In a House testimony over voter registration legislation on Wednesday, Texas Representative Betty Brown (R-Terrell) suggested that maybe Asian Americans of Chinese, Korean and Japanese descent should adopt names that are "easier for Americans to deal with."
Gee, Betty, how do you mean? After all, they're Americans too. Oh, you mean real Americans like yourself! Via the Houston Chronicle:
The exchange occurred late Tuesday as the House Elections Committee heard testimony from Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans.Ko told the committee that people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent often have problems voting and other forms of identification because they may have a legal transliterated name and then a common English name that is used on their driver's license on school registrations.
Brown suggested that Asian-Americans should find a way to make their names more accessible.
"Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese -- I understand it's a rather difficult language -- do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?" Brown said.
Brown later told Ko: "Can't you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that's easier for Americans to deal with?"
What's worse is the her spokesperson says Brown won't apologize for the comments, claiming that Democrats (who asked for an apology) are merely using racial rhetoric to push back against the bill.
"Racial rhetoric." Heh. I say Ms. Brown should change her name to something that's easier for us to deal with. Any suggestions?
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I would call her Betty Baka. Baka being "idiot" in Japanese.
And the adopting name things is ridiculous. As someone who grew up in Hawaii, I saw a lot of my Korean, Vietnamese, and Filipino friends being forced to do this, and they frequently voiced their annoyance at having to whitewash their identities as so.
lol'd. How about "Betty Baka Haku-Jin"? That would translate to "Betty the Idiot Whitey."
Maybe then she'd understand that racism actually hurts, even if she still didn't get just how much.
Betty Baka is the best thing I've heard all day.
Over at Racalicious, they've provided contact information to speak out against this. When I read it earlier, I thought I had mistakenly gone to The Onion, what a truly stupid woman this Ms. Brown is.
I grew up with a lot of Vietnamese kids that didn't change their names. The first time I saw a girl do that was in college. I think her real name was Yu-Ting, but she went by Tiffany. I had never heard of people using different names, so I was really confused.
Did she just tell people to call her Tiffany, or did she actually get a legal name change and put that on her official paperwork?
She just told people to call her Tiffany. On my professor's roster it said Yu-Ting. I don't think it's a legal change.
Grandpa Simpson (to nursing home worker): Thank you Ping-Pong.
Nursing home worker: My name is Craig.
I'm confused-- does the article say that some Asian people have one legal name and then a different name on their driver's licence? Doesn't it have to be your legal name on there? I can see the confusion if they are using two different names for legal purposes. But if they are just complaining that the single legal name is hard to pronounce, then that's ridiculous.
I think the problem is that Asian names are frequently misspelled/spelled differently across different documents (because there's often more than one way to transliterate words/names that aren't usually written in the Roman alphabet), so it can be hard sometimes to reconcile the various records.
Well then the solution is to make sure that the first time the name is transliterated into the Roman alphabet, they pick one that the person is ok with, and then make sure to spell it consistently from then on. It can obviously cause legal problems if people are using different names or different spellings of names on different official documents. That doesn't mean anyone needs to change their name, but it does need to be consistent.
And if you want to have a completely different name that people call you in real life, that's fine, but it doesn't mean you can put it on official documents without a legal name change. If my legal name is Rebecca, I can't get a passport that says Becky, even if that's what everyone calls me.
I have a German last name that I can recall being spelled incorrectly about six different ways, but for some odd reason nobody's ever asked me to change it. Huh.
haha,yea. No one can pronounce my last name without practive. Fooz-non? Foo-ass-a-non? "It's Foo-es-no. It's French."
You have to change it then. Change your last name to Smith. I'm shaking with rage at how offensive your last name is to me. You're ruining the country!
*snickers*
Jokes aside, I completely get the frustration. People have lots of fun spelling and saying my first name wrong. And its a perfectly standard "white American" name. (Jenna = Jean, Jeannie, Janet?) I wonder if Betty Brown would want me to change my name...
