Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [78]
But now I must temper passion with realism. I believe we should adopt a group-based accommodation model to protect traditional civil rights groups from covering demands. I believe with equal conviction, however, that courts are unlikely to adopt this course. The explosive pluralism of contemporary American society will inexorably push this country away from group-based identity politics—there will be too many groups to keep track of, much less to protect. Indeed, I expect English jurisprudence to look more like American jurisprudence fifty years from now than vice versa. Americans are already sick to death of identity politics; the courts are merely following suit.
We must find a way to protect difference that does not balkanize the country into separate fiefdoms of competing identity groups. We need a new paradigm of civil rights.
THE NEW CIVIL RIGHTS
To describe the new civil rights, I return to the source of my argument. What most excited me about gay civil rights was its universal resonance. Unlike other civil rights groups, gays must articulate invisible selves without the initial support of our immediate communities. That makes the gay project of self-elaboration emblematic of the search for authenticity all of us engage in as human beings. It is work each of us must do for ourselves, and it is the most important work we can do.
In looking for a vocabulary for this quest for authenticity, I found psychoanalysts more helpful than lawyers. The object-relations theorist D. W. Winnicott makes a distinction between a True Self and a False Self that usefully tracks the distinction between the uncovered and covered selves. The True Self is the self that gives an individual the feeling of being real, which is “more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself, and to relate to objects as oneself, and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation.” The True Self is associated with human spontaneity and authenticity: “Only the True Self can be creative and only the True Self can feel real.” The False Self, in contrast, gives an individual a sense of being unreal, a sense of futility. It mediates the relationship between the True Self and the world.
What I love about Winnicott is that he does not demonize the False Self. To the contrary, Winnicott believes the False Self protects the True Self: “The False Self has one positive and very important function: to hide the True Self, which it does by compliance with environmental demands.” Like a king castling behind a rook in chess, the more valuable but less powerful piece retreats behind the less valuable but more powerful one. Because the relationship between the True Self and the False Self is symbiotic, Winnicott believes both selves will exist even in the healthy individual.
Nonetheless, Winnicott defines health according to the degree of ascendancy the True Self gains over the False one. At the negative extreme, the False Self completely obscures the True Self, perhaps even from the individual herself. In a less extreme case, the False Self permits the True Self “a secret life.” The individual approaches health only when the False Self has “as its main concern a search for conditions which will make it possible for the True Self to come into its own.” Finally, in the healthy individual, the False Self is reduced to a “polite and mannered social attitude,” a tool available to the fully realized True Self.
This paradigm captures my coming-out experience. My gay self, the True Self, was hidden behind an ostensibly straight False Self. Yet it would be wrong to cast the closeted self as purely inimical to the gay one. In my adolescence, this False Self protected the True Self until its survival was assured. Only at this point did the False Self switch from being a help to being a hindrance. And even after I came out, the False Self never disappeared. It was reduced to the minimum necessary to regulate