Too hard to find your name on the voting rolls? Do ‘American’ poll workers have a difficult time understanding how to spell your ethnic name? Time to change that name – or so Rep. Betty Brown suggests…
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 exchange occurred late Tuesday as the House Elections Committee heard testimony from Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans.“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?†[chron]
Ohnoshedin’t. She’s not even suggesting that people take on easier to pronounce nicknames, but legally changing names to make it easier for immigrant Americans to have access to voting. For realz?
Watch Ramey Ko duke it out with Ms. Brown in the above video. This is a very important voting rights issue up for debate – Texas Senate is debating a Voter ID legislation currently and asking for identification at the polls on Election Day is intimidating to APIA voters. Ko was arguing that asking for a form of identification to vote is difficult when dealing with this population. Studies show that “Asian American voters in states that required a form of ID were 8.5% less likely to vote compared to Asian American voters in states without voter identification requirements.”
See what your Betty Brown approved name would be on the Betty Brown Name Generator. You can just call me, Tiffani “Americana” Brown, from here on out. At least I’m still ‘Brown’.
Yes and No. I think almost all travel documents from the desh have the names in English. The US immigration databases are out of date though. They have room for three names. If there are more than three names, all of the other names are placed in with the last name. The last name field has room for around nineteen characters. Anything that isn’t fit is either truncated or dropped. The Mexican naming tradition has children combine the mother’s maiden name with the father’s name, so the last name could be Rodriguez-Gutierrez. This name would not fit, so they may drop one name or the other. There is no formal policy, different officers do it differently.
Obviously many Desis have more than three names and names longer than nineteen characters. The problem rises in that all other identity documents are based on your immigration documents. Post-REAL ID Act, you cannot get a driver’s license in most states without showing immigration documents. When you finally get around to becoming a citizen, your naturalization certificate and passport match what is on your permanent resident card. The end result is that this is a recipe for people being disenfranchised. DHS needs to fix its database, but the fundamental solution is to have a policy of tolerance at polls with identity documents.
did not this whole tangent start because of criticism of the US government’s human rights record?
Suki: People who come here and bad-mouth are probably doing it from nostalgia. I, for one, love US for the freedom I have here which is not possible as a woman in India and the innovation and like most people I have met here compared to that in India. On the other hand I sorely miss my aging family, and hope to go back just for them.
Nostalgia is one thing, but alot of the stuff I here about how the Punjab is heaven on earth and people in Canada/United States have no morals or culture is another thing. And the thing is that I have heard this from alot of backwarding thinking people who take advantage of every thing that there no homeland as to offer but have no loyality to there homeland.
Just look at the muslim community in the Europe many of them who come from 3rd world hellholes yet having nothing but hate for there no homeland. SInce many of them are brown, the backlash against them affects all browns living in the west.
for there no homeland.
I meant to say new homeland, not no homeland. Sorry about the mistake.
It’s amazing how one person spouting totally unrelated rhetoric can hijack a good discussion. Ofcourse, anyone can say anything in an unmoderated forum, but it would make good sense for us to completely ignore comments left by trolls trying to forward their agenda that’s totally unrelated to this discussion about language, assimilation and notions towards immigrants. I encourage everyone to completely ignore such commentors and not accord any respect. Let’s just respond to people who stick to the discussion at hand.
People, Sepiaaahhh = Pardesi Gori. I bet SM’s own Madame Blavatsky is laughing her ass of at all of you right now.
yeah, i was thinking that…the feminism leading to anti-indianism mixed in with anti-materialism rooted in exotic indian past thrown out to the mutineers wrapped in passive aggresive non-PC language.
Good times.
while we’re at it, this dude is prema.
I find the majority of articles (and comments) on this site hilarious and entertaining. However the general direction of comments on this article (and pretty much every article) makes me ask all of you a question.
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Oh, I’m sorry. So since “Americans” can’t “deal” with my name, does that mean that I’m now no longer an American? I thought a citizen is a citizen is a citizen. If some dude can name himself “Trout Fishing in America,” then I should be able to keep my “difficult” name.
To reiterate Cajun, let’s stay on topic please. Comments that are “non-issue focused flames” on this thread will be deleted later. For those who forgot, it’s about voting right and the ability to vote using your name and without having to show I.D.
Here in California, if you are a first time voter you are asked to show an ID. That is the only time. And swiping driver’s license isn’t all that accurate (hello, fake IDs in college anyone?) not to mention that the Diebold voting machines themselves are under fierce attacks. I can’t imagine throwing another machine in the mix.
One way we deal with it here in Orange County poll worker issues is that the local ROV recruits and hires bilingual poll workers to work the polls with large populations of those ethnic communities. I think this solution works very well – American bilingual pollworkers and 1st/2nd gen American voters. I guess Betty Brown didn’t really think about THAT.
Hmmm. I’ve been having a field day with this all day (and alerting a Chinese-American friend whose name actually IS Tiffani), but THANK YOU for actually posting the full YouTube video of the hearing, Taz.
