"I know I should denounce Brown's coded use of "American" and point out that Ramey and Ko are both easier to handle than, say, Zbigniew and Brzezinski."

News flash to the author: it's not just Chinese people who are getting the shaft on making their names more American, as people who have names like the ones he cites in the sentence I quoted above can tell you. Anything that is not from the few ethnic origins that were the most represented during colonial times (with the notable exception of Native Americans, of course) is considered "foreign," even if your family has been in North America for generations.

Recall that Tennessee Williams had Stanley Kowalski have to assert he is "100% American" in A Streetcar Named Desire because his Polish ancestry gets referenced instead of what he is. I have an Eastern European name that is only five letters long, yet even when I spell it out letter by letter people still often get it wrong.

I thought the rest of the article made some good points, but leading off by hating on other ethnicities that have gone largely through the same crap as what you're describing in the essay isn't any way to gain solidarity. Just because Betty Brown can't tell the difference between "American" the nationality and "English" the language doesn't mean the rest of us need to muddle them too.