Do we owe polarization to the sloppy osmosis between academia and mainstream media?

When should academic critique permeate into everyday discourse? Are there harms inherent in replicating a discourse with a higher bar of contextualism in mainstream media??

Earlier this week, a pair of researchers at Georgetown and Harvard posted a thread to X detailing the findings from a study into why Latinos are voting for Trump, looking specifically at the political effects of deploying the term “Latinx.” The origins of Latinx vary depending on who you ask, but it has been critiqued as nomenclature delivered by academic institutions, sometimes to the tune of “academic imperialism.”. The academics in question posit deploying such inclusive group labels may “have limited electoral benefit while alienating group members predisposed against the inclusivity of the marginalized intra-group subset.” In other (somewhat reductive) terms, rejection of Latinx goes hand in hand with anti-LGBTQ ideology. They narrate the finds like so:?

“...we use a large sample of Latinos surveyed after the 2020 election to show that Latinos living in areas where “Latinx” was more salient pre-election are more likely to switch their vote to Trump between 2016-20202. This association is driven by anti-gay Latinos.”?

Their ultimate conclusion?

“... the solution to the problem we’ve diagnosed requires thinking beyond electoral politics, e.g. poltiical education meant to root our qeueerphobia in Latino communities, a very difficult solutions for social scientist sot develop, evaluate, and put into practice.:?

The internet is losing it’s Sh*t. Latinx is hotly contested; some view it as university imperialism, an affront to the intrinsically gendered language, or the grammatical solutions (a la Latine) which have germinated up to address the evolving nature of modern gender. Putting aside feelings about this specific debate, which I’m not qualified to adjudicate, I feel it frames a deeper question. Do we owe, in part, the polarization of political discourse to the sloppy osmosis between academia and mainstream media???

Critical inquiry produces discourse with other critical inquiry. At the very level of sentence, it performs that discourse via referentialism; you can always locate the origin point of an idea via citation, and trace its evolution - how it’s been pushed back on, critiqued, transformed in the discourse - via bibliography. Daily media, reported media assumes credibility in the absence of citation, bar named sources. And as insofar as it structures discourse, it does so at the expense of the referentialism that exists in the academy. Especially in an era that prizes vibes over expertise, and absent the inherent check that an ideal body politic engaged in bipartisan and cross-disciplinary literacy produces.?

In an anti-intellectual era, the project of porting discourse from the academy into the mainstream can be at best, sloppy, and at worst, politically disastrous.?

Now, before I go further, let me say there’s evergreen merit to discourse permeating beyond the academy. What am I always talking about? Futures. Ideologically constructed, first, and then performed with guidance IRL.?

That said, ideas in the academy take on the quality of clouds, even when crafted with fervor. It may be years before a critical intervention bends a dominant discourse, and decades further before it gets mediated through content, culture, policy, entertainment. But platforms - specifically Jack Dorsey’s Twitter - created a fascinating middle space where academic thought, media, and everyday debate comingled. Before Musk assumed control of the platform, this dynamic produced an amplification effect for radical critique – damn near almost at the speed it was produced. That means ideas, well-researched but not yet taken through the (necessary!) cycles of argument-critique-refinement, were suddenly available to the masses as they were being devised.?

Great! Will always advocate for more intellectualism. But now we arrive upon an election shaped, largely, by a rejection of the liberal discourses that were constructed in that suspended digital place. Language, for academics, is intervention; narrative is intervention – you’ll hear me say, often, that narrative is destiny.

Narrative is also ammo. We were right to call for more inclusive language, writ large, but ill-prepared to grapple with the reality that language structures reality only when you prize language as the dominant mechanism for interacting with the world. I can commiserate with why some feel this is an inherently elitist bend; human experience, materiality, and the performance of legacy dictates how those on the other side of this discourse interact with the world.?

Such that interventions - cast in that antagonistic, almost militant way that we narrative folks like to frame critical intervention - fail to land by virtue of displacing the agency of the audience we expect transformation from. We are telling Latinos they should abandon the gendered logic of their language because we, in vaunted, increasingly emotional towers, feel it’s amiss. And we are mobilizing superstructures like academic institutions to drill that ideology. (You may say - Brandon! That’s what everyone has done throughout history; I ask: is not radical theory to abandon the tools of the master to liberate the servant?)??

Secondary here is the intervention of personal bias - clearest in the example I led with - that may be strong fuel for intellectual examination, but ill-suited for then communicating the fruits of that exploration with a skeptical audience.?

I don’t practice academia and thus am not committed to its performances of critique. I’d say the closest approximation to what I practice is academically-driven cultural analysis.?

So my question: where do these discourses belong? And when media reduplicates them, what responsibility does it have to perform the nuance otherwise constructed by referentialism, tempered conclusions and?

And, because I’m sure someone will ask, my two cents on the Latine/Latino/Latina/Latinx debate:?

Identity as language is the most reductive view of identity, and is producing in our culture a flattening of cultures. Take queerness. Queerness was so, so, so expansive when I was writing my thesis in college on its interplay with Afrofuturism; in fact, I only landed on the topic because I felt that former validated the futuristic views of the latter. As an identity mediated through culture, which reifies daily performance, we’ve landed on an abbreviated view of queerness prism’d through sexual identity and pop.?

The feeling that if we just applied the right words to describe a group of people we might deign to understand them is silly. Talk to people; they contain messy, messy multitudes. And technology, digital humanities, enable you to balance those complexities against your line of inquiry.?

Off my soapbox on mile 6 :)?