
Before our news feeds were dominated by the tragedy in Texas (about which I had thoughts) I had intended to write this post. So, it's belated, twitter-cycle wise, but I can’t shake it from my attention. Here it is, better late than never.
A Pew study on the public use of the term Latin-X came out recently, calling into question the institutional use of the term. According to the study only a quarter of Hispanics have heard of Latin-X, and only about 3% use it. This is interesting because it is insisted by some that Latin-X be adopted by our culture at large, leaving us to wonder why we should be using a term left unused by those whom it allegedly serves.
Names and their political use are at the heart of much public strife nowadays, and I left reading the study hungry for a deeper conversation about it. Enter Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza’s excellent essay “Naming the Unnamed: On the Many Uses of the Letter X.” In it McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza seeks to ground X within a cultural story that is historical and crunchy. Wherever she is leading us, the waters are deep and interesting.
What follows is some engagement with her ideas. But before you read on, take five minutes with her essay. It's worth the read.
McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza’s article is reflexive, that is, she is not making a philosophical or historical case for the use of X. She is searching for metaphors, not metrics. But in so doing she puts her finger on something which could make the use of X, at least, more intelligible to those of us for whom adoption of X seems remote and difficult—which is much appreciated.
To do this she starts with Descartes. Now, don’t worry, hers is not a philosophical survey. She wants us only to note two things about the Frenchman. One, that he “was deeply concerned with the condition of existence;” and two, that his work in analytical geometry used the variable x to represent unknown quantities. More on this later.
For now, it's enough to understand that his connection—the use of X as a stand-in for the condition of existence, or what we don’t know of being itself—is at the core of her insight and establishes the trace she draws connecting each cultural reference used in the article.
As a stand in for meaning, she explains that X is flexible “...capable of erasure, prohibition, and restriction… equally capable of identification, rebellion, and expansion.” She illustrates this potential of X in Malcom X’s famous use of it. Commenting on an interview of the civil rights leader conducted by the journalist Len O’Connor, McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza notes O’Connor’s insistence that X use his “real” name in the interview.
She notes that “O’Connor will not accept that this man’s name is X,” and argues that this amounts to not accepting “that [X] represents an unknown quantity” in Malcom X’s existence. She shows how this put’s Malcom X’s “...very identity under scrutiny: Who are you? What are you? And his autonomy too: Who gave you the right to do this?”
Remember these words: identity and autonomy, they are essential to her insight and Descartes role in them.
They highlight how implicit in O’Connor’s interrogation is the politics of language. Malcolm X is defending more than his right to change his name. He is defending his right to identify the unknown—the unknown of his ancestry because of slavery. Thus, the rejection of his birth name is the rejection of the political narrative which would hold him to it. As O’Connor insists on X’s “real” name, he militates against X’s definition of what can’t be known, his very identity.
When I read this, I couldn’t help thinking that the ability to identify the unknown, to use X, is a privileged one. This must be why it is a polarizing claim. For O’Connor to affirm Malcom X’s use of it, would have been to affirm an entire historical narrative, a different way of looking at his nation, at himself. Thus, the absence of Malcom X’s “real” name implicates the whole of American history, and to an extent, O’Connor’s role in it.
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Later in the article, McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza calls the letter X both the “infinite” and the “unknown” —everything and nothing, a sort of potent darkness out which anything could emerge. It was this sort of peering into nothing that Descartes himself indulged in.
The story goes that when Descartes set down to write his Meditations on First Philosophy, he did so with the aid of a sensory deprivation tank. In total darkness the philosopher sat for hours, thinking through what he could know for sure. As I think of him, cross legged on the cast iron, blinking into nothing, I am certain he caught a whiff of the infinite and the unknown.
Descartes was the first philosopher to grapple with the reliability of our senses, providing every stoner since with their favorite talking point: how do we know that what we experience is real? Couldn’t it all be a dream? Haven’t we all been so caught up in a dream that we thought for sure that we are were drowning, or punching in slow motion, or kissing our favorite movie star? How can we prove something similar is not happening now, as we speak?
