Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights

In this remarkable and elegant work, acclaimed Yale Law School professor Kenji Yoshino fuses legal manifesto and poetic memoir to call for a redefinition of civil rights in our law and culture.

Everyone covers. To cover is to downplay a disfavored trait so as to blend into the mainstream. Because all of us possess stigmatized attributes, we all encounter pressure to cover in our daily lives. Given its pervasiveness, we may experience this pressure to be a simple fact of social life.

Against conventional understanding, Kenji Yoshino argues that the demand to cover can pose a hidden threat to our civil rights. Though we have come to some consensus against penalizing people for differences based on race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, and disability, we still routinely deny equal treatment to people who refuse to downplay differences along these lines. Racial minorities are pressed to act white by changing their names, languages, or cultural practices. Women are told to play like men at work. Gays are asked not to engage in public displays of same-sex affection. The devout are instructed to minimize expressions of faith, and individuals with disabilities are urged to conceal the paraphernalia that permit them to function. In a wide-ranging analysis, Yoshino demonstrates that American civil rights law has generally ignored the threat posed by these covering demands. With passion and rigor, he shows that the work of civil rights will not be complete until it attends to the harms of coerced conformity.

At the same time, Yoshino is responsive to the American exasperation with identity politics, which often seems like an endless parade of groups asking for state and socialsolicitude. He observes that the ubiquity of the covering demand provides an opportunity to lift civil rights into a higher, more universal register. Since we all experience the covering demand, we can all make common cause around a new civil rights paradigm based on our desire for authenticity — a desire that brings us together rather than driving us apart.

Yoshino's argument draws deeply on his personal experiences as a gay Asian American. He follows the Romantics in his belief that if a human life is described with enough particularity, the universal will speak through it. The result is a work that combines one of the most moving memoirs written in years with a landmark manifesto on the civil rights of the future.

"Seldom has a work of such careful intellectual rigor and fairness been so deeply touching. Yoshino, a law professor at Yale and a gay, Asian-American man, masterfully melds autobiography and legal scholarship in this book, marking a move from more traditional pleas for civil equality to a case for individual autonomy in identity politics. In questioning the phenomenon of 'covering,' a term used for the coerced hiding of crucial aspects of one's self, Yoshino thrusts the reader into a battlefield of shifting gray areas. Yet, at every step, he anticipates the reader's questions and rebuttals, answering them not only with acute reasoning, but with disarming humility. What emerges is an eloquent, poetic protest against the hidden prejudices embedded in American civil rights legislation-legislation that tacitly apologizes for 'immutable' human difference from the white, male, straight norm, rather than defending one's 'right to say what one is.' Though Yoshino recognizes the law's potential to further (and hinder) liberty's cause, he admits that his 'education in law has been an education in its limitations.' Hence, by way of his unsparing accounts of self-realization, he reveals that the struggle against oppression lies not solely in fighting an imagined, monolithic state but as much in intimate discourse with the mother, the father and the colleague who constitute that state. As healing as it is polemical, this book has tremendous potential as a touchstone in the struggle for universal human dignity." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"In a hospital waiting room, Kenji Yoshino brushed away the reaching, worried hand of his first boyfriend as they waited for a diagnosis that could have been serious. Ten years later, Yoshino, a Yale Law School professor and deputy dean, still winces at the memory. In his rejection of his lover's hand, Yoshino was 'covering': Although he was openly gay, he refused to engage in public displays of affection... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) that might seem to 'flaunt' his homosexuality.

'Everyone covers,' Yoshino asserts at the beginning of his intriguing book. 'Covering,' a term coined by sociologist Erving Goffman in 1963, means to play down certain characteristics in order to fit into the perceived mainstream. Yoshino provides a number of examples: Krishna Bhanji covered his Indian ethnicity when he became Ben Kingsley; Margaret Thatcher covered her femininity by hiring a coach to help lower her voice; Mary Cheney covered by deflecting the media from her same-sex partner; Issur Danielovitch Demsky covered his Jewish heritage by becoming Kirk Douglas; and even the great FDR covered his wheelchair-bound legs by moving behind a desk whenever his Cabinet entered his office.

