Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights | 
 enlarge | Author: Kenji Yoshino
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 31394
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0375760210
Dewey Decimal Number: 305
EAN: 9780375760211
ASIN: 0375760210
Publication Date: February 20, 2007
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Product Description
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
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
 "Covering," a term used for the coerced hiding of crucial aspects of one's self--in his case his homosexuality July 6, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
There have been several struggles in civil rights in the USA. Women suffrage, African American civil rights, and finally the Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Bisexual cause.
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. Seldom has a work of such careful intellectual rigor and fairness been so deeply touching.
In questioning the phenomenon of "covering," a term used for the coerced hiding of crucial aspects of one's self--in his case his homosexuality--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 also 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. It deals with the ability to "blend" with the society who is yet to give the GLBT community the rights and respect it deserves.
As healing as it is polemical, this book has tremendous potential as a touchstone in the struggle for universal human dignity.
 Not Much There May 29, 2008
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
No offense to Yoshino, but in truth, he doesn't make many actual points. This is a great book if you want to hear about his personal journey, but it's not very enlightening overall.
interesting read, somewhat inconclusive May 20, 2008
A mix of professional experience, glimpses of personal experience, poetic imagination and some interesting ideas for America's future. I am glad I've read it. The only regret is that the book doesn't lead to a powerful, clear vision for the country. The very interesting ideas from the introduction are just briefly repeated at the end. Maybe someone else will build upon this material? The book certainly encourages a discussion. Maybe that was the whole point?
This Poet Has Done It Well March 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The Publisher's Weekly review says it all, but I cannot let the opportunity pass to add my voice to those honoring this book. Yes, it's a simple concept, elaborated over 200 pages, but there is nothing monotonous about it. The academic monotony characteristic of similar monographs is thwarted through the simplest of means: the scholar-author is also a poet. He writes on the minutiae of civil rights law with the compression and unexpected image that make strong poetry memorable. I heard the author speak on the concept of Covering on the Maine Public Radio broadcast of the Chataqua Program. The discussion was interesting enough, but when he read the Epilogue, I immediately thought, "I have to have that in my Commonplace Book." As a politically active gay man and 15-year conductor of a gay men's chorus, I've often meditated on the meaning of cultural appropriation, assimilation, and accommodation and the resulting effect on actualization and abnegation of the individual. So, Kenji Yoshino's orderly discussion of coversion, passing, and covering is immediately attractive to me. But it is not my habit to read 'brainiac' books. I'm put off by the customary tone, talking down to me, especially when the subject of the discussion is, by inference, me and the people I know and love. This one is the exception. I feel like Yoshino and I have just spent a long evening, with a wide variety of friends, talking about something of immediate concern to all of us. And then there's that Epilogue. Talk is one thing, but how we live it out is usually quite another. And it's never simple. That's why it's best left to the hands of a poet, and this poet has done it well.
Polemical, thought-provoking, personal December 7, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I recently heard Professor Yoshino speak here in Seattle on a day in celebration of Human Rights Day, and I can attest to his being a gifted speaker and possessing an extraordinary intellect.
However, with respect to the notion of "covering," a term I believe that he has coined in this book to illuminate a polemical topic that he wishes to place squarely into the fore of the larger map/discourse of civil rights in the U.S., I am perplexed that his notion of the "mainstream" apparently does not take into account more dimensions, e.g., the cultural anthropological/sociological.
From my own experience as a gay man AND as an Asian-American, I have found, largely to my dismay, that in either social group, there is, in fact, a "mainstream" that does, in fact, exert pressure to conform to its "majority" norms, behaviors...
And I would suppose that in any "society," whether it be in a nation-state such as Japan, or a social group such as African-Americans, that there do exist "mainstream" cultures that individuals within those groups do have to "contend with."
"Covering" as Yoshino has placed it has, by dint of his conceptual definition of it has overwhelmingly negative connotations, one which allows a "mainstream" body within a social group to exert pressures on individual members who do not conform, whether out of choice or due to individual disposition.
But sometimes what could be considered "covering" (by some people) is also a means of what one could consider "healthy assimilation" or a reasonable concession to the majority--without being in any way a "sell-out."
When and where such "concessions" become a sell-out, of course, is an open question. But even where "adaptation" in some behaviors to the "norm" of the mainstream does occur, it may simply entail "building bridges" and acknowledging the opinion of the majority rather than remaining in isolation from them.
(If, for example, I am a nudist, I can still choose to walk outside of my house WITH clothing on, if only in simple deference to the fact that the law and the majority of my fellow citizens deem it an offense or offensive or both).
This is not to deny the legitimacy of the claims of gay people to equal rights (to marriage, protection from discrimination in the job market, etc.) but to point out that "covering" might be understood in a more nuanced context. Covering, in all its different aspects, is not tantamount in all situations to being an "assault on civil rights."
Covering may simply describe the "interface" where the majority and a smaller grouping, at least in a particular situation, and where the minority accedes to the norms of the former--despite the negative overtones that the author is ascribing to it. In other cases, the reverse (majority accedes to the behaviors of the minority despite a clear divergence of opinion) could and, in fact, DOES happen in America.
In some instances, too, dysfunctional or inappropriate (vis-a-vis the majority) behavior by a minority is tolerated, condoned, or even lauded.
Discussions of loaded discussions of "diversity" or "covering" need to be evaluated within a context rather than be seen in a predetermined, black-or-white intellectual "matrix."
In other words, the major concern that I have with this book is that it too "obviously" has an agenda stamped on it.
The personal details disclosed nicely balance the analytical (legal) side of the discussion.
But in terms of overall appeal to both mind AND heart, a little less Paul Haggis (director/screenwriter of "Crash"). Taking a strong position on an issue, with corroborative evidence, is fine. Re-iterating that position--as a constant thread--throughout a long discussion may seem to some people evidence of "not dodging an issue." But considering all the different dimensions of that issue would provide, I believe, a more balanced, more cogent argument in favor of one's position.
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