Gadfeal
She is an amazing production, daughter of Indian immigrants, her name is Nimarata Ramdhara, and following the practice of millions of East European, Jewish and Hispanic immigrants in the 19th-20th Century, she must be deliberately “rebranding” herself as the Next Great White Hope! First, her nickname of Nikki replaced Nimarata, and her married name of Haley promptly replaced Ramhara. I thought that it was no longer I thought that the overt anti-Anglo prejudice of a century ago would have made it obsolete for Steins to become “Kings”, and Patrowicz to become Paltrow, and Issur Danielovitch to change his name to “Kirk Douglas”. Did Martin Sheen really have to change his name from Estevez to Sheen for his success, or Raquel Tejada to become “Raquel Welch”?
Even if they had, surely the “ancestral pride” and authenticity could have persuaded Americans with invented last names to reclaim their historic names in the 21st Century?
Obvious, to appeal to “Republican” voters, one has to whitewash one’s image. So, Ms Ramdhara seems to be a heavy user of skin whitening makeup, a form of self-hate exhibited by some visible “minorities”. Has she even one recorded speech in Punjabi or Hindi, most likely her first spoken language being not English? There are several millions “South Asians” in the US today, and you would think that appealing to any segment would be politically useful.
However, this is not a uniquely American phenomenon. The British Royal dynasties have been entirely Germanic since the establishment of the U.K. in 1707, with prior monarchs or spouses being non-Anglophone European Protestants as of the 16th Century (when British Parliament kicked out the Pope’s clergy).
* The Haus of Hanover was on the throne until 1901 when Queen Victoria died. All of the Hanoverian monarch first spoke a form of German before learning English. Even Victoria had a mother, nanny, half her grandparents (to be checked) AND husband were all Germanophones. It is odd that she became to symbolise all things British – when precious little of her ancestry traced back to England, Scotland or Wales.
* Then the Haus of Saxe-Coburg-und-Gotha dynasty was on the London throne from 1901 until 2022 when QEII died.
* Lastly, King Charles III inthronation marks the start of the Haus of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, the birth ancestral name of Prince Charles.
Yet, WWI and WWII had such anti-German sentiment that in 1917, three years into WWI, the then British monarch changed his name to “Windsor”, the location of near London castle. He also “encouraged” other German aristocrats in Britain to also anglicize names.
Prince Philip of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg started “courting” Princess Elizabeth when she was only 13, and upon naturalization to a British citizen post WWII, he also took an invented anglicized name based on his grandmother’s name of Battenburg, which then changed to “Mountbatten”.
So, I can understand why non-Anglo immigrants may have found it to be an existential necessity to hide their non-Anglo ancestry until even the 1960s, but it just smacks, today, 2023, of an unfounded explanation for “whitewashing” one’s ancestry.
You almost can imaging that some visible (or cultural) minorities are so brainwashed into seeking “approval” from an imagined homogenous Anglo / White majority, while it is more likely that they have internalized self-hate, much like the Jewish skinhead who beats up “minorities” in a gang while taking great care to hide his Jewish ancestry.
