Fairfax police academy bars Herndon officers in dispute over Chinese signature

[AlexB23]

That's not much of a response.

I said what happened to me wasnt racism.
I kind of like knew it was a crime at the time.

In no way did I advocate tolerance of racism.

Prejudice can be pro or con. Some think blonde
women are extra pretty. Others assumed I'd be a wh8z at math.

I don't give much of a response to people who excuse the actions of racists.

 

[MotoToTheMax]

What- evs

You're better than these types of responses.

 

[AlexB23]

You're better than these types of responses.

Agreed. The "what-evs" comment by @Estrid sounded similar to what folks in my high school said back in the mid-2010s when dismissing someone's words (short for whatever). This forum is not a high school, but a place to have discussions.

 

[Hans Blaster]

Let's put it into practice, you've just received two signed documents, with these two handwritten signatures...you need to verify that it is, indeed, a signature and not just some random thing someone put on the line.

Let's be real here. Most American signature are just some random scribble someone put on the line. Hopefully it is relatively stable from use to use.

 

[Estrid]

You're better than these types of responses.

Its a better response than was merited

 

[ThatRobGuy]

Let's be real here. Most American signature are just some random scribble someone put on the line. Hopefully it is relatively stable from use to use.

They should be relatively stable... however, if there were, say, 10 different academy instructors all deciding to do that instead of just 1...things could start getting a little trickier given how familiarity with that character set is limited in the US

BBC - Languages - Real Chinese - Mini-guides - Chinese characters

Revision activity where you greet people and give your name in Chinese

www.bbc.co.uk

(plus, there's also the aspect that the concepts of "signatures" themselves are somewhat different between Western and Eastern countries, where in the West, the printed version of the name means nothing, and a document "doesn't count" until you put the cursive form down. From a verification perspective, a signature on a document should be something close to resembling the one that shows up on our driver's licenses or state IDs)


Some subsequent articles have shown up about the situation, and it appears the police Chief in question has expressed why they took the approach they took. It seems as if it's as simple as:

"I am requesting that they are issued certificates signed in English, the language that they are expected to use as an officer." (as the commonwealth of Virginia does have English codified as the official language)

Those defending Lee have used the defense "It's honoring his cultural heritage by using a signature that exudes heritage pride" (the words used by a Fairfax county official)


Obviously people have a gut reaction here because one person is white and the other isn't... But at its very core, the underlying question is, Is a person entitled to be able to "exude pride" in the heritage of another country when conducting official business in the US? There has been some debate recently over whether or not people should even be exuding pride in the heritage of their own country given it's a circumstance of birth

But like I mentioned before, sometimes a "role reversal litmus test" can put things in perspective.

Like I noted before, Japan is a country that also has many jurisdictions that mandate that things have to be conducted in Japanese using their written character set.


If a Japanese American says "I want to honor, and exude pride in Japanese Heritage" and I say "sorry, this jurisdiction officially calls for English, this is the US and we're an English speaking country, so that's what we use for these types of documents" -- am I the bad guy in that situation?

Now let's flip the script, same situation with the roles reversed:
I go to Japan, and they require that Japanese be used for such matters, and I say "No, I want to sign it in English, because I want to honor, and exude pride in, my American culture and heritage" -- is the "bad guy" in that scenario still me?


If a person answers "Yes" to both, then it's really not about "whether or not a person should be able to exude pride in national heritage", and is more about people picking a side based on intersectionality and perceptions about domestic marginalization dynamics.

 

[Hank77]

So this lady, while she not be xenophobic, is certainly displaying xenophobic behavior by demanding a Chinese-American write the Anglicized version of his name because she won’t accept his signature.

That is not what she is asking him to do.

She is asking that he write his name using the English language alphabet characters rather than Chinese alphabet characters.
It doesn't matter how he spells his name, just write it using English characters.

Ma is a common last name in Chinese. It's written Ma using the English alphabet.
Using the Chinese alphabet it looks like this....嘛

Spelling has nothing to do with it. What alphabet do your parents use? Is it some other alphabet than the 26-letter Latin alphabet? Do they use a foreign alphabet such as Arabic or Hebrew?

