As this administration makes it clear that we will all soon need to carry papers proving that we are citizens if we don’t want to be shuttled off to some random country for exercising First Amendment rights or something—and with the deadline looming for Real ID to finally go fully into effect after years of delay—I keep seeing people carrying on that it’s really not that hard to obtain Real ID or a passport.
Well, I have thoughts and some personal experience to share.
Right now, it is projected that half of Americans do in fact have either a passport book or card, a percentage that has increased drastically in recent years. That’s good, but it also means half of Americans don’t have a passport. I am among the half that don’t have a passport, though that should change in the coming weeks ahead.
The fact is that for many Americans, cost and lack of access to the documents required to obtain a passport, along with seeing no legitimate reason for having a passport, are among the myriad reasons that some Americans opt to not have one.
In my case, an oversight 52 years ago by my parents and—until recent years—not having the resources to even consider international travel, are among the reasons why I never had one. But in a matter of weeks, this has gone from being something I wanted to take care of to a necessary top priority.
Friends, gather around as I tell a story of how an oversight by my beloved, now-deceased parents and the current state of the country have added to my stress levels.
I was born in late January of 1973 at the county hospital in Chicago, formerly known as Cook County Hospital. My parents were barely into adulthood when they married at 19 and 20—a young couple from two very different backgrounds. My mother came from a solidly middle class (some might even say upper middle class) Black and Mexican family, though they identified as Black. My father came from more humble stock, one of sixteen children from Arkansas, and my paternal grandparents were sharecroppers.
Dad literally picked cotton after school as did most of his siblings. The day my father graduated from high school, he received a steamer trunk as his graduation gift. By nightfall, he and that trunk were on a Greyhound bus headed to Chicago, where Dad would join his older brothers in searching for a better way of life beyond the hot Arkansas sun and cotton fields. His older brothers had all found hope and a better way of life in Chicago, tradework and union jobs being the ticket to clawing out of the poverty and racial segregation of the South.
As fate would have it, Dad would land at his brother Bob’s house, and it was through his niece that he would meet the young lady destined to be my mother. In less than a year’s time, they would fall in love and, well, yours truly was on the way. They married a month before my arrival because my mother’s parents were so disgusted by the idea of her marrying someone with my dad’s pedigree that they preferred them not to marry. Given their background and the times, it was pretty damning and scandalous.
My parents stayed together 33 years, until death did they part, through sickness and health, poverty and all that jazz. They were vastly different people, and their differences emerged almost immediately. The first one being that when I was born, they literally could not agree on what to name me.
It was the early 1970s, the air was filled with Black Americans wanting to connect with their African heritage, and that was reflected in the names that many people gave their kids. Both my parents had, well, white names if I am honest. My Dad’s name was a stereotypical Southern man’s name; while it is considered a Black Southern name, it’s really just a Southern name and it originated with white men. My mom was named for a popular white actress in the 1950s. Mom felt I should have a Blacker name; Dad wanted something that would blend in.
As a result of their inability to agree on a name, yours truly wasn’t named until two weeks after my arrival on this dusty rock. They just called me baby until they settled on a name. This meant they left the hospital without naming me.
Mom wore Dad down on the issue of how to name me and, well, my legal name is indeed a relatively common name chosen for Black American women born in the 1970s. One of the ones that ends in an “a.”
Growing up, I heard the story of how they arrived at my name often enough that it was one of those family stories that got retold by relatives, especially because I was the only one in the family with a different-sounding name. I ended up with a host of nicknames growing up, including the one that I am most commonly known by now. Since, despite all the angst in naming me, I was rarely actually called by my full legal name.
The saga of my name was nothing more than a funny story for the first years of my life, except there was one problem that I didn’t even know was a problem until I ran off at 18 to marry my first husband.
My parents had never thought to put my first name on my birth certificate (which would have been automatic if they had named me before I left the hospital).
They enrolled me in school in 1978 when I started kindergarten. I have my early school records and apparently no one questioned my lack of first name on the birth certificate. They just put my legal name on my school records based on my parents’ say-so. I received my physical social security card in the 1980s when I started working the summer before my freshman year of high school. My full name appears on that card; I still have that original card.
