On Tuesday, State Rep. Betty Brown (R) caused a firestorm during House testimony on voter identification legislation when she said that Asian-Americans should change their names because they’re too hard to pronounce.The Truth-Is-Dumber-Than-You-Realize Reality: What Ms. Brown was discussing was voter registration, where the misspelling of a name can lead to disenfranchisement: For example, someone with the name that sounds like "chang" could spell it "Chiang" or "Cheng" or "Jiang". Using the reasoning skills of a 5-year-old, she figured that if Asians would just settle on a single spelling for a single name, things would be so much easier.
Yeah. Well.
It's not racist... unless Ms. Brown would not also have suggested to Mr. Smythe, Mrs. Johnsson, Miss Foxx, and Mr. Browne that they change their names as well. (It's up to you to decide whether she would or would not have suggested that.) It's just the kind of idiotic and uneducated thing that falls squarely in the "asking-for-trouble-no-matter-how-well-you-explain-yourself" category that local politicians (especially from Texas) always seem to blindly wander into.
In other words, in this case, checking the facts doesn't lead you to think that Ms. Brown is any less retarded than you were led to believe — she is — just that she probably didn't intend to come across as a racist while engaging in her massive stupidity.
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