Covering, Yoshino posits, is 'the dark side of assimilation.' While he recognizes that assimilation 'is often necessary to fluid social interaction, to peaceful coexistence,' when it becomes a demand for covering, it becomes a 'hidden assault on our civil rights.' Within what Yoshino calls 'traditional civil rights classifications like race, sex, orientation, religion, and disability,' racial minorities are pressured to 'act white,' women to act more like men, homosexuals to not 'flaunt,' the religious to hide their beliefs, and the disabled to keep their impairments out of sight.

In our post 9/11 society of diminishing civil rights, Yoshino's debut is well timed: 'Covering' is already being touted on 'must-read' and 'editor's choice' lists. What you need to know to participate in the conversations that will inevitably surround this book is mostly contained in the preface — it's that concise, and a certain repetitiveness throughout the book lessens its impact.

'Covering' includes textbook analyses such as Yoshino's 'three phases' of gay identity — conversion (wanting to be anything but gay), passing ('don't ask, don't tell') and covering (out, but not flaunting). Yoshino also identifies the four axes along which everyone covers: appearance, affiliation, activism and association. He discusses important legal decisions that, in his view, coerced individuals to cover: Shahar v. Bowers, which upheld the firing of a lesbian attorney not because she was homosexual but because she held a religious ceremony that 'married' her to another woman; Rogers v. American Airlines, which upheld the dismissal of an employee not because she was African-American but for wearing cornrows, a hairstyle strongly associated with African-Americans; and Jespersen v. Harrah's, in which an appellate court upheld the firing of a casino bartender not because she was a woman but because she refused to wear makeup.

Although civil law, legal briefs and history make up most of Yoshino's book, the personal stories included are its strength. For example, Yoshino winningly recalls his days as an English major who persuasively petitioned to write a poetry collection instead of a traditional thesis. With his Exeter /Harvard /Rhodes scholar /Yale Law credentials, Yoshino is undoubtedly a member of the elite. Yet as a gay American-born son of Japanese immigrants, he recognizes that privilege does not always protect him from the demands of covering.

With heartbreaking poignancy, he shares his own coming-out story. 'This is the worst any closet does to us,' he writes; 'it prevents us from hearing the words "I love you."' While he trusts his parents"'love,' he cannot trust the 'you,' because the 'you' they love must be 'some other, better son.' His stories are not without humor: Once out and trying to pass, he hits the gym to 'acquire a straight-acting body' but confesses he 'dreamed of a gym spangled with lesbian poetry — Emily Dickinson's "I like to see it Lap the Miles' over the pool and Adrienne Rich's "the experience of repetition of Death" over the weight rack.' And he notes how his parents 'flaunted' his heritage on his behalf in giving him a Japanese name even though they 'must have intuited that people with white-sounding names fare better than individuals with ethnic ones.'

In his many stories and histories, Yoshino ultimately channels Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, who called for a transition from a civil rights paradigm, which polarizes in its inherent focus on specific groups, to a human rights model that champions common humanity. Yoshino believes the Supreme Court is moving in a similar direction, citing the 2003 decision to strike down Lawrence v. Texas, which had criminalized same-sex sodomy, because it violated the fundamental right to privacy for all persons — regardless of orientation. Yoshino might seem Pollyanna-hopeful to some, but his optimistic insistence on fair treatment for everyone is really not much different from our country's most idealist vision of itself: 'one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.'" Reviewed by Terry Hong, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

"A sober, rigorous and touching treatise....In times to come, this book could be viewed as a seminal work, not only in confronting the legal and social roadblocks faced by the disenfranchised in America, but as a challenge for human dignity as a whole." Chicago Sun Times

"[P]art luminous, moving memoir, part cogent, level-headed treatise...covering is going to become more and more a civil rights issue as the nation struggles with an increasingly multiethnic America." San Francisco Chronicle

