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
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