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Lawmaker defends comment on Asians. "A North Texas legislator during House testimony on voter identification legislation said Asian-descent voters should adopt names that are 'easier for Americans to deal with.' The comments caused the Texas Democratic Party on Wednesday to demand an apology from state Rep. Betty Brown, R-Terrell. But a spokesman for Brown said her comments were only an attempt to overcome problems with identifying Asian names for voting purposes."
Racism is not just streetcorner intimidation.
Identification problems with alternative names has nothing to do with ethnicity. My wife and I were both born here in the US with names that I suspect would be “easy to deal with†even in Texas. Still, between professional names, alternate spellings (e.g. Glenn / Glen) of both our names (often made on “official†documents), documents with middle name, maiden name, with middle initial, etc. we are constantly dealing with ID issues.
Perhaps the problem does not fall on people who inconveniently use names, but with the ridiculously antiquated systems, protocols, and mindsets that refuse to address real people.
How about numbers tattooed on the forearm? Maybe that would help the politician in Texas.
Identification problems with alternative names has nothing to do with ethnicity.
Exactly so, nor does it have anything to do with the difficulty of the names, as Rep. Betty Brown "understands that Chinese is a rather difficult language." As if US Chinese citizens are using Chinese characters to show their names when voting! The problem is a simple technical one, occurring when a person's legal name differs from the name on a driver's license. I might be willing to give Brown the benefit of the doubt, however. She may very well be trying to address a problem with voting identification and she just doesn't express herself well.
I remember reading somewhere that Houston is supposed to have the largest Vietnamese-American population of any U.S. city. Do those names cause problems with the voting system?
It could be, as samaphore said, that Brown just expressed herself poorly, but since she singled out Asians when discussing the issue of people having “weird†names that Americans somehow can't deal with, it's hard for me not to see this as a race thing.
The idea that you have to learn Chinese (or another Asian language) to deal with Chinese names really seems bizarre to me. Does Brown also think that you need to know Italian to understand Italian names or German to understand German names? I don't know any Asian languages (aside from the 15-20 words of Japanese I've picked up from watching subtitled Japanese movies), but I've never had any problems with the names of Asian-American friends or with famous names such as Toshiro Mifune, Akira Kurosawa, Osamu Tezuka, etc.
For what it's worth, Brown has since apologized for her comments:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jsBwdM8e7kzG_0_jihfVBkX1NK4wD97GDTOO0
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