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GOP tries its best to alienate another growing voting bloc
Posted: Tue Mar 03, 2015 10:15 pm
by Scooter
AUSTIN — 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.
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.
Easier for voting?
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?”
Democratic Chairman Boyd Richie said Republicans are trying to suppress votes with a partisan identification bill and said Brown “is adding insult to injury with her disrespectful comments.”
Brown spokesman Jordan Berry said Brown was not making a racially motivated comment but was trying to resolve an identification problem.
Berry said Democrats are trying to blow Brown’s comments out of proportion because polls show most voters support requiring identification for voting. Berry said the Democrats are using racial rhetoric to inflame partisan feelings against the bill.
“They want this to just be about race,” Berry said.
Blow her comments out of proportion? Want this to just be about race? Grab a clue, spin boy, singling out an entire race of people and telling them to make their names more "American" is what made it "about race". Because your boss is racist, and so is the party whose machinery is now madly trying to justify the venom she spews.
Re: GOP tries its best to alienate another growing voting bl
Posted: Tue Mar 03, 2015 10:27 pm
by Crackpot
I agree all Asians hence forth shall go by the names John of Jane Doe. No one will have trouble recognizing that.
Re: GOP tries its best to alienate another growing voting bl
Posted: Tue Mar 03, 2015 11:40 pm
by wesw
my friends and I used to walk by a doctors office when we were on the way home fromschool. his name was huang hung. not sure if I remember the spelling correctly, but it was always good for a laugh.
we also had a kid in our school named peter Richard yanker, the third!
Re: GOP tries its best to alienate another growing voting bl
Posted: Wed Mar 04, 2015 1:20 am
by rubato
I think what she was talking about has been missed.
A lot of Chinese people adopt 'westernized' names of convenience so it is easier professionally. These names often appear on some of their 'official' documents like drivers licenses. But their legal real names are those which are written in Chinese characters and can be pronounced correctly by people who speak Chinese. Requiring poll workers to be able to read Chinese characters is a significant burden and perhaps it is reasonable to require them to use names rendered in the English alphabet.
yrs,
rubato
Re: GOP tries its best to alienate another growing voting bl
Posted: Wed Mar 04, 2015 5:19 am
by Econoline
I think you may be wrong there, rube, regarding what she was talking about:
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.
This seems to be about the use of both a
transliterated legal name and an "everyday" common name by the same individual. For instance, a young Japanese woman of my acquaintance is named Yasuko, but in her professional life as an art therapist she goes by the name Sue. (I have no idea which name is on her driver's license, and since she is a resident alien rather than a U.S. citizen the voting issue is moot.) Obviously if the same individual has some documents showing her name one way and other documents showing, say, a different first name that's going to create some problems occasionally.
Where Ms. Brown went off the rails is in suggesting that ALL "people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent" should change their legal transliterated names for the convenience of people like her who are unwilling to make an effort to pronounce an unfamiliar name. (OTOH, I can sometimes understand her frustration: personally, I think that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ought to be required to change his name.)
Re: GOP tries its best to alienate another growing voting bl
Posted: Wed Mar 04, 2015 2:50 pm
by MajGenl.Meade
I suggest "Bruce"