Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights
by Kenji Yoshino
Random House, 268 pages including notes and bibliography

We may be a nation ruled by laws, but those laws are still interpreted by men and women.
So, while on paper every person has equal rights, in practice it is not always so. Racial minorities are still pressured to “act white,” women are expected to downplay their child-care responsibilities in the workplace, and gays are asked not to flaunt.

Changing that—legally and culturally granting people the liberty to simply be themselves—is the premise of Kenji Yoshino’s critique of assimilation, “Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights.”

In Yoshino’s lexicon, “covering” is a modern extension of “passing.” It’s the military’s shift from banning gay soldiers to implementing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. It’s a universal demand of an assimilation-minded culture.

“Everyone covers,” Yoshino states. “To cover is to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream.”

The Yale law school professor traces America’s cultural and legal path from a “melting pot” world to the call to “celebrate diversity” to what he sees as the current backlash against special interest group politics.

He illuminates these stories in clear, lyrical prose and fair arguments.

There are examples from the courtrooms of our country—women, gays, minorities who have found themselves seeking equal opportunity in the arenas of parental rights, personal grooming or what they can do in their own bedroom.

And throughout there are the stories from Yoshino’s own life as a maturing, talented poet uncovering his own identity as a gay man and as a first-generation American born to Japanese parents. The combination of his undergraduate education as a poet at Harvard and Oxford with his graduate training at Yale Law School marry in discourse that is light and smooth, and occasionally arresting.

“Growing up, I assumed I was the word that rhymed with none other—like “silver” or “orange,” glistering bright, but sonnet foiling, and always solitary traveling…. So there is something seismic about holding Paul in my arms, of wondering what color his eyes, which in daylight shift through shades of slate, settle into under his lids.”

Yoshino’s main argument is that whether you’re talking about appearance, affiliation (cultural identity), activism (politicizing one’s identity) or association (whom one chooses as colleagues and peers), we all mute or flaunt our identities.

If this tendency is so pervasive, I want to argue, then perhaps it is a part of who we are, something that can’t be legislated or refereed out of our nature. Yoshino doesn’t address our sociological patterns, nor does he offer examples from other cultures where an ideal state of harmony has been reached.

What he does suggest is that our common desire to express ourselves gives us common ground for conversation. Rather than advocate for redress under the law, he says we should be using our current assimilation renaissance to move forward into new territory, a new civil rights paradigm based on what draws us together—our mutual desire for authenticity. And he argues that this conversation should happen “In workplaces and restaurants, schools and playgrounds, chat rooms and living rooms, public squares and bars. They should occur informally and intimately, where tolerance is made and unmade. … It is only when we leave the law that civil rights suddenly stops being about particular groups and starts to become a project of human flourishing in which we all have a stake.”

Yoshino himself is as good a conversation partner as one could ask for. As you read the book, you’ll find yourself engaging in conversations with him and with yourself, and explaining what you’re reading to your friends. And who knows what doors that might open.


Kenji Yoshino will read and discuss “Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights” on Thursday, Feb. 2 at First Parish, 3 Church St., Cambridge, Mass.
For more information, call the Harvard Coop at 617-499-2000.