 

[Hank77]

Let's be real here. Most American signature are just some random scribble someone put on the line. Hopefully it is relatively stable from use to use.

I can't think of any important document that I have signed that has not included my printed name from my marriage license to voter registration to bank loans, to driver's license, etc. and it's always printed using the English alphabet. Not Finnish, Swahili, Hebrew, or Chinese.
When you sign that document you are claiming that your signature is the same as the name printed on the document. If it doesn't that could be fraud.

 

[durangodawood]

...but I think the person in question being accused of racism is entitled to not have that be the immediate assumption about them (especially given the circumstances). As immediately having local publications circulating that assertion around is tantamount to defamation if it ends up not being verifiable.

Per some other publications:
DeBoard, 60, made history in 2012 by becoming the first female police chief in Northern Virginia. She has reportedly actively engaged with non-White communities, participating in events like the “Justice for Black Lives” rally and advocating for immigrant communities to feel comfortable contacting the police.

If you hit the rewind button and look at DeBoard's other "headline making" endeavors, they're mostly positive

Virginia police chiefs want to make it easier to banish bad cops from profession

Herndon Police Chief Maggie DeBoard says some of the state's police departments don't ask for prior employment records when hiring an officer.

www.insidenova.com

She led the state efforts to change laws so that if a bad cop was fired from one department, they couldn't be rehired at another.

And even per the Washington Post (and we know what their leanings are):
She has taken numerous steps to reach out to her non-White constituents, including attending a “Justice for Black Lives” rally after the death of George Floyd in 2020 and sending a letter to the immigrant community urging them to call police without fear of deportation.

The letter, in Spanish and English, was sent home with schoolchildren and posted throughout apartment complexes in the town.


The very fact that "I prefer English, so I want things to be done in English for these types of official documents" is immediately conflated with racial bigotry (based on no other details or information about the person), I think, highlights a certain double-standard with regards to perceptions about culture.

Often times, it seems like some of the attitudes from certain people on the left is "everyone's allowed to have cultural preferences...except for Americans."

In fact, I'm pretty confident that if the roles were reversed...say, if an American went to Japan (where they require Japanese to be used for many types of official business) and said "Nope, I'm doing this in English, the English language is part of my culture and heritage and you have to respect that", that American would likely be getting labelled as "entitled" or "arrogant"

The "if the roles were reversed" scenario is often a good litmus test that I think people need to consider.

For instance, if someone accusing "Steve" of some sort of -ism because of something he said to "Dave"... If the actions & roles are reversed, and they still find a way to come to the conclusion that "Steve's at fault", then it really has nothing to do with the action, and everything to do with them having some sort of vested interest in taking Dave's side over Steve no matter what. (usually to virtue signal)

I was not referring to this specific case. I was responding to Estrid general complaint that Americans are obsessed with race.

That said, as much as I love Japan, my understanding is their culture is pretty darn racist in a lot of ways.

 

[Hans Blaster]

I can't think of any important document that I have signed that has not included my printed name from my marriage license to voter registration to bank loans, to driver's license, etc. and it's always printed using the English alphabet. Not Finnish, Swahili, Hebrew, or Chinese.

I always use the Finnish alphabet when I make my signature and I'm not even Finnish.

When you sign that document you are claiming that your signature is the same as the name printed on the document. If it doesn't that could be fraud.

Is it though? I kind of thought that, but like I said before -- I've seen modern signatures and their resemblance to words is suspect. (And no, it wouldn't be fraud. When I put my scribble on the line I am saying it is "me" making my mark, not someone else. That is all. If I claim to sign for you, then it is fraud.)

 

[Estrid]

I was not referring to this specific case. I was responding to Estrid general complaint that Americans are obsessed with race.

That said, as much as I love Japan, my understanding is their culture is pretty darn racist in a lot of ways.

Japanese are not at their most loveable when
they go racist. As racist nations go, usa in not
in the same league as Japan.
China is liberally endowed too.