His solution was novel—Cogito, ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. Despite the problems of perception, Descartes argued, the one thing we know for sure is that we are perceiving in the first place. Therefore, in a sea of mystery (literally in the bleak darkness of his cast iron tank), Descartes settled on some sure footing. He was the one constant variable in all these dubious phenomena, his mind, his will. This assertion of the self as philosophical bedrock was paradigm shifting and its impact is still felt today, especially with respect to names.
It's precisely the autonomy of mind and will over which Malcom X and Len O’Connor had grappled back in the sixties. Whose perception wins out? Who gets to be the cross-legged philosopher peering into, and naming, the darkness they see? I think this accurately frames the problems we have with the other naming controversies of our day—what is marriage, what is a woman, what is a citizen, what is a human?
That these problems exist should be enough to question the virtue of Descartes' ideas. But he had problems of his own—what is called the mind-body problem. If the individual mind is the only sure thing, and the senses are unreliable, they are certainly different substances, mind different from body. But if this is the case, how do they relate? Why does a decision to write made in my mind, cause my fingers to actually type? It's a problem which has dogged many of Descartes' disciples and is still hotly debated today.
But an analogous problem arises in our modern use of chosen names, like X. We might call it the mind-culture problem. When do we reject the autonomy of those who name themselves and why?
Our culture does reject some who wish to do so. Take Rachel Dolezal, the white woman from Spokane, Washington who—by way of perms and tanning lotion—pretended to be black. Cases like these show the tension between an individual's freedom to define themselves and the duties they owe society. Or take one of the many examples from the other end of the political spectrum regarding gender pronouns.
In each case, power dynamics have a way of polluting the purity of cartesian self-assertion. What happens when a society is composed of individuals asserting opposite estimations of the unknown, when X means different things to everyone. It's at this point where the usefulness of X ceases and can fall under suspicion.
This is what is happening in the current confusion surrounding Latin-X. In response to the term being virtually unused by Hispanics, Democrats—the party which uses the term most—are left in a sort of lurch. Their location of the unknown is not shared by those upon whom they wish to saddle with the name. In the words of Joaquin Blaya, one of the founders of Univision Telemundo, Latin-X is “...too weird…dumb…foreign…not Spanish.”
In a helpful article in politico, Fernando Amandi, a pollster, and Latino vote expert says,
The numbers suggest that using Latinx is a violation of the political Hippocratic Oath, which is to first do no electoral harm… Why are we using a word that is preferred by only 2 percent, but offends as many as 40 percent of those voters we want to win?
Why indeed? By way of way of answering we can turn again to McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza who discusses the roots of Latin-X in her article. She explains,
the x form has roots within Spanish-language anarchist publications—DIY zines and antiauthoritarian “guerilla texts”... where the form is adroitly wielded for political and progressive ends. In these radical movements, Latinx does often replace the binary Latino/Latina, giving people new ways to describe themselves.
Thus, what we have in the case of Latin-X is a group which is debating whether their identity is up for debate. Some think it is, but the majority don’t, and are content, like Descartes wasn’t, to take their perception and identity as they’ve received it.
But more than that, they seem skeptical of Latin-X’s usefulness, even suspicious of its motives. Interestingly, McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza understands this response as natural when X is used. She asks,
If X is a way to tear down language to make room for new semantic possibilities, putting a place holder on something until we understand it, then we must ask, who gets to define confusion, upon what basis is mystery identified—what's the difference between someone on the bleeding edge of the dialectic and someone who is just wrong?
This insight haunts our modern preoccupation with name revision. And it seems to haunt the many examples she gives in her essay. Malcolm X gave up on the letter. By the mid 1950’s he went by Malcolm Shabazz, embracing the culture and history of his faith as a fit anchor to his identity. And while in mathematics X can be used to represent the unknown, it is Algebra’s function to solve for it.
Descartes himself had a way of dealing with his X problems. To account for the mystery connecting mind and body, the philosopher appealed to standard arguments for God’s existence. It was only by the presence of a supreme identity, an ultimate existence, that our subjective identity and existence could be made sense of.
Perhaps our modern infatuation with X suggests a search for just that sort of ultimate truth.
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