Frito-Lay however, is not immune from boneheaded decisions. After 20someodd years of employment, and a trophy case full of awards, he and some of his [white male] colleagues were laid off in favor of creating a more 'diverse' management roster.
Lacking the experience of those whose positions they took, performance tanked with the new management team, and the person who set it all in motion was fired.
At the end of the day, revenue-per-share is pretty indifferent to age, race, or gender.
Except, as the article shows, diversity often does increase revenue share. Flamin' hot cheetos were invented by a Mexican immigrant who realized that Frito-Lay didn't have any products which appealed to Latino people.
EDIT: Changed Latinx to Latino.
There is no faster way to discredit your argument than using absurd language like latinx. I've yet to meet a latino person who referred to themselves as anything else.
If you know significantly more people who refer to themselves as "Latinx", I'd wager that you probably live in the ideological bubble surrounding a fairly liberal American city, but there is certainly a generational component: the term is much more commonly used by American Millenials than by anyone else.
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=latinx,latino,lat...
It kind of seems like the opposite is true here...
I feel like it's probably trying to include both genders, since spanish doesn't have a neutral gender, and that normally annoys me, since it's normally pretty clear when you mean actually-male or neutral-male, but I'm not necessarily against it.
People from around where I come from would've probably gone with latin@, though.
It seems like they’re just terms to lump a bunch of legitimately different people and cultures into a single, convenient demographic. That’s how I feel about it anyway. Not saying people shouldn’t identify with it, if that’s how they feel. :V
I'm an Indian living in the US. If I see another brown skinned person who does not look Indian, what should I call them? There are many Mexicans into the US, but there are also people from other countries in South America etc. I have no idea what Hispanic actually means, but I've heard it (and Latino) commonly used to refer to that group of people in general, and those the words that I use too.
If you were in Africa and saw a white skinned person, would you call them American or White? Calling them White would "lump a bunch of legitimately different people and cultures into a single, convenient demographic," but that lumping is necessary since you can't know someone's culture just by looking at them - or even after you have known them for a while.
I’m aware that nobody actually says this in real life, but this is what people in the US usually mean when they think of “typical Latino-looking person”.
In reality though, “Latino” is not a very precise way to describe someone with that phenotype, because just like Canada and the US and other countries with a major history of colonialism, there are people of all racial ancestries in Latin America. This is largely ignored in the Western US, I suspect because most of the “Latino” people there are from Mexico and Central America, where most of the population looks like what you describe.
But Latin America started out with all the same major groups that the US did: Native Americans, European settlers, African slaves, Asian immigrants, etc., and so you would expect to find all the same ancestries there as you would in the US, just in different proportions.
And indeed, in places like Uruguay and Argentina, the majority of people would be considered “white” according to US racial classification norms. In the Caribbean, many would be considered “black”. In Brazil there are a lot of people of Japanese descent.
But even in Mexico there are people who look like this: https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5b147c3d4bb...
That guy is Mexican and Latino and Hispanic by any possible definition of those terms, and also “white” (I.e., of primarily Western European ancestry).
The point is: “Latino” and “Hispanic” are not directly connected to phenotypes or biological ancestry in the way you are assuming.
In general I don’t understand why it is so important to describe people by their ancestry, as opposed to their actual culture. If you see a white person in India you can be 99.99% sure they are not culturally Indian, but you can’t really conclude anything similar in the US.
If you are in a rare situation where you need to describe their appearance, Latino or Hispanic would work. At the end of the day, if you're speaking in good faith, people will understand that.
I don't get what the big deal is about someone using latinx is. It's not a pejorative, and it makes some small subset feel better, so what's the loss to anyone?
If I'm talking about someone like my friend from Guadalajara, yes, then 'Mexican' is more specific.
Interestingly I think there is a parallel to this: there’s no widely-used term in English to refer to white, English-speaking people from the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. People in those countries just think of each other as foreigners and don’t spend a lot of time talking about their group as a whole.
But there is a widely-used term in France (and probably other European countries) for this group: anglo-saxon. Which is only used very rarely in the US unless you are talking about the actual medieval Anglo-Saxon tribes.
To me this feels similar to how people in the US are much more likely to describe people as “Latino” than people from Latin America are.
Vida, (a show about gentrification and lesbians in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of LA) markets itself as a Latinx show, not as a Hispanic show, though the showrunner identifies as Latina...
rolls eyes
I can see latinx only being preferred by non-gender-conforming individuals to whom it applies, as opposed to when referring to individuals rather than to communities (families, neighborhoods, food, etc).
Latino and Latina are also fine. Hispanic as well although that has a slightly different meaning.
I think it’s best to call people by the terms that they use themselves. Foisting a new term on someone to describe their ethnicity doesn’t seem like it would ever be a good idea.
But it is a strong identity in my family, and, for example, I really don't want to be lumped in with the people of Bavarian descent who made up about half of the town I grew up in. I'm nothing like them culturally.
Honestly, "white" isn't an ethnicity and it is borderline insulting to think others can know all about me by my skin color, but I've given up on the idea that my opinion on this will make a difference. It is nice to say it out loud for the first time in years, though.