My observation of USA is that it's very fad n fashion
driven. And being very loud about it.
Those who will can see my point on that.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

That said, as much as I love Japan, my understanding is their culture is pretty darn racist in a lot of ways.

I've heard the same...but my curiosity is with would it be perceived that way by people here?

IOW, would it be an ideologically consistent position, or would it be portrayed within a framework where "The American person is wrong in the exchange no matter what"?

As I noted before, the list of countries/localities (ranging the progressive to conservative spectrum) that require adherence to using their language for things (especially things involving government business) is quite a long one.

It only seems to get perceived as "racist" by some on the American left when it involves US-based efforts to do it...and the inverse to the rule almost never seems to apply.

For instance, if Thai person wants to live here and someone says "we do things in English, so we expect learn how to read/write/speak it"
-- it would be "How dare you! They have a right to retain, embrace, and honor their heritage and culture"

If an American person went to Thailand and said "I know you have Thai as your official language, but I still want to do things in English because I should have a right to retain, embrace, and honor my Anglo-American culture"
-- it would be "How dare you! It's their country and culture and they have a right to preserve it, some Americans are so arrogant that they think everyone should accommodate them everywhere they go"

 

[dzheremi]

I don't know or really care whether this is classified as racism or not, because of course something can be just plain silly without necessarily being racist (though I also have no problem with people seeing this as an example of anti-Chinese racism; what do I know about what Chinese people face in the USA one way or another? I'm not Chinese, and the Chinese friends I have don't really talk to me about this sort of thing). I think the underlying idea -- something like "we can't read that because it is not in Latin characters, and suddenly that's some sort of problem" -- is a little rich, precisely because, as others have pointed out, there is no need to standardize a signature according to what you personally can or cannot read, so long as whatever a person writes is established as their signature. I mean, we've all seen the famously terrible signatures that doctors are stereotyped to have, right? I'm not sure they're really any easier to read in some cases than Chinese characters would be, and I write that as someone who cannot read Chinese.

On a very basic level, this sort of objection to things written in non-Latin characters in an official or quasi-official ceremonial setting doesn't really work for me, since having something written in Latin characters does not immediately equate to "readable for English-language monolinguals in the United States." If you ever have any doubt that this is the case, just try to sound out a standard Polish name if you have no familiarity with the sounds of that language and how they're conventionally written in its variation of the Latin alphabet (I would argue that Hungarian is am even more apt example, with its many confusing digraphs, trigraphs, and diacritics marking accent and sometimes vowel length). You're not going to be able to do it, making Warszawa or Włodzimierz effectively as inscrutable to you as Иван Иванович, إسكندر الكبير , or ܐܬܢܐܣܝܘܣ ܩܕܡܝܐ ܓܡܠܐ. There is a world of difference between "I can recognize those as Latin characters" and "I can read that", or "I can recognize that as a name." There's a reason we've Anglicized the name of the capital city of Poland as "Warsaw", since "Warszawa" visually does not appear to follow English-language phonotactics (rules about what sounds can occur next to each other in a word or syllable), though if you know how to read it, the underlying pronunciation is nothing that we couldn't say in English (the "sz" digraph in Polish makes a "sh" sound like in "shop", so "Warsaw" in the native tongue of its inhabitants is pronounced something like "Varshava", since the "w" in Polish makes a "v" sound; this is where the form in other European languages tends to come from, e.g., the French Varosvie, or the Spanish Varsovia).

Also, since I grew up speaking two languages and have added a few since then (including several that aren't conventionally written in the Latin alphabet), I'm well aware and attuned to the uncomfortableness that many English-language monolinguals appear to feel around people speaking or writing in other languages. You don't have to confirm it for me; I can well remember my mother nervously asking me when I was a child if that person over there (just some person; any person who happened to be outside, living their life, speaking their non-English language) was talking about us. The answer was no in 1987, and I'm going to guess the answer is still no today, but I don't think this is a conscious thing anyway. Having people speak or write around you in a way that you cannot understand can feel weird. I sort of experience that myself in my own neighborhood, as where I currently live is heavily populated by people from Afghanistan, so I can't understand their languages (I assume they're speaking Dari or Pashto most of the time, since those are the two federally-recognized languages of Afghanistan, but I don't really know), even though I can read them, since they're written in variations of the Perso-Arabic script that I already know from learning Arabic. That's why I don't automatically assume racist intent in cases like this, or at least not any more than would be reasonable whenever someone is uncomfortable with or confused by something that they do not immediately understand or recognize -- which is all the time, because thousands upon thousands of years of human evolution has trained our brains to recognize novel things and approach them with caution until we can verify that they're not going to hurt us. This is just the language and culture version of that.