I’m conflicted now. Perhaps the conversation wasn’t as nuanced or sensitive as many of us would hope it to be, but immediately after the outrageous excerpted quote, Brown says:
There’s then a discussion about Pinyin transliteration systems and the practice of taking “English” names that are used in some contexts and not others. I actually think this whole thing has blown up into a tempest in a teacup, as a large part of the debate was about development of a voter ID-checking system (which I personally don’t see a need for anyway), and the problems that might arise if someone appears on voter rolls as “Piyush Jindal” (or Xiaoming Xu) and then presents a driver’s license that says “Bobby” (or Hsiao-Ming Hsu) — although I assume they manage to have no problem with the 300 John Smiths on the voter roster even if some of them bring official ID cards that say Jack Smith. In any case, my point is that I think this debate got blown out of all proportion, and on video Ms. Brown comes off like much less of a xenophobic redneck than she did when I saw her decontexualized quote all over various blogs today. Carry on…
Anthony
Brown is clearly dividing the world into two different camps: “your citizens” and “us” in which different groups, priorities and agents exist in a mutually antagonistic relationship. It’s an attitude predicated on a very mild antipathy to experiences and interactions which render inadequate one’s core competencies (which for a politician include being able to publicly connect and empathize with constituents in some way.)
She’s down to the spittle-soaked nub of her already thin knowledge base and is gnawing frantically for a shred of insight. Piteous creature.
so this woman is arguing for additional documentation to what many already find a confusing and bureaucratically augmented process? Hopefully no one will take her seriously because she is clearly overlooking some major social and possibly constitutional issues here. As an American I have always been taught that this nation is a melting pot and identifying something (other than the ideal of american individualism) as “truly” American is pretty much impossible. When claiming that voters of Asian-descent should change their names for something easier for “Americans to deal with” she is clearly throwing some loaded punches regarding who she views as “real” Americans (i.e. W.A.S.P.’s with names like hers?) In addition requiring certain subsets of the population to carry legitimizing papers to allow voting is hauntingly evocative of the Post-Bellum Southern taxes that led to need for the 15th amendment and the Voting Rights Acts. Also having worked at voting drives, social security numbers, and tons of other data are used to identify registered voters not just name- otherwise the 5 million John and Jane Smith’s would have lost the right to vote long long ago!
P.S. doesn’t this lady know that America no longer cares about having “funny names,” last time I checked a man named BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA was still MY PRESIDNET! This article has only reaffirmed my desire to give my kids extremely distinctive South Indian names.
I’ve got the problem where my name doesn’t sound Indian at all – my last name, which is Punjabi, sounds like an English name, and my first name is English…so whenever I meet an Indian person and tell them my name, they then ask me what my real name is. When I don’t have an Indian name, they think I’m a white wanabee!
Even though I’m Punjabi, I think most Punjabi names are horrible (ie. names that end in Jit or Inder), neither me nor any of my brothers have Punjabi names. We all have Indian (non-Punjabi), English or Persian names.
If you want Indians from a humble background who have moved abroad, well there’s loads of chamars (tanners) in northern California, and I grew up surrounded by chamars and chooras (sweepers) in UK. I have cousins in India who are illiterate, and if I go back further than my grandparents, basically everybody was illiterate. My mum left school when she was 12, her mother and her brother’s wife are both illiterate.
My dad’s mother had 8 kids, only 2 lived more than a few years. My mum’s mum had 8 kids, and only 3 lived. They were so poor back then that they couldn’t sfford medicine and had more kids when the first ones had died.
My grandmother wasn’t allowed out of the house cos the Muslims would kidnap girls who had hit puberty. As a result of this marriages were done at a young age. My father’s mother married when she was 7! I’ve an uncle who arrived in UK I 70s aged 12, and he was already married!
Goodness Gracious Me on Indian Names: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0on29a9kvlA
… and Radiostan on names & naming: http://www.radiostan.com/?p=4
As far as I know, the issue here was to accurately establish identify of an individual, I have serious doubts that adopting easier sounding names would assist in that regard. What we are (or should be) matching here is the spelling of a name not the pronunciation of the name (e.g. you can spell ‘Stephan’ in more than one way).
The gentleman talking in the video was citing an example where an error in transliteration of a Chinese name can occur as there can be more than one interpretation of that name – well – if your name in the passport/papers is not spelled as you’d like then you can get it changed via legal means. One should not expect that ‘Viswanathan’ and ‘Vishwanathan’ be considered same.
What this lady was saying about adopting easier names was just a brain-fart, I think she did not mean to offend anybody. I am really not that concerned about making things easier for poll workers – I mean how can you complain when you have a job where all you do is matching letters and numbers.
