Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [13]
American equality law must be reformed to protect individuals against covering demands. Yet our generation of civil rights will also increasingly need to look outside the law. Many covering demands occur at such an intimate and daily level that they are not susceptible to legal correction. Such demands are better redressed through appeals to our individual faculties of conscience and compassion. When my colleagues suggested I stop writing on gay topics, my best response was not a lawsuit but a conversation.
Law is also an inadequate remedy because the covering demand extends beyond traditional civil rights groups. When I lecture on covering, I often encounter what I think of as the “angry straight white man” reaction. A member of the audience, almost invariably a white man, almost invariably angry, denies that covering is a civil rights issue. Why shouldn’t racial minorities or women or gays have to cover? These groups should receive legal protection against discrimination for things they cannot help, like skin color or chromosomes or innate sexual drives. But why should they receive protection for behaviors within their control—wearing cornrows, acting “feminine,” or flaunting their sexuality? After all, the questioner says, I have to cover all the time. I have to mute my depression, or my obesity, or my alcoholism, or my schizophrenia, or my shyness, or my working-class background, or my nameless anomie. I, too, am one of the mass of men leading a life of quiet desperation. Why should classic civil rights groups have a right to self-expression I do not? Why should my struggle for an authentic self matter less?
I surprise these individuals when I agree. Contemporary civil rights has erred in focusing solely on traditional civil rights groups, such as racial minorities, women, gays, religious minorities, and individuals with disabilities. This assumes those in the so-called mainstream—those straight white men—do not have covered selves. They are understood only as impediments, as people who prevent others from expressing themselves, rather than as individuals who are themselves struggling for self-definition. No wonder they often respond to civil rights advocates with hostility. They experience us as asking for an entitlement they themselves have been refused—an expression of their full humanity.
Civil rights must rise into a new, more inclusive register. That ascent begins with the recognition that the mainstream is a myth. With respect to any particular identity, the word “mainstream” makes sense, as in the statement that straights are more mainstream than gays. Used generically, however, the word lacks meaning. Because human beings hold many identities, the mainstream is a shifting coalition, and none of us is entirely within it. As queer theorists have recognized, it is not normal to be completely normal. All of us struggle for self-expression; we all have covered selves.
For this reason, we should understand civil rights to be a sliver of a universal project of human flourishing. Civil rights has always sought to protect the human flourishing of certain groups from being thwarted by the irrational beliefs of others. Yet that aspiration is one we should hold for all humanity.
I do not mean discrimination against racial minorities is the same as discrimination against poets. American civil rights law has correctly directed its concern toward certain groups and not others. But the aspiration of civil rights—the aspiration that we be free to develop our human capabilities without the impediment of witless conformity—is an aspiration that extends beyond traditional civil rights groups.
To fulfill that aspiration, this generation of civil rights must move far beyond the law. While law can help us be more human in crucial ways, it will never fully apprehend us. We should not mourn this