"With great tenderness toward those who helped and challenged his budding sexuality, Yoshino writes of struggling to accept his sexual orientation." Los Angeles Times

"Yoshino offers his personal search for authenticity as an encouragement for everyone to think deeply about the ways in which all of us have covered our true selves." New York Times

"Covering is a magnificent work — so eloquently and powerfully written I literally could not put it down. Sweeping in breadth, brilliantly argued, and filled with insight, humor, and erudition, it offers a fundamentally new perspective on civil rights and discrimination law. This extraordinary book is many things at once: an intensely moving personal memoir; a breathtaking historical and cultural synthesis of assimilation and American equality law; an explosive new paradigm for transcending the morass of identity politics; and in parts, pure poetry. No one interested in civil rights, sexuality, discrimination — or simply humanflourishing — can afford to miss it." Amy Chua, author of World on Fire

"In this stunning, original book, Kenji Yoshino demonstrates that the struggle for gay rights is not only a struggle to liberate gays — it is a struggle to free all of us, straight and gay, male and female, white and black, from the pressures and temptations to cover vital aspects of ourselves and deprive ourselves and others of our full humanity. Yoshino is both poet and lawyer, and by joining an exquisitely observed personal memoir with a historical analysis of civil rights, he shows why gay rights is so controversial at present, why covering is the issue of contention, and why the covering demand, universal in application, is the civil rights issue of our time. This is a beautifully written, brilliant and hopeful book, offering a new understanding of what is at stake in our fight for human rights." Carol Gilligan, author of In a Different Voice

"This brilliantly argued and engaging book does two things at once, and it does them both astonishingly well. First, it's a finely grained memoir of young man's struggles to come to terms with his sexuality, and second, it's a powerful argument for a whole new way of thinking about civil rights and how our society deals with difference. This book challenges us all to confront our own unacknowledged biases, and it demands that we take seriously the idea that there are many different ways to be human. Kenji Yoshino is the face and the voice of the new civil rights." Barbara Ehrenreich

"Kenji Yoshino has not only given us an important, compelling new way to understand civil rights law, a major accomplishment in itself, but with great bravery and honesty, he has forged his argument from the cauldron of his own experience. In clear, lyrical prose, Covering quite literally brings the law to life. The result is a book about our public and private selves as convincing to the spirit as it is to the mind." Adam Haslett, author of You Are Not A Stranger Here

"Kenji Yoshino's work is often moving and always clarifying. Covering elaborates an original, arresting account of identity and authenticity in American culture." Anthony Appiah, author of The Ethics of Identity and Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor Of Philosophy at Princeton University

"This stunning book introduces three faces of the remarkable Kenji Yoshino: a writer of poetic beauty; a soul of rare reflectivity and decency; and a brilliant lawyer and scholar, passionately committed to uncovering human rights. Like W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, this book fearlessly blends gripping narrative with insightful analysis to further the cause of human emancipation. And like those classics, it should explode into America's consciousness." Harold Hongju Koh Dean, Yale Law School and former Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights

From the acclaimed Yale Law School professor, this remarkable and elegant work fuses legal manifesto and poetic memoir to call for a redefinition of civil rights in today's culture.

In this remarkable and elegant work, acclaimed Yale Law School professor Kenji Yoshino fuses legal manifesto and poetic memoir to call for a redefinition of civil rights in our law and culture.

Everyone covers. To cover is to downplay a disfavored trait so as to blend into the mainstream. Because all of us possess stigmatized attributes, we all encounter pressure to cover in our daily lives. Given its pervasiveness, we may experience this pressure to be a simple fact of social life.