I do too. It's always spelled incorrectly and pronounced wrong, but I guess German last names are "American" and Asian last names are inherently not. wtf.
Russian last name here, and I can know people for months and have them unable to pronounce or spell my completely phonetic, no weird phoneme containing name. I also use a different first name than the one on my driver's license/birth certificate.
But clearly the problem is those Asians and their weird Chinese names.
Because "Ko" is just so goddamn hard to pronounce.
Also, what does Brown mean by "your citizens" (my emphasis)? Because I'm pretty sure the voters wouldn't be voters, at least not in state and federal elections, if they weren't U.S. citizens.
(The only way I can imagine this discussion being remotely relevant is if Brown were talking about the frequent reversal of Chinese surnames and given names in the U.S. and trying to find a way for poll workers, Chinese-American voters and bureaucrats better to stay on top of it. But nope, she doesn't seem to've been doing that...)
That's more it. It's less about the names, poor diction on her part, or the flat-out ignorance of the varying groups Asian-Americans, really.
It's the "you and your citizens", barely a step above "you and your kind". It suggests that we're not quite American, we're not one of them. We're still somehow different, a foreign, yellow object that's embedded itself in a nice mostly-white quilt.
It's a rather large drop on the constant drip-drip Chinese water torture that is dealing with Asian prejudice (both by and against).
The kicker is that she was addressing a guy named "Ko".
I have trouble pronouncing names with only one syllable, too. ;)
The real issue here is the difference between their legal name and the name on their driver's license.
Ummm, bring another form of ID? Register under their legal name?? Don't use a common name on your license??
And I don't understand why it's difficult to transliterate their names. No American is going to care which tonal you need to use.
The real issue here is racism. If all Americans treated people with respect no matter what their name sounds like, citizens of Asian descent wouldn't feel pressured to use Americanized names, in daily life or on their IDs. And I imagine that Asian Americans might, in fact, care which tonal you use. I know I hate having my name mispronounced, and I don't even have to deal with anyone telling me I don't sound American when I am.
Don't get me wrong, the congresswoman's remarks are racist---I just don't understand why she has to go there because obviously it's an issue of the way we identify voters, not someone's name.
Thanks for clarifying, the first thing you wrote sounded like it was denying the racism in the issue.
If there's a difference in what's on an ID card and the person's legal name, then ok, that could be a challenge for poll workers.
But you don't fix that problem by asking people to *change their name* to something more "American." Maybe cross-check it with their address? Or the last four numbers of the Social Security number?
Also, Asian-Americans don't have a monopoly on difficult names-- someone should introduce this twit to my Nana and Grandpa DeBolske.
Don't get me wrong, the congresswoman's remarks are racist---I just don't understand why she has to go there because obviously it's an issue of the way we identify voters, not someone's name.
Of course standardizing names would make everything easier. But were america we accept people from all countries .. a "melting pot".
I actually enjoy learning how to pronounce names of different languages. I ask my friends to tell me how to pronounce their names correctly several times and practice it to get it right. And of course apologize for being ignorant of their language
Racism aside, I find this stupid because I find Asian names easier to pronuance than some European names.
I think she has the right idea, and instead of names that may be difficult to pronounce, we should all simply use numbers. For example, I shall be known as 1158265401. You may call me '401, for short.
The next step logically would be everyone getting a tattoo with their number, of course. I'm sure the good Representative would support this.
The tattooed number will be right below a corresponding barcode on the back of our necks.
Awesome! Nothing is more all American than the good old barcode. :) Betty will be pleased.
As a Texan who is involved in community organizing and citizen based lobbying on environmental issues all I can say is:
1) Our state legislators are consistently insensitive, snarky assholes when speaking to citizens in committee hearings and
2) Community inclusion FAIL
I actually think Betty Brown is a perfect name for her, but that's mostly because I've read Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut a few too many times.
Wow, that is an awesome observation!
I didn't read Slapstick and feel left out.. :'-( Care to explain, please?
