QUOTE OF THE DAY: What the Heck Is ‘Filipinxs’?
Carlos Oronce, the president-elect of the Filipinx Community Health Association, has raised eyebrows with the cutting-edge terminology in his recent op-ed.
THE QUOTE
“For Filipinxs, health care work in the U.S. has been an enduring legacy of American colonialism whose health consequences have predictably played out during the Covid-19 pandemic,” Oronce wrote in the opinion essay published Monday by Stat, a health news site.
A fun fact about the Philippines is the main language spoken there doesn’t even have grammatical gender at all. pic.twitter.com/GxmLHWQJ7J
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 14, 2021
In the essay, Oronce argued that Asian Americans, and particularly Filipino Americans, have been “[l]ost in the conversation” about the link between racism and poor COVID-19 health outcomes.
- “While the official numbers show that Asian Americans have lower death rates from Covid-19, the few states in which data are broken out by Asian ethnicity reveal sharply higher proportions of Filipinxs who have contracted the disease and died from it,” he said.
MOVE OVER LATINX
On Twitter, users drew comparisons between Oronce’s use of “Filipinx” and the controversy over the term, “Latinx,” which has gained increasing acceptance among progressives, if not among actual Latinos.
First they came for the Latinxs, and I did not speak out because I was not Latinx.
Then they came for the Filipinxs, and I did not speak out because I was not Filipinx.
Then they came for mx, and there was no one left to speak for mx. pic.twitter.com/rHPovdon8M
— Spooky Pill Pagliacci 🎃 (@Slatzism) October 13, 2021
Meanwhile, David Lat, an Asian American legal blogger, tweeted Friday that in his personal experience, “hardly any of us use the term ‘Filipinx’ (just as “Latinx” isn’t in super-wide usage in that particular community).”
- Just 3% of Hispanics use the term “Latinx” and only 1 in four have even heard of the phrase, an August 2020 Pew survey found.