Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [12]
I saw this shift as an undergraduate. When I arrived at college, in 1987, I thought I might want to be an academic, and looked for role models on the faculty. The preceding generation of civil rights had done some work—the faculty was no longer exclusively white, male, ostensibly straight, Protestant, and able-bodied. But when I looked at the outsiders Harvard had included, I saw covering at work, though I had no name for it then. “I’m more black than Dean X,” my white dorm mate quipped, referring to the African-American dean whose demeanor was more patrician than any Boston Brahmin’s. Women faculty members often muted their visibility as women, avoiding feminist scholarship and downplaying their child-care responsibilities. The rare gay faculty member who was out of the closet did not flaunt his sexuality, appearing to all viewers like a bachelor don. Alan Dershowitz writes that although he wasn’t the first Jewish professor at Harvard Law School, he was the “first Jewish Jew.” My only disabled teaching assistant, like FDR, was always seated behind a seminar table before class began.
This was progress: individuals no longer needed to be white, male, straight, Protestant, and able-bodied; they needed only to act white, male, straight, Protestant, and able-bodied. But it was not equality. The message for an Asian-American closeted gay student was clear: downplay your ethnicity and your orientation. Don’t uncover yourself.
Of course, I cannot assume all these individuals were covering. Dean X may just have been being himself, and if that was the case, I would be the last to press him toward more stereotypically African-American behavior. My commitment here is to authenticity, as experienced by the individual, and that authenticity would be just as threatened by an imperative to “act black” as it would be by an imperative to “act white.” This is why I am equally opposed to reverse-covering demands—demands that individuals act according to the stereotypes associated with their group.
While I could be wrong about any particular individual, however, I knew Harvard generally demanded covering. Individuals in conditions of freedom will be diverse. At Harvard, the span of this diversity was truncated—either because the institution had selected individuals who naturally conformed to mainstream norms or because it had pressured them to do so. Like America as a whole, Harvard was still skewed toward traditionally dominant groups.
This covering demand is the civil rights issue of our time. It hurts not only our most vulnerable citizens but our most valuable commitments. For if we believe a commitment against racism is about equal respect for all races, we are not fulfilling that commitment if we protect only racial minorities who conform to historically white norms. As the sociologist Milton Gordon identified decades ago, the demand for “Anglo-conformity” is white supremacy under a different guise. Until outsider groups surmount such demands for assimilation, we will not have achieved full citizenship in America.
In my early years of law teaching, I searched for remedies. I had learned the language of power; it was now time to wield it. To my chagrin, I found our major civil rights laws—such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the equality guarantees of the federal Constitution—do not currently provide much protection against covering demands. Courts have often interpreted these laws to protect statuses but not behaviors, being but not doing. For this reason, courts will often not