No, it wasn’t until I sneaked off to the Chicago City Hall in 1991 to marry my first husband, who would become the father of my first child, that I would learn that while I had a lifetime of documents with my full name on them and stories about my name, no one had bothered to ensure that my first name appeared on my birth certificate. My birth certificate is blank where it says first and middle name. It has my last name and all the other required information, just no first or middle name.
To obtain a marriage license, I needed to provide a copy of my birth certificate and the clerk at City Hall couldn’t initially find it because, well, there was no first name on it. Eventually they found it, I paid to get a copy, and no one suggested that at 18 I might want to get my name put on that damn thing.
Nope, I got a copy, applied for my marriage license and 48 hours later, my then-boyfriend and I were married by a judge at City Hall. Six weeks later, I was pregnant, and life went on.
Six years later we divorced, and I remarried. Going again to City Hall to apply for a marriage license for my second marriage, this time armed with my divorce decree from my first marriage and birth certificate, and no one batted an eye. Marriage license granted, we got married—this time, a proper wedding ceremony approved by my parents.
Five years after we got married, in 2002, we moved to Maine. Almost immediately upon relocating to Maine, my then-husband and I went to the Bureau of Motor of Vehicles and swapped out our Illinois licenses for Maine ones and, again, no one said a thing about my birth certificate.
It was in 2005, the same year my daughter was born, that Real ID first went into effect, but it would take decades to really become a thing with people pushing back against it—so it wasn’t really on my radar. My standard ID was fine for flying domestically over the years, and it wasn’t until around 2019 when I got the itch to travel internationally (at the very least to cross the Maine border into Canada) that I started to think seriously about obtaining a passport.
I looked up at the requirements for getting a passport at that time and learned that my birth certificate not having my first name on it wouldn’t be an issue because the State Department offered another pathway for verifying birth: a signed affidavit by a close family member who could attest to my birth. Besides, I did have a birth certificate, it just didn’t have my first name on it.
Now you may be wondering: Why wouldn’t I just get my first name put on my birth certificate? Fair question.
In Illinois, corrections to birth certificates must be done before your 19th birthday; otherwise, it is the same legal process as a name change. Which, because I wasn’t living in Illinois at the time, meant either spending weeks in Illinois or hiring a law firm to file on my behalf because I couldn’t make the change to an Illinois birth certificate in Maine. So, what would have just been a few bucks, some notarized documents, and a court date if I still lived in Chicago was now a major project potentially costing thousands of dollars to hire a law firm or six to eight weeks in Illinois to do it myself, which probably would have been equally costly.
Well, I could just apply for a passport bypassing the whole Real ID thing, and have my dad sign the State Department affidavit. Easy-peasy, right?
Not so fast.
I had a work trip planned to Northern Illinois in late 2019. I would be less than 200 miles from Chicago, so I figured I would take an extra few days, go visit with my Dad, we would go to a notary, he would sign the affidavit, and I would kill two birds with one stone. Great plan.
The reality? That work trip happened, but my daughter’s health issues were starting to become apparent, and I decided to just fly directly home from Illinois. I planned to go visit my Dad and take care of that pesky paperwork in early 2020, once things were stable with my daughter.
Well, the universe had an entirely different plan. Come January 2020, my daughter was hospitalized for almost two weeks and my son had just relocated to Nashville and then his wife left. In March 2020, a pesky virus took over the world and shut it all down. While all that was happening, Dad was having some seemingly minor health problems that were starting to concern my brother.
The world would be focused on COVID as we were all effectively locked down, my dad would have a massive stroke, and later he would die in June 2020.
Needless to say, Dad never signed that affidavit, and our last visit would be my bedside vigil when he was in hospice, where he was non-communicative.
Friends, don’t put shit like this off. Tomorrow isn’t promised.
From Dad’s untimely death in mid-2020 through most of 2024, I didn’t really give much thought to the birth certificate issue. Life was happening and frankly, I wasn’t doing much traveling aside from a few visits to see my son and grandchildren in Tennessee. Hell, I moved our organization to becoming a primarily remote operation, so my need to get the Real ID or a passport wasn’t a pressing thought until Trump won the 2024 presidential election and a voice inside told me that I needed to get this taken care of especially with the looming deadline for Real ID finally becoming real. I had no idea just how pressing this would become or how weird things would get under a second Trump term.
