Covering
The Hidden Assault on our Civil Rights
Anteprima del libro
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.