On the other hand, I also think the Swedish-American OP has an understandable point. Cultural group identification is a natural, strong human urge, and it can be a bit arbitrary and not objectively correspond to actual observable culture or to ancestry.
I wouldn't tell someone living in Serbia who identifies as a Croat that that's nonsense because from an outsider's perspective their culture is 99% indistinguishable from that of a Serb. They have their own reasons for identifying as part of that group, and it's important to them. And similarly I don't really think it's illegitimate for Nth generation white Americans to feel that they are "Swedish" or "Irish" in some way that means something to them. (With the understanding that, yes, they are culturally quite different from someone actually raised in Stockholm or Cork).
But what is you’re ancestry, they will persist. “From America”.
Honestly my parents have told me X generations ago where someone immigrated from, but I can never remember? For some reason the factoid just won’t stay in my brain, and it has zero relevance to me.
For some people the roots of their identity is intensely personal. For others mostly irrelevant. My inclination is that it’s a place of privilege to not know (or particularly care) where your ancestors came from, and perhaps some people would even find that offensive, I’m not really sure. I certainly don’t fault someone for identifying strongly with their own heritage or being proud or even protective of it.
At the same time, though, should we then say that all English-speaking Americans have more in common than whatever ethnic stock they came from in another country, whether Mexicans or Asians or whatever group? Or do you say that just because the Bavarians are "white"?
I’d say it depends on the extent to which they have maintained a meaningfully separate culture within the US, but largely, yes. I think in most cases, a kid born in the US to Chinese parents has more in common with white American kids than they do with kids brought up in Shanghai.
Just my opinion; I don’t have any quantitative way to back this up.
It's more that people likely don't know for sure that you're actually of Mexican descent. You could've descended from any number of Central or South American nationalities, so going with something properly broad like "Latino" is going to be much more reasonable than running the risk of labeling someone as "Mexican" when one actually descends from, say, Colombia.
This is similar to the reason why most people just stick to calling white people "white" or black people "black" instead of trying to guess something more specific.
If you don't like using Latino, there's already a gender-neutral English word works just fine: Latin. Alternatively, Hispanic works just fine too.
'Latin' is more inclusive than 'Latin American' but by the numbers both are more inclusive than 'Hispanic' which generally excludes Brazilians, and other Latin American speakers of minority languages.
Incidentally, the whole "Latin" thing was invented by the French for geopolitical reasons. Recognition of a "latin race" common among the French, Spanish, Italians, and Mexicans, as a means of balancing the scales in what these Frenchmen perceived as their struggle against the Anglo-Saxon and Slavic races.
I’ve had non-<Hispanic/Latino> correct me when I said Mexican but I knew the person was actually Mexican. What gives?
I would recommend simply ignoring anyone who gets offended about how a group they’re not even part of refers to itself.
Perhaps 'actually Mexican' in this context means Mexican ancestry. For communities struggling to be accepted as American, this is a legitimate issue.
But I certainly wouldn't suggest listening to the opinions of random Anglos who aren't affected by the issue at all claiming that "calling someone Mexican is offensive"
These threads always have the same look as the ones where people complained about singular they. Latinx doesn't have centuries of use the way singular they does, but it doesn't really matter. It costs you nothing to respect another person's self-identification.
Whether people should use it as a group term beyond enby Latin American descendants is another matter.
But I'm sorry if I offended anyone. I've edited my comment to say Latino instead.
And if we want to respect self-identification, we should reserve “Latinx” for the people who actually want to be called that way, not for whole communities 99% of whose members have never even heard the term.
Yes, they do, “Latin” and “Hispanic” were the dominant terms in English before “Latino” and “Latina” took over and are still current though less common; the main reason Latino/Latina took over is because they respect terminology used in the described community, in a way Latinx (used generically, use as a label for enby members of the ethnicity may be different) does not.
But, as a hispanic, there was already a gender neutral term for this in english. ( hint, i already used it, there's also Latin ). LatinX unfortunately is a bastardization of grammar for a language that has pretty strongly enforced grammar ( hey, we have a "royal academy of language"). It's the introduction of a foreign language construct into Spanish, which is going to have a pretty strong negative reaction by, well, those who speak it. ( and they also have a right to self identify ) Others make better points than I ever will[0][1]
The term "Latino" was a borrowing of a Spanish word into english, that already had a similar enough meaning in Spanish ( aside from gendering )
[0]https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-hernandez-the-ca... [1]https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latinx-elitist-some-push...
It may be used that way, and that may be it's original use, but I don't think that's it's main use: AFAICT, the main use is as as a general gender-neutral alternative to “Latino” or “Latina” (i.e., basically equivalent to “Hispanic” or “Latin”, but awkward to pronounce either as an English or a Spanish word), often by people who are neither enby nor of Hispanic/Latino/Latina/Latinx ethnicity.
A wide range of backgrounds, opinions, and thought processes is good and what everyone wants, but forcing diversity based on people's unchangeable physical attributes is nothing but injustice masquerading as morality.
Not a super cool way to add to discourse.
