Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [1]
“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. Du Bois’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 Democracy,
Human Rights and Labor
“Magnificent … so eloquently and powerfully written I literally could not put it down. Sweeping in breadth, brilliantly argued, and filled with insight, humor, and erudition … 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] from the pressures and temptations to cover vital aspects of ourselves and deprive ourselves and others of our full humanity. [Yoshino] 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
Although Covering is a work of nonfiction, the names of certain nonpublic individuals have been changed.
2007 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2006 by Kenji Yoshino
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2006.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Philip Levine for permission to reprint “The Doctor of Starlight” from One for the Rose (Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1999), pp. 57–58.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Yoshino, Kenji.
Covering: the hidden assault on our civil rights / Kenji Yoshino.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-172-1
1. Yoshino, Kenji. 2. Gay lawyers—United States—Biography. 3. Japanese American lawyers—United States—Biography. 4. Gay rights—United States. 5. Civil rights—United States. 6. Assimilation (Sociology)—United States. I. Title.
KF373.A3Y67 2006
342.7308′5—dc22 2005046561
www.atrandom.com
v3.1
It is a fact that persons who are ready to admit possession of a stigma (in many cases because it is known about or immediately apparent) may nonetheless make a great effort to keep the stigma from looming large.… This process will be referred to as covering.
—Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the
Management of Spoiled Identity
PREFACE
Everyone covers. To cover is to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream. In our increasingly diverse society, all of us are outside the mainstream in some way. Nonetheless, being deemed mainstream is still often a necessity of social life. For this reason, every reader of this book has covered, whether consciously or not, and sometimes at significant personal cost.
Famous examples of covering abound. Ramón Estévez covered his ethnicity when he changed his name to Martin Sheen, as did Krishna Bhanji when