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Yet it was only after Mungin left Katten Muchin that he was able to see the costs of this strategy:

I was going to have to be more publicly honest about the lie I was living. It wasn’t that I was around people who were open minded, who thought blacks are terrific. It’s that I was bending over backward all the time to avoid making white people uncomfortable. Like my neighbors [in Alexandria]: Now I’m just tired of making them feel comfortable, I don’t even talk to them. If they say hello, I’ll say hello, but I don’t even bother anymore making them feel comfortable late at night. It’s too much work.

Sometimes covering comes in the mindless ways we hold ourselves or exchange pleasantries on a bus. At other times, covering is the exhausting burden that Mungin ultimately felt it to be. In either case, however, covering is work.

As I read The Good Black, I keep thinking back to Julie’s notion of the contract. The book is about a social contract, in which racial minorities are told we will be rewarded for assimilating to white norms. In my view, Mungin sued not for the breach of his employment contract, but for the breach of this broader social contract. For this reason, I believe he should have lost his legal case, but that his challenge to the social contract deserves our sympathy and attention.

I have received the benefit of the social contract of racial covering. Like Liu, I have covered my race and moved to the center of American society. And like Liu, I understand this to be an advance over categorical exclusion: “Times have changed, and I suppose you could call it progress that a Chinaman, too, may now aspire to whiteness.” Yet it is worth asking when we will live in a society where Americans will feel central without feeling white.

To measure how far we are from that society, I began to look at racial minorities who breached the social contract of assimilation—individuals who flaunted their racial identities rather than covering them. As in the orientation context, I found the consequences to be grim—an African-American woman was prohibited from wearing cornrows, a Latino was struck from a jury for acknowledging his capacity to speak Spanish, a Filipina nurse was barred from speaking Tagalog at work. I felt the old outrage, and looked to the law.

Because the federal Constitution and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 both protect race much more robustly than orientation, I expected individuals to fare better against race-based covering demands. This proved overly optimistic. The courts have made the same distinction between being and doing in race cases that they have made in the orientation cases, protecting the immutable but not the mutable aspects of racial identity. A racial minority fired for her ancestry or skin color will win her suit in a hot second. But a racial minority fired for refusing to cover a cultural aspect of her racial identity will generally lose.

Rogers v. American Airlines—decided in 1981 and never overruled—demonstrates this dynamic. Rogers was an African-American woman who worked for American Airlines as an airport operations agent. This job fell under a grooming policy that prevented employees from wearing an all-braided hairstyle. On its face, the policy was race neutral and gender neutral, prohibiting individuals of all races and sexes from wearing all-braided hairstyles. Yet the policy disproportionately burdened African-American women, with whom cornrows are strongly associated. Rogers, who wore cornrows, challenged the policy under Title VII as race and gender discrimination. The district court opinion, which is the final disposition of this case, ruled for the airline on both claims. I focus on her race discrimination claim.

Under Title VII, a plaintiff can prevail if an employer enacts a policy that disproportionately burdens racial minorities and lacks a business justification. The Rogers court refused to acknowledge that the no-cornrows policy disproportionately burdened African-Americans. It pointed