Blown up exchanges like these are part of the problem with mining soundbites. Listen to the rest of what was said in the origional House Elections Committee conversation! Mr. Ramey Ko had pointed out an existing problem with Chinese-American voters having difficulty voting at polls because the spelling of their name on their Photo ID does not match the spelling on their voter registration… a legitimate concern, since the whole point of checking ID’s at the polls is to be sure the person voting is the person registered for the vote. It came out in Mr. Ko’s discussion that there is much confusion & variation as to how these names should be spelled from the original Chinese figures into English. The intent of Representave Brown’s regrettable sentence was corrected with her next sentence in which she clarified, that she was not suggesting anyone change their names! She was talking about ‘his people’ (meaning the ‘Organization of Chinese Americans’ whom Mr. Ko was there representing), taking the bull by the horns and developing a consistant way to conform the spellings of Chinese names into English-letter form, so that the names would be preserved & consistent outside of the origional Chinese characters (enabling the true name to be read by English speakers without them having to learn Chinese to do it – it is said to be a complicated language you know…) And yes… many who might take advantage of the results of such a project might be ‘changing their names’ in the future in order to adopt the ‘corrected’ English-character spellings. How has it taken so long for this to come up?
SUCH bullshit. I know East Asians often adopt Anglo-Saxon first names to blend in, but I’m proud that the South Asian community doesn’t do that. Why the hell should we make our names easier for WASPs to deal with? In that respect, the governor of CA is a great example of this. He was asked while in Hollywood to change his last name – he didn’t, and these days I believe everyone pronounces Schwarzenegger just fine.
Betty Brown is such an idiot.
Texan representatives are generally known for their general douchebaggery and out-of-touch idiocy, so I’m not surprised, but definitely disappointed in her comments. What Betty Brown fails to realize is that Houston, the fourth largest city in the country and the largest city in the state, has a HUGE Asian-American population – the largest Vietnamese-American population in the United States, in fact, is right here in Houston. Huge desi population, too. There are plenty of grassroots organizations in this state to protect the rights of Asian-Americans, so I’m hoping some community organizing and outrage will shut this lady up.
71: To be fair, South Asians do that, too. Mukesh becomes Mike, Sujatha becomes Sue, Mohammed becomes Mo, and so on. This isn’t a value judgment on whether Anglicizing names a good or bad thing, just noting that it is done.
Let’s just stick with the ole drag queen rule , you know, street where you live + first pet’s name.
Only if they change their names when they reside in the east..
Yes names should be spelt phonetically…then no problem, eg Grewal should be spelt Graybaal , so it is not misprounced as Grey Wall, Dhillon should be T’lon or Tilou and so on
Honestly? I recently voted in a local election and my father was standing in line right in front of me as we went through to get our names checked off the list. The election worker glanced at his last name and year of birth and promptly marked my MOTHER’s name off the list. He was watching her and corrected her. Her excuse was well I couldn’t tell which one was the male and which one was the female. WTF?
I don’t think its the names that are the issue… its just plain laziness on the part of some election workers who seem to misinterpret or ignore the rules. Voter ID laws seem like a way to give more traction to workers who are seeking to disenfranchise voters.
AMEN.
While Rep. Brown’s comments have been mostly quoted without the full context in other coverage/stories, I do think her comments (indicating that OCA’s membership is somehow “non-American”) around citizenship and belonging creates a weird us/them dichotomy that isn’t really fair, is alienating to Asian Americans, and captures a misinformed notion of what an American looks like, sounds like, and is named. I’m also generally disappointed when those in positions of power ask organizations that are relatively under-resourced to take on burdensome projects such as trying to get all linguistics frameworks to conform to one narrow transliteration method for names. LAME.
People who become adept and obsessed with reading between the lines forget to read the actual lines.
M. Nam
@ 71 – desis do it, too. my dad changed his name to jack, my mother still introduces herself as kay. many of their friends also go by more westernised names. and for the curent generation, the prospect of having their child’s name butchered in america is a very strong, if not the dominating, consideration when choosing a name.
They’ve been “Anglicizing” names for a couple hundred years. Some of the old Ellis Island records are remarkable evidence for this, should you have any doubt. The official who signed you in, set your family’s place in the phone directory forever. You wouldn’t believe what O’Leary, Mcgonaeghal, Steinberg, Schwartz, Wang and Leideren orignally looked like on paper. Immigrants often did this on their own, as I suspect many Indians have or would do anyway. This country has always been a great one for giving teachers headaches calling role on the first day of school.
For most puposes, you assume incorrectly. Names can change for many reasons — the most common one being when people get afflicted by marriage. The same problems apply.
Most ID systems have a weighted point system/ guidelines. Think of the I-9 form you fill in when you get employed /open an acount, etc. INconsistent names are a big no no, and require a round about way of being dealt. (I’m guessing here that the voters here do not have a US passport, and so are using the naturaliation papers. And the problem is that the various names do not match.)
For trying to understand the issue and help? You do know that she could simply decide that, if the names do not match, you’re out of luck, and move on to the next item on the agenda, dont you?
It is a us /them situation. Or rephased, the situation seems to be unique to many of OCA’s members and creates an exception to a general rule.
Some western names have become Indian names:
Jarnail = General Karnail = Colonel Alexander = Sikander or Iskander
I’ve met Punjabis with all these names
Happens often with a name like ‘Aditya’.
Since someone posted one already – here is another great GGM where they butcher an english waiter’s name:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a42pwyL1ecc or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huSP7PtctC4 (live version)
another delightful gem of racism from the great state of texas. why haven’t we taken up perry’s offer to secede yet?