The Los Angeles Times
2006
Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights by Kenji Yoshino, Random House: 286 pp., $24.95
Kenji Yoshino’s new book, "Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our
Civil Rights," is a plea for the populace to take action on what he
sees as one of the pressing issues of our time. It is a problem, the Yale
University professor of law contends, that threatens fundamental human liberty
and one the U.S. legal system cannot fully address.
The distinction between being and doing is at the heart of Yoshino's argument
about "covering," a term he has borrowed from sociologist Erving
Goffman's 1963 book, "Stigma." It describes the act of downplaying
a disfavored trait so as to blend in.
Covering is a well-known phenomenon among groups traditionally linked to
civil rights issues: Racial minorities feel pressured to "act white";
women in professional arenas opt to "play like men"; people with
physical disabilities try to fit in by hiding crutches or otherwise masking
their differences from the able-bodied world. It is one thing to be gay,
for instance, a status increasingly protected in legislation and policymaking.
It is another thing altogether to flaunt one's gayness through active display,
such as marrying someone of the same sex or acknowledging sexual activity
while in the military.
Assimilation is not necessarily problematic, Yoshino argues, but coercion
to assimilate is. Using gay history as an example, he recalls widespread
attempts at forced conversion — with heterosexuality the goal, lobotomies
and electroshock treatments were practiced well into the mid-20th century.
Increased tolerance and understanding have virtually eradicated such drastic
attacks, but pressure endures to avoid demonstrations of one's racial, sexual
or gender identity. Covering, then, is a subtler, more complex form of assimilation
expressed through appearance, affiliation, activism or association, the four
axes that Yoshino sees as the "fundamental dimensions along which we all mute
or flaunt our identities."
The legal system offers an insufficient avenue for redress, Yoshino claims,
because the many demands to cover "occur at such an intimate and daily
level that they are not susceptible to legal correction." Indeed, he
writes, the urge to cover often comes from within. With a leavening humor
that ripples throughout the book, he points to his impulse to hide his own
homosexuality. "When I hesitate before engaging in a public display
of same-sex affection, I am not thinking of the state or my employer, but
of the strangers around me and my own internal censor. And while I am often
tempted to sue myself, this is not my healthiest impulse."
Paradoxically, the pressure against conforming to an imagined mainstream
ideal — reverse covering — can be just as oppressive to the individual. "More
generally, negative epithets for racial minorities who cover — such
as 'Oreo,' 'banana,' 'coconut,' or 'apple' — seem to come from minority
groups rather than from whites," Yoshino observes.
For this meditation on identity and self-liberation, Yoshino mixes scholarship
with memoir — and a degree of personal exposure he was initially reluctant
to offer up. "But I came to see that I could not compose an argument
about the importance of human authenticity without risking such authenticity
myself."
Yoshino was a typical child of immigrants — the repository of his parents'
dreams for all that their adopted country promised. His parents sent him
to Exeter, the exclusive and predominantly white East Coast boarding school,
and they questioned why he would join Asian American student groups that
would only isolate him from the majority. Yet they enrolled him in Japanese
language correspondence courses and sent him to Japan each summer, hoping
he would make a deep connection to their native culture.
Yoshino felt like a fish out of water in both worlds. Anglo Americans would
look at his face and ask where he really came from; but when his parents'
countrymen heard his stilted Japanese, they responded with disdain and worse.
Noting the Japanese proverb, "the protruding nail gets hammered," Yoshino
adds that "all Japanese society seemed entitled to do the hammering."
With great tenderness toward those who helped and challenged his budding
sexuality, Yoshino writes of struggling to accept his sexual orientation,
including the anxiety surrounding coming out to his parents and how, for
a time, he would not bring his boyfriend to workplace events.
Others have faced far worse. Yoshino gives examples of people who have lost
jobs, promotions and child custody in recent decades — examples backed
up by 65 pages of end notes and bibliography. He also examines cases of people
who "breached the social contract of assimilation" by flaunting
rather than covering — "an African-American woman was prohibited
from wearing cornrows, a Latino was struck from a jury for acknowledging
his capacity to speak Spanish, a Filipina nurse was barred from
speaking Tagalog at work."
Even when not actionable, the need to cover has a chilling effect on performance.
Yoshino cites a study of gender issues in University of Pennsylvania Law
School classrooms showing that "women who spoke out in class were subjected
to hissing, public humiliation, and gossip. Women who did not conform to
stereotypically feminine behavior were called 'man-hating lesbians' or 'feminazi
dykes.' "Not exactly an encouragement to pipe right up.
Yoshino advises us to go beyond emphasizing civil rights to promote more
inclusive human rights.
"Contemporary civil rights has erred in focusing solely on traditional
civil rights groups, such as racial minorities, women, gays, religious minorities,
and individuals with disabilities," he writes. "This assumes those
in the so-called mainstream — those straight white men — do not
have covered selves. They are understood only as impediments, as people who
prevent others from expressing themselves, rather than as individuals who are
themselves struggling for self-definition. No wonder they often respond to
civil rights advocates with hostility. They experience us as asking for an
entitlement they themselves have been refused — an expression of their
full humanity."
We all feel pressure to cover, he is saying. But because the law is not equipped
to handle the subtleties of complex humans, the real work of uncovering falls
to society, to individuals.
"[Covering] demands are better redressed through appeals to our individual
faculties of conscience and compassion," Yoshino writes. "When my
colleagues suggested I stop writing on gay topics, my best response was not
a lawsuit but a conversation."
Practically speaking, it's hard to say whether Yoshino's rallying cry will
catch on. After all, the same pressures that urge us to cover also mute us
in the face of perceived criticism. But the potential benefit, he says, is
human flourishing, and that has always been the aspiration of civil rights.
To underscore his point, he offers, again, an example of his own life, and
the poignancy of his personal victory is as compelling as any other piece
of his treatise.
"Being gay shifted for me from being a condition into being a life only
when I began to overcome covering demands," he writes. "This was
where I came to possess my emotions, my culture, my politics, my lovers. This
was where gay life assumed a tincture of joy."