No disrespect is intended with this question, but are you sure that was the real reason? I've seen people get laid off before search for reasons why they specifically were singled out, and come up with some pretty biased excuses for themselves when it was really something fairly mundane. Even when their replacements turned out to be incompetent.
Does that mean that people who don't report abuse aren't victims? I struggle to see the logic behind this statement.
How does a story about a minority janitor who started at the literal bottom, get turned into a grievance thread about the damage done by "diversity hiring" policies?
There’s another offshoot discussion on this thread about how “Latinx” is a ‘white academia term’ and therefore it’s racist. Yet another about gender fluid pronouns and how using preferred pronouns is a burden some are unwilling to accommodate. It has to be the Cheetos.
In one of the first chapters, he himself talks about how he missed out on some promotion at the bank he worked for because "upper management wanted diversity". Very little detail is provided about this policy, so we have to take him at his word.
While I don't really question his interpretation of events, I have to wonder about this unicorn bank that was promoting minorities wholesale over white males in the 1980s.
Certainty may be rumors that come from colleagues in other parts of the company that play out exactly as they said it would.
>Why wouldn't he sue for wrongful termination?
This was many years ago in Texas, but imagine having the choice between fighting the brunt PepsiCo's legal team, possibly incurring crippling debt and losing the case to boot (read lack of provability)
Or signing a 5 year NDA and receiving 18 months severance.
(and in response to someone else suggesting incompetence, you know of many companies that offer 18 month severance packages for not doing your job well? I'd love to submit my resume)
I would also say that rumors are not a certainty either, in fact, I would argue that the game of telephone gives rise to biases, not the opposite.
Kudos to the guy for the initiative, but we are wrong to assume the janitor is in a weak and powerless position. You can work in a factory where you don't see any of the building apart from the walk to your station and the walk to the tea room. You just do your shift operating a machine.
The janitor isn't so intensively over-worked, not physically tied to a machine on a production line. There is scope to travel about the facility and time to observe. There is also scope to be on first name terms with everyone. But most managers would never hire anyone with an entrepreneurial brain into such a role.
Also by being outside any power structure the janitor has nothing to lose and everything to gain.
This story is also telling because of how people in America find it so inspirational. They are chips, a popular junk food item made of corn!!!
Some perspective is needed on that. No atoms were split. If you had two kids, one grew up to be the inventor of a new chips flavour, the other to be a foreign language teacher, which one would you feel best pleased with? Being happy and down to earth isn't good enough though, in America there has to be a rags to riches story for one to be deemed successful.
Secondly, why does it matter that what he made was a popular junk food made of corn? If he was a chef that made a popular meal made of locally sourced ingredients, would you find that more impressive? If he were an artist and he splattered paint onto canvas made of cotton? I’d be careful to not trivialize what it means to make something beloved by millions just because you ascribe negative value to junk food and corn.
This is the bit that some people would be underwhelmed by. Without the janitor story he is just a corporate executive, 'a suit'. And yes I did read the story, 1 + 1/2 times...
The junk food industry is not where the creativity is at. That is not a put down, it is a statement of fact. Most junk food products have not changed in decades. A century ago the brands were the same.
I am sure that there are plenty of fascinating aspects to the business, you could get into vending machines or industrial processes to find a load of intellectually stimulating stuff going on.
But look at it this way:
If you were having to do speed dating and you were an executive for a junk food company, how would you rate your chances?
Even if you had inspired a new flavour of corn chip then you are not going to have the most captivating of chat when the topic inevitably moves on to what you do for a living.
If this was me and the guy at the next table was nurse in the emergency ward, a teacher or even an artist then I would be concerned about my chances.
The fast paced world of junk food sales just has the word 'dull' run before it. As for corn, there is something you hit upon in your comment. Most things in America are made of corn. It is in everything. Beverages have the corn syrup. The meat is made from corn fed animals. Even the chips that should be 'potato crisps' are made of corn. It is this industrial feedstock variety of corn that goes into these things, not a product that can be eaten corn on the cob style as a seasonal treat.
In the rest of the world people eat less corn. I very much doubt that in France there are people having fake flavoured corn products several times a day.
Various native American tribes were corn fed. They did all the original genetic modification for corn. You have to wonder how much modern America really has moved on since everyone is still corn fed there.
Many millions of Americans like cocaine, crack, crystal meth and heroin. Nothing makes them happier. A little bit of their brain lights up when they score. These more powerful substances have hijacked the same pleasure circuits used for the reward system.
The junk food industry has the same gig going on, to all intents and purposes the customers are every bit as addicted as the crack head is. And you just have to look at the waist line of modern day, corn fed America. It isn't healthy.
We hear about food deserts in America. These same food deserts are the places you will find the most outlets for junk food. It is like an invasive species. The humble potato or the carrot does not have marketing executives trying to get the vegetable into everyone's home. The junk food industry does.
Every school has cooks trying their hardest to make nutritional meals for kids. The junk food industry is the enemy. If I was an executive, a suit, in the junk food industry then I don't imagine that I would be getting a lot of respect from the school chef. So, no, I am not putting this guy on a pedestal (or wanting to begrudge him) just because he has made it to the top of corporate America.