Official records overrode and falsified her mother’s lifelong oral account of her own birthday

Evidence

Historical records such as birth certificates, death records, and census information are documents written from a white perspective, which often fail to capture the essence of the Black experience. We talked about how this kind of approach discounts the stories that have been passed down in families like ours. We considered my mother, whose oral account of her age and date of birth was not sufficient. Although she celebrated June 8 as her birthday for her entire life, she was wrong according to the Montgomery officials and forced to accept the erroneous December 23 date they assigned to her. It’s like they don’t value and appreciate these oral histories as a meaningful way of recapturing a truer account of the African American experience. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 286

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to The Namesake’s theme of names and dates assigned by officials overriding personal identity, and to archival erasure generally. — connects to: Self-archiving families produce records that fundamentally mislead about their inner life — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 479
• DEFINE: Concrete instance of the archival bias claim: the ‘official’ document is itself the product of the keeper class, not a neutral record.