Against conventional understanding, Kenji Yoshino argues that the demand to cover can pose a hidden threat to our civil rights. Though we have come to some consensus against penalizing people for differences based on race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, and disability, we still routinely deny equal treatment to people who refuse to downplay differences along these lines. Racial minorities are pressed to “act white” by changing their names, languages, or cultural practices. Women are told to “play like men” at work. Gays are asked not to engage in public displays of same-sex affection. The devout are instructed to minimize expressions of faith, and individuals with disabilities are urged to conceal the paraphernalia that permit them to function. In a wide-ranging analysis, Yoshino demonstrates that American civil rights law has generally ignored the threat posed by these covering demands. With passion and rigor, he shows that the work of civil rights will not be complete until it attends to the harms of coerced conformity.

At the same time, Yoshino is responsive to the American exasperation with identity politics, which often seems like an endless parade of groups asking for state and social solicitude. He observes that the ubiquity of the covering demand provides an opportunity to lift civil rights into a higher, more universal register. Since we all experience the covering demand, we can all make common cause around a new civil rights paradigm based on our desire for authenticity–a desire that brings us together rather than driving us apart.

Yoshino’s argument draws deeply on his personal experiences as a gay Asian American. He follows the Romantics in his belief that if a human life is described with enough particularity, the universal will speak through it. The result is a work that combines one of the most moving memoirs written in years with a landmark manifesto on the civil rights of the future.

“This brilliantly argued and engaging book does two things at once, and it does them both astonishingly well. First, it's a finely grained memoir of young man’s struggles to come to terms with his sexuality, and second, it's a powerful argument for a whole new way of thinking about civil rights and how our society deals with difference. This book challenges us all to confront our own unacknowledged biases, and it demands that we take seriously the idea that there are many different ways to be human. Kenji Yoshino is the face and the voice of the new civil rights.” -Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed

“Kenji Yoshino has not only given us an important, compelling new way to understand civil rights law, a major accomplishment in itself, but with great bravery and honesty, he has forged his argument from the cauldron of his own experience. In clear, lyrical prose, Covering quite literally brings the law to life. The result is a book about our

public and private selves as convincing to the spirit as it is to the

mind.” -Adam Haslett, author of You Are Not A Stranger Here

“Kenji Yoshino's work is often moving and always clarifying. Covering elaborates an original, arresting account of identity and authenticity in American culture.”

-Anthony Appiah, author of The Ethics of Identity and Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor Of Philosophy at Princeton University

“This stunning book introduces three faces of the remarkable Kenji Yoshino: a writer of poetic beauty; a soul of rare reflectivity and decency; and a brilliant lawyer and scholar, passionately committed to uncovering human rights. Like W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, this book fearlessly blends gripping narrative with insightful analysis to further the cause of human emancipation. And like those classics, it should explode into America's consciousness.”

-Harold Hongju Koh Dean, Yale Law School and former Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights

“Covering is a magnificent work - so eloquently and powerfully written I literally could not put it down. Sweeping in breadth, brilliantly argued, and filled with insight, humor, and erudition, it offers a fundamentally new perspective on civil rights and discrimination law. This extraordinary book is many things at once: an intensely moving personal memoir; a breathtaking historical and cultural synthesis of assimilation and American equality law; an explosive new paradigm for transcending the morass of identity politics; and in parts, pure poetry. No one interested in civil rights, sexuality, discrimination - or simply human flourishing - can afford to miss it.”

-Amy Chua, author of World on Fire

“In this stunning, original book, Kenji Yoshino demonstrates that the struggle for gay rights is not only a struggle to liberate gays---it is a struggle to free all of us, straight and gay, male and female, white and black, from the pressures and temptations to cover vital aspects of ourselves and deprive ourselves and others of our full humanity. Yoshino is both poet and lawyer, and by joining an exquisitely observed personal memoir with a historical analysis of civil rights, he shows why gay rights is so controversial at present,

why “covering” is the issue of contention, and why the “covering demand,” universal in application, is the civil rights issue of our time. This is a beautifully written, brilliant and hopeful book, offering a new understanding of what is at stake in our fight for

human rights.”

-Carol Gilligan, author of In a Different Voice

Kenji Yoshino is the deputy dean for intellectual life and professor of law at Yale Law School. For more information about Yoshino's work, visit www.kenjiyoshino.com.