As a twice-married, twice-divorced woman who had changed her name with each marriage, I would quickly learn that obtaining a Real ID wasn’t quite that easy, especially without my first name being on my birth certificate. Fellow married friends shared that getting a Real ID was actually harder than getting a passport. Which meant it was time to address the issue that had been sitting in the background since I discovered it at 18. The disappearing and harassment of fellow citizens in the first two months of the new administration turned a lifelong quirky personal situation that I had lived with for all my adult life into an urgent problem.
A Black woman living in the whitest state in the United States, and being publicly known for work that is now being essentially banned by this administration, meant I needed to take care of this sooner rather than later.
Which is how I recently found myself in consultation with a law firm in Chicago. My situation isn’t unique; plenty of older folks like me, particularly folks of color, have similar situations—paperwork that needs to be corrected. Often the barrier to correction, though, is the cost. Which makes sense. This simple oversight on the part of my parents is costing me almost $2,000 to correct. That’s a couple thousand that I don’t have handy, but thankfully can put on a credit card.
The fucked-up irony being that the early executive orders from the first two weeks of the new administration attacking diversity, equity and inclusion efforts led to the cancellation of several large projects I was to do. As such, income I had been expecting and been planning to use to address this situation disappeared because of the political climate that prompted my urgency.
Once I pay the retainer in full, which I will be doing in the next few days, the firm I am hiring will start with filing the paperwork and the matter should be resolved in eight to 10 weeks depending on when we get a court date. Presumably, I won’t be required to appear in person since the courts now use Zoom so much more—thank you, COVID, for that at least. Though at this point, if I must appear in court in Chicago, I will have to do whatever I must to get there.
On the one hand, I am grateful to know that this oversight will finally be addressed and once I have my corrected birth certificate, I can submit my passport application and presumably have it by summer. It has been stressful AF, as the youngsters say. These days, I am carrying my ID and copies of other documents in the event I am stopped but personally, it is stressful. Let’s just say that I am not interested in going far from home until this matter is resolved given the current climate.
However, as kooky as this situation is it has made me reflect: How many others are in this bind? Hell, my father was born at home, delivered by a midwife who couldn’t write, so his birth certificate has a X where the midwife was required to sign. Millions of Black and Indigenous people born in a different era where documents weren’t a concern could find themselves in this situation.
But the stakes are high now. It isn’t just about being able to fly or access federal buildings after Real ID goes into effect on May 7. There is the very real potential that given Trump’s latest executive orders, people will be disenfranchised and unable to vote if he has his way, since he is proposing that people will need either a Real ID or passport to register to vote. For any person who has ever married and changed their name (mostly applying to women), this could present extra possible hurdles, particularly with proposed law changes to require that your birth certificate name match your name on your ID.
No doubt these moves by the administration and many conservatives in Congress and elsewhere are going to be used to clear the rolls of voters and otherwise inhibit voting by the people most likely to oppose their agendas.
There is also the issue of people here legally as visitors or immigrants who are being literally disappeared by ICE lately for either no reason at all or because they disagree with Trump. Lack of “appropriate” ID is pretty much all the excuse the feds need to claim you don’t belong here and deport you. Yes, even if you are a natural-born citizen.
I have lived my entire life of 52 years now without the need to show papers. Now in the blink of an eye, I am worried about being stopped or questioned and the fear is real and legitimate that if the authorities don’t believe me—or don’t accept current documentation which has been suitable for all of my adult life—I could be kidnapped and sent somewhere, possibly to some country I don’t belong to and that is even more dangerous than the one I live in now. Thus, becoming the real-life version of the Tom Hanks character in The Terminal, except the story won’t be as cute.
Passports and Real ID aren’t always a simple process, but having both is now a potentially life-or-death matter for people of color—and probably soon for white citizens too who don’t just go with the flow of our deranged administration.
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Image by Levi Ventura via Unsplash
