Thread by @Yair_Rosenberg

My latest: To get beyond the typical talking points of the Latinx debate, I spoke to a Palestinian scholar in Israel about his community's experience and about how minority identities evolve over time. newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/61…

1. There's been much debate over "Latinx," which most Latinos do not use, but many media outlets and some politicians do. In Israel, there's a similar debate over the identity of Arab citizens, who are often dubbed simply "Palestinians," but call themselves many other things.

2. Growing Arab citizen identification with Israel is actually not new, but you probably haven't heard much about it, because it hasn't gotten much attention in elite discourse:
newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/61…

3. Divides between elite narratives about minorities and the minorities themselves tend to be exposed at the ballot box. In America, we saw this with the shift of Latinos toward Republicans. In Israel, Arab voters shifted to a party that pledged to work w/ the Israeli government.

4. As Palestinian scholar and activist Mohammad Darawshe put it to me, "Identity is not a zero-sum game." Arab citizens in Israel have a complex identity and resist being pigeonholed into a single label. One cannot understand them without understanding all these facets.

5. Whether it's Latinos in America, Arabs in Israel, or Jews around the world, the problem isn't any particular label for the community, like "Latinx." It's reducing entire minority communities to one label, rather than granting them the dignity of their own diversity.

6. Here's a link to the full piece:
newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/61…
It's for Atlantic subscribers, with a public preview. If you want to read more—not just this piece but more like it—please do subscribe: theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/su…