Cite that “many blacks” don’t have a record of their birth.
Yes, everyone realizes that they are not issued by the hospital itself. “I couldn’t wait any longer” is hardly an excuse, though.
Do you have one? It seems very strange that people are refusing to answer that question.
Good Gawd, do you mean she’s actually changed in the last 50 years? Earth shattering finding Claverhouse, good work!
FWIW, I’ve had a driver’s license for nearly 50 years, and up until last year, it was renewed automatically; I just had to pay the fee. But sometime in the last six years (my previous renewal was 2009), they changed the rules, and required a birth certificate. If I hadn’t checked on the internet first, I wouldn’t have known that, so if I had been a poor person, I would have wasted a trip to the DMV. But I wasted a trip anyway, because the birth certificate I had from the hospital was not acceptable. It was signed by the doctors, and it even had my baby footprint, but it lacked some kind of state certification that they demanded. AFAIK, it’s the only birth certificate I’ve ever had, so even a white guy born in a northern state doesn’t get what they wanted. I had to send a request to the state where I was born to get it, and it cost $35, and if I hadn’t had access to the internet, I wouldn’t have had any idea how to get it.
So yeah, all these new hoops may be a minor annoyance to people with plenty of money and internet access, but they can be the difference between yes and no for someone with little or no money, education, or internet access. And IMO, anyone who can’t at least acknowledge that whatever the intent, the effect of this works hand in glove with all the other Republican attempts to make it harder to register and vote is being, at best, disingenuous.
Right, because Dopers represent a perfect microcosm of poor blacks in Alabama. What are we hiding, hmmm?
This thread has been very instructive for me.
Well, isn’t that something! I, on the other hand, don’t find your evasion of my question at all unusual! Son of a gun!
This just in — 50 years ago, she thought Elvis was “dreamy.”
Up to 13 million people don’t. Here’s one example of why it’s particularly difficult for black people born before the Civil Rights act. (And before you kvetch that “oh big deal, people over 60-whatever,” remember that seniors are among the most likely to vote.)
Some here might also sneer at a mere 7%. If they were among that 7%, they wouldn’t find it so amusing. But see, this concept requires imagining oneself in someone else’s shoes; not a skill that comes easily.
The woman in this article doesn’t even know her correct age, for chrissake. As you’ll see, she qualifies for subsidized housing but because of a lack of a photo ID can’t apply.
To mock $25 as being a trifling amount to poor people is revolting.
More:
According to Politifact.com as of 2012:
Bolding mine, as in the earlier quotes.
So let’s average those two figures from the range and say the number is 15%. That’s a pretty significant figure.
How does an adult woman not know her own age???
The Brennan Center is not exactly a neutral source, by the way.
It’s actually impossible to know your age unless someone else who knows it tells you, and some people grew up without access to anybody who knew exactly when they were born.
I know it’s hard to believe, but not everybody was raised by their birth parents in a literate household with all of these documents that we take for granted today.
Agreed, Satchel Paige, who grew up in the Jim Crow South talked about how there was disagreement within his family as to when he was born.
Somehow, I don’t think his was the only Southern African-American family which would have such a problem.
No, it’s not impossible. It’s called a birth certificate. Again, something like 97% of Americans were born in a hospital, where the issuance of a birth certificate is a matter of course.
Her mother died of complications of childbirth because the local hospital was for whites only; her father was arrested for loitering and died in prison; her drunk of an uncle took her in, but put her to work in his field rather than enrolling her in school; she ran away when he started molesting her, and by the time she thought to ask how old she was, he had been shot in a bar, and she had no idea whether she had any other relatives.
You’re like a teenage girl asking how can someone not know who Zayn Malik is. Because not all lives are alike, that’s how.
None of that happened, let alone all of it.
The information on a birth certificate is information from other people. Babies can’t fill out paperwork. But anyways, if you don’t have a copy of your birth certificate, you have to have at least a rough idea of the details that are on it. If you don’t know anything about your birth name, when you were born, or where you were born, you’re SOL.
Got any proof of that?
And who doesn’t know those things? Less than 1/4 of 1% of the population?
I’d just like to bring up, that I grew up on welfare, and when I was young $25 free dollars wasn’t something trivial.
We were out of money by the last week of each month, and when the first of the month came, it was like that Bone Thugs song, like literally. Well, except it was food and necessities instead of weed and 40s.
Now imagine that $25 unbugeted dollars, is necessary to do something as symbolic as voting? It’s a real barrier, because voting is a luxury. It’s something you do when your kids aren’t hungry, and choosing between a birthday present for your kid, or school supplies, or gas for the car, or maybe just a pack of cigarettes to pass the time, and a birth certificate, so that you can vote a year from now, isn’t the sort of thing most people will prioritize.
If you don’t understand what it is to be truly broke, good. It sucks. But just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean that those people are stupid and worthless and worthy of your derision.