine men” and “Masculine women” in other language and manage to express basically the same point. They have been brainwashed by tranny propaganda into thinking that not having a neuter gender is equivalent to a hate crime that will psychologically devastate spaniards unless anglophones come to save them.
I’m not even being unironic here this is what’s going on and it’s kind of awesome really because we have SJWs being linguistic imperialists and cultural supremacists which are things usually alleged of the right wing and they seem oblivious to the blinding hypocrisy.
The military has actually released reports shitting on the French language, in English, as being problematic for not having a neuter gender. The left wing has actually gone insane and genuinely cannot comprehend that everybody who claimed that they were psychologically devastated unless you called them by whatever gender you wanted were literally attention whores who were greatly culturally influenced. They unironically believe that having a neuter gender fundamentally makes English more progressive.
They don’t of course really realise all of this or think of this on any sort of deep level, they just go “woah Latinx is more progressive than Latino XD”. It’s not even impossible that the anglophones will win this battle and honestly it would be funnier to me if the SJWs actually managed to cuck the Spanish and the French into literally adding a gender to their fucking language through sheer brow beating and exported cultural influence. I mean English is already mogging other languages super hard but this would be a new extreme.
Lol this is stupid
Stella I appreciate the Joy your article brought my friends and I tonight, we Had a wonderful time discussing and laughing about it.
Hope your campaigns go well in the forgotten realms.
For we are truly in the clown timeline.
This is even better than a parody article. Be careful,!constantly claiming victim-hood can get addictive.
Man, I can’t wait until this woke shit goes away
This is dumb.
This is silly
I appreciate the move away from slave torture-associated “Dungeon Master” and toward “Game Master,” but “storyteller” is the term we want. The word “Master” isn’t appropriate in any context and must be done away with entirely.
Most Hispanic people don’t use the term ‘Latinx’, they prefer ‘hispanic’ or ‘latino/latina’ for the most part. Latinx is difficult to pronounce in Spanish since the pronunciation of the name for the letter ‘x’ is multiple syllables and doesn’t form a simple ligature with ‘n’ like it does in English. Latinx is essentially some performative bullshit made by white people that is actually racist
just 42% yourself already
Wow, this is some of the worst drivel I’ve ever read. Imagine living such a sad, deluded life.
Wish it had been paywalled, it would help keep some of Stella’s delusions quarantined
lol
One time, my whxte friend REFUSED to acknowledge that my gay lesbian double trans Black Asian alienkin furry Latinx friend was Latinx, calling xzym “a fucking moron” instead of xzyyrr preferred prxnxxns. I literally SHOOK WITH RAGE, but then I murdered the white friend and all of xzyyrr family and burned every last remain of xzyyrr heritage. I felt so much better!
I am a Latino and I am transphobic! We must claim Transphobia as a valuable trait when it’s in accordance with reasoning and intelligence.
Something similar happened to us but in class. It can happen anywhere. I’m so with you.
So proud of u. I’m also in a diverse dungeons group that meets biweekly. We need a lot more!
Thanks! Send deets and maybe we can exchange information or even meet up!