I'll do my best, but it might not make too much sense out of context. In the book, there's a set of boy-girl twins who operate best when they're together; sort of like each has half a consciousness and half a brain, but together they make a (genius) whole. When they're physically far apart, they have trouble functioning and thinking and don't feel fully awake and aware. The girl half, I believe her name was Eliza, made up the names Betty and Bobby Brown to describe the people she and her brother were when they were alone and barely functional.
Didn't mean to exclude anyone, it just seemed like the explanation would kinda kill the funny. And thanks, naivemelodie :-)
Thanks for explaining, SociologicalMe. You got me curious, so I just downloaded the book (will buy it and/or others from him later) and will spend the night reading it. :)
The funny part in this context is that the brother became President. So!
In elementary school I had a buddy from Poland whose given name sounded very much like Michelle. The teacher in a misguided attempt to protect him from teasing decided to give him an "American" boy's name. I was against the whole idea, but suggested Michael since that was probably the closest American equivalent to his real name. No, instead the teacher had the class vote on a name. She didn't let him choose his own name, but had the class vote on it. His name became Ted.I remember being so pissed off! Luckily he was a really mellow, nice kid, and didn't care either way. I still get mad when I think of this.
Not a racism issue, but when I took French in high school the teacher assigned us "French" names and made us answer to them all year. So irritating and strange.
Every one of my language classes pre-college did that. French, German, Spanish and Latin. It was creepiest when there was someone whose real name was on the list of names for us to pick from, and the teacher had a little crisis about whether or not to assign them a different one.
Oh, I always thought that was fun. I kinda miss it, actually. (Then again, Frau let us pick our names, so it wasn't like she was just like "Leslie, you are now Sylvia." She gave us a list of German names and let us pick which one we wanted to use. My language teacher in 8th grade (who did two week mini sessions on a bunch of languages so we could have some idea before we started for real in 9th grade) even let me be Martin (instead of trying to force me to be Martina). It was fun.)
Holy shit! That's up there with segregating volleyball games in gym between White people and Hispanics, using a one-drop rule, of course (none of us Hispanic kids played this game, nor did we do the squat thrusts for losing).
I always found it kind of weird when teachers asked kids with the "weird" names if they wanted to go by an "American" name. I saw this more in middle school and high school than in elementary school. Some of the kids went by American names, and some of them went by nicknames. But then there was this one kid from Turkey named "Yufuk," and he did not want to go by another name. If I were him, I'd go by a different name, maybe my middle name. But it's his choice.
IHOP has these things called Bacon Browns, which are hash browns with bacon in it. My brother now use "bacon brown" as slang for poo stains on your undies. So I say we call her Bacon Brown.
I'd like her to tell the president his name should be, "Barry Henry O'Bama" :-)
How 1928 of her! Here I thought that anglicizing names went out after Southern Europe moved in. What a WASP prick of her!
Backofbus, I cannot support your use of bacon brown as anything negative because it sounds like pretty much the best food EVER.
I'm sure they're very tasty, but the name is too funny. "I'm makin' some bacon browns!"
There are tons of "white people names" that are hard to pronounce too. My last name is Italian and very few people I have met can pronounce or spell it correctly, even after I tell them the right way.
Since she's an American and I'm an Australian, I'm 99% sure that I can't pronounce "Brown" the way she does, either. That American "r" is tricky! She should change her name to something easier. Like Ko.
Hell, I have a name that's six letters long and starts with "McC" and people still say it wrong. Or pronounce it wrong when they read it. Or both. At the same time.
I think this has gotten Representative Brown enough XP to become a 12-level Bigot, though. She has Improved Jingoism now!
I'm ashamed to have the same last name as her.
I hesitate to call this racism only because I think there is an important difference between sheer stupidity and racism, because the latter is much more dangerous (granted, the former is close).