That certainly does not mean that it is acceptable or reasonable to react in an alarmist way to presence of some Chinese writing on a certificate, but immediately reaching for the nuclear option of explanations (racism) might not be all that helpful in recognizing what is actually going on (unease at not being able to read or understand something). Unless you want to posit that simply being an English-language monolingual American makes a person racist by default, but that doesn't seem like a very reasonable thing to think.

 

[durangodawood]

I've heard the same...but my curiosity is with would it be perceived that way by people here?

IOW, would it be an ideologically consistent position, or would it be portrayed within a framework where "The American person is wrong in the exchange no matter what"?

As I noted before, the list of countries/localities (ranging the progressive to conservative spectrum) that require adherence to using their language for things (especially things involving government business) is quite a long one.

It only seems to get perceived as "racist" by some on the American left when it involves US-based efforts to do it...and the inverse to the rule almost never seems to apply.

For instance, if Thai person wants to live here and someone says "we do things in English, so we expect learn how to read/write/speak it"
-- it would be "How dare you! They have a right to retain, embrace, and honor their heritage and culture"

If an American person went to Thailand and said "I know you have Thai as your official language, but I still want to do things in English because I should have a right to retain, embrace, and honor my Anglo-American culture"
-- it would be "How dare you! It's their country and culture and they have a right to preserve it, some Americans are so arrogant that they think everyone should accommodate them everywhere they go"

Yeah a lot of us probably do have a double standard in that regard.

Otoh America is conceived as an almost nationless state in a way. Its not built (ideally) on any particular cultural premise like Thailand is, or France, or Japan. The Thai people are a culture, more or less. So they have a Thai-land.

 

[dzheremi]

I've heard the same...but my curiosity is with would it be perceived that way by people here?

IOW, would it be an ideologically consistent position, or would it be portrayed within a framework where "The American person is wrong in the exchange no matter what"?

As I noted before, the list of countries/localities (ranging the progressive to conservative spectrum) that require adherence to using their language for things (especially things involving government business) is quite a long one.

It only seems to get perceived as "racist" by some on the American left when it involves US-based efforts to do it...and the inverse to the rule almost never seems to apply.

For instance, if Thai person wants to live here and someone says "we do things in English, so we expect learn how to read/write/speak it"
-- it would be "How dare you! They have a right to retain, embrace, and honor their heritage and culture"

If an American person went to Thailand and said "I know you have Thai as your official language, but I still want to do things in English because I should have a right to retain, embrace, and honor my Anglo-American culture"
-- it would be "How dare you! It's their country and culture and they have a right to preserve it, some Americans are so arrogant that they think everyone should accommodate them everywhere they go"

You don't think the Thai could see a benefit to catering to English-speaking people who don't bother learning Thai? Not every interaction between a non-American person and an American who doesn't bother to learn their new country's language is necessarily so adversarial.

For example, my uncle Ed spent the last 25 or so years of his life living in Partizanske, Slovakia, where he taught English to factory workers at the town's hockey puck and shoe factory. During all of his time there, he never learned Slovak, not because he was arrogant or didn't want to (I've got the occasional Christmas card from that time with a perfunctory greeting in Slovak to prove that he did at least sort of try sometimes), but because the Slovak people where he lived saw making themselves available as translators for him wherever he went as much more advantageous for them than trying to teach a 60+ year old American guy how to speak their language from scratch. The opportunity to work with not just a native English speaker but an English teacher was much better for the Slovaks, since after all he was already teaching them English at their job, so taking him to the grocery store or wherever was like getting a 'free' naturalistic lesson in exchange for speaking their own language, which they were already going to do anyway at the grocery store whether he was there or not. So there was really no downside.

