Texas Rep. Betty Brown thinks Asian Americans should change their names to something 'Americans find easier to deal with'. She made the remarks during House testimony on voter ID legislation in Austin, Texas.

Brown was responding to testimony from Ramey Ko of the Organization of Chinese Americans, who said that people of Chinese, Korean and Japanese descent at times run into problems with identification. Even if there are questions relating to transliteration issues from document-to-document, that unfortunately wasn't how Brown's remarks came across.

She suggested that Asian-Americans 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's suggestion that Asian names are 'hard to deal with' is a generalization. A name such as Ko or Lu is a cinch compared to say Castrogiovanni or Wojciechowski . In any case why should Asian Americans change names that reflect their heritage and hold special family meaning just for the purpose of voting?

She basically suggested the onus was on the Asian-American community not to be disenfranchised by the ID bill when she said...

"I see a need here for young people like you, who are obviously very bright, to come up with something that would work for you and then let us see if we can't make it work for us."

There would appear to be a political motive at work here. Democratic Chairman Boyd Richie said Republicans are trying to suppress votes with a partisan identification bill and Brown “is adding insult to injury with her disrespectful comments.”