I don't think that the representative believes Asians are lesser-beings. I just think she is stupid and can't pronounce Asian names, and HONESTLY believes (as stupid as it may sound and as stupid as it makes her) that Asians changing their name would be easier. Perhaps there is an implied dehumanization (which is what can make it offensive) at the thought of Asians needing to conform, but I don't think the representative is aware enough to consciously intend it.
Orgs. like the KKK deserve the racist card solely. For one, it more fully demonizes those people that actively intend to dehumanize other people, it also gives hope to people like Betty (and I'm sure there are many of them) to be educated out of their ignorance.
I have to disagree- if we limit what we consider to be racism to only the most severe degree, a LOT will get apologized away. Brown's ignorance is a kind of racism- namely, the privilege to ignore other groups that comes with belonging to the majority. She does not have to have an active personal hatred for all Asians in order to be a racist. She can (and did) accomplish that simply by failing to stop and think about her own privilege before she speaks.
Telling Americans that their names aren't "American" just because they have surnames that originate in East Asia is pretty racist (in a KKK/David Duke/Tom Metzger sense of the term).
Because she's saying that only European Americans are 'real Americans' and everybody else is not.
And yeah, that's kinda racist!
There's so much going on in Ms. Brown's comments I don't even know where to start. Fortunately, most of the previous posters have covered it very well.
The thing that struck me was her little aside of "rather than everyone learning Chinese--which I understand is a difficult language..."
Oh yes. God forbid people in *America* should learn even a *bit* about another language. Being open to learning about unfamiliar, non-"English" names is just too much for us monolingual Americans.
Please, Ms. Brown, give us some credit. You don't have to learn the entire language to figure out people's names. Duh! Just...duh!
...God forbid Americans acknowledge that an entire world exists outside of this country! People around the world are fluent in multiple languages. I think the LEAST we can do as Americans is learn how to properly pronounce names.
It's sad, we are "supposed to be" some kind of world leader, shining example, you'd think the American population would be more internationally savvy (including conservatives).
Oh wow. Hey Betty,thanks for representing our state in the national and world media SOOOOOO well! You make Texas PROUD! Thanks for pointing out that people should change their names to convienence you rather than you take two seconds to ask someone their name. Thanks for telling Ms. Ko to her face tht she should change her name to something easier. That's really sweet!
>
Jeez. It is really hard to live in Texas sometimes. I am constantly explaining to people that Texas isn't as bad as it seems and then something like this happens. I'm so proud of our legislature for wasting time on voter id bills and legislation to allow people to carry concealed weapons on college campuses. Its not like Texas ranks near the bottom on issues like healthcare, education, domestic violence etc.
I'm going to change my name so that no one knows that I live here.
Ugh.
Yeesh. Did you guys check out the YouTube vid on Racialicious? That shizz should carry a trigger warning or something, because I seriously wanted to throw something. Brown's actions are just so indicative of this truly effed up sense of entitlement that some of us "real" Americans have when it comes to appreciating the changing nature of our country.
Oh, wait... I'm not a "real" American because I'm too ethnic-looking. Oh well... j/k
Did anybody write to this crazy ding-bat? I sent her a very civil email attempting to explain that even people with names from "difficult languages" are oftentimes American citizens if they reside here and are allowed to vote.
I also asked her when she would be making similar suggestions to Americans of European descent with names from such "difficult languages" as German or Czech. Otherwise, you know, it seems like she's majorly racist asshat. I'm really hoping for a reply, but frankly I don't expect it.
Given that Betty is a politician, Larson E. Whipsnade might be appropriate ... except it might cause confusion with all the other politicians.
Your subject line says it best. Let her change her name to "Racist Asshat", that way people will know exactly what they're dealing with from the start.
Let's see, what's in a name? Hmmm..how about a whole lot of things. For starters, a name is an identity and is what makes each person unique. I think that it is crazy to make someone change their name just so that it is easier on someone else. This is America, the land of the opportunity and equality or so we were taught. Reality is that America doesn't want to change. All I have to say to that is too bad America is changing whether people like it or not so they should just embrace the diversity that is occurring.