 

[dzheremi]

Yeah a lot of us probably do have a double standard in that regard.

Otoh America is conceived as an almost nationless state in a way. Its not built (ideally) on any particular cultural premise like Thailand is, or France, or Japan. The Thai people are a culture, more or less. So they have a Thai-land.

Only in America would a country that is ~57% non-Hispanic White be conceived of as not having a dominant culture tied to some genericized version of that majority's culture. This is a silly point, my friend. It reminds me of the secularist idea that we can't be a Christian country by self-confession because look at this non-Christian group, and that one, and that third one over there. True, America will lose its non-Hispanic White majority sooner rather than later (I read a Pew Research brief recently that predicted that if current trends continue, NHWs will be 47% of the USA by 2050, while Hispanics of all races will increase to 29% of the total share of the US' demographics by that same year), but since who a country's 'people' are is often purposely narrowly defined by those who have a vested interest in presenting their own group as being the 'real' _______s, what makes America stand out most among developed western countries is our own inability to acknowledge that we do the same thing as the Thai or whoever, despite the fact that this is clearly what we do.

The only people who are confused about what America is are Americans ourselves.

 

[durangodawood]

Only in America would a country that is ~57% non-Hispanic White be conceived of as not having a dominant culture tied to some genericized version of that majority's culture. This is a silly point, my friend. It reminds me of the secularist idea that we can't be a Christian country by self-confession because look at this non-Christian group, and that one, and that third one over there. True, America will lose its non-Hispanic White majority sooner rather than later (I read a Pew Research brief recently that predicted that if current trends continue, NHWs will be 47% of the USA by 2050, while Hispanics of all races will increase to 29% of the total share of the US' demographics by that same year), but since who a country's 'people' are is often purposely narrowly defined by those who have a vested interest in presenting their own group as being the 'real' _______s, what makes America stand out most among developed western countries is our own inability to acknowledge that we do the same thing as the Thai or whoever, despite the fact that this is clearly what we do.

The only people who are confused about what America is are Americans ourselves.

People of my generation at least had it bashed into our heads that the USA is defined fundamentally by the ideals in our founding documents. None of those are dependant upon this or that predominating language.

So while we may happen to have a dominant culture, thats not what makes America, America. At least not ideally. I mention ideals because the discussion had veered toward what it is right to do re this persons signature.

 

[dzheremi]

I mean, sure, if by "ideal" you mean "what we tell ourselves that we're about as a country no matter what we actually do", then that makes perfect sense. I'm just saying that reality obviously doesn't match the ideal, so continuing to put the ideal out there as though that's what America 'is' seems a bit silly. To the elite who benefit from peddling image of it, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (a.k.a., North Korea) really does embody all of the stuff that they claim it does. That doesn't stop the rest of the world from declaring everything they produce to try to sell people on that idea to be obvious and cheap propaganda.

 

[Estrid]

Only in America would a country that is ~57% non-Hispanic White be conceived of as not having a dominant culture tied to some genericized version of that majority's culture. This is a silly point, my friend. It reminds me of the secularist idea that we can't be a Christian country by self-confession because look at this non-Christian group, and that one, and that third one over there. True, America will lose its non-Hispanic White majority sooner rather than later (I read a Pew Research brief recently that predicted that if current trends continue, NHWs will be 47% of the USA by 2050, while Hispanics of all races will increase to 29% of the total share of the US' demographics by that same year), but since who a country's 'people' are is often purposely narrowly defined by those who have a vested interest in presenting their own group as being the 'real' _______s, what makes America stand out most among developed western countries is our own inability to acknowledge that we do the same thing as the Thai or whoever, despite the fact that this is clearly what we do.

The only people who are confused about what America is are Americans ourselves.

I kinda skimmed your post but last line is a winner !

 

[weekEd]

Having divorce after divorce is legal how much more religious do you want this country to be?