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    Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights
    Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights
    Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights
    Audiobook7 hours

    Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights

    Written by Kenji Yoshino

    Narrated by Patrick Lawlor

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Everyone covers. To cover is to downplay a disfavored trait so as to blend into the mainstream. Because all of us possess stigmatized attributes, we all encounter pressure to cover in our daily lives. Given its pervasiveness, we may experience this pressure to be a simple fact of social life.

    Against conventional understanding, Kenji Yoshino argues that the demand to cover can pose a hidden threat to our civil rights. Though we have come to some consensus against penalizing people for differences based on race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, and disability, we still routinely deny equal treatment to people who refuse to downplay differences along these lines. Racial minorities are pressed to "act white" by changing their names, languages, or cultural practices. Women are told to "play like men" at work. Gays are asked not to engage in public displays of same-sex affection. In a wide-ranging analysis, Yoshino demonstrates that American civil rights law has generally ignored the threat posed by these covering demands. With passion and rigor, he shows that the work of civil rights will not be complete until it attends to the harms of coerced conformity.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateOct 4, 2016
    ISBN9781515982111
    Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights
    Author

    Kenji Yoshino

    Kenji Yoshino is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of Law and the faculty director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. Kenji studied at Harvard, Oxford, and Yale Law School. His fields are constitutional law, antidiscrimination law, and law and literature. He has received several distinctions for his teaching and research, including the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, the Peck Medal in Jurisprudence, and New York University’s Distinguished Teaching Award. Kenji is the author of three previous books—Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights; A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare’s Plays Teach Us About Justice; and Speak Now: Marriage Equality on Trial. He has published in major academic journals, including the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal, as well as popular venues such as the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. He serves on the board of the Brennan Center for Justice, advisory boards for diversity and inclusion at Charter Communications and Morgan Stanley, and on the board of his children’s school.

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    Reviews for Covering

    4.5/5

    49 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Very readable book, part memoir, but mostly discussion of what "covering" is and how the more subtle aspects of discrimination can be dealt with by legal and other action. I like his very underplayed sense of humor.
    • 3/5
      To be honest, I expected more given the hype surrounding this book. Well-written, the first two of three parts is largely autobiographical in which Yoshino describes the existential angst in which he wallowed despite a life of privilege. The connecting thread of his narrative is a line he lifts from Erving Goffman's Stigma: "It is a fact that persons who are ready to admit possession of a stigma may nonetheless make a great effort to keep the stigma from looming large.... This process will be referred to as covering." This idea strikes him as a revelation, and he makes it the third phase of a progression he devises to describe the coming out process: Conversion, Passing, Covering. He then discovers this process literally everywhere. It applies to everything. In the hands of a more competent theorist, that (possible) insight would lead to a more general theory of identity formation and socialization (tellingly, he tells us nothing of what Goffman did with this idea, or how later sociologists might have followed up on the suggestion). Lacking those skills, Yoshino can only leave his discussion at the superficial level of claiming that we each have a hidden authentic self that must be managed in order to fit into various social roles. Part III attempts to insert this platitude into civil rights law, leading him to claim that we should favor more accommodation over assimilation. That may sound lovely, but as recent events have shown those most vociferously demanding accommodation are sectarians claiming a right to exercise their discrimination against gays. He would seemingly favor this request as it follows from his prioritizing the protection of general liberties over the more particularized equal protection of minorities. In such a world minorities will always lose their attempts to rectify actual injustices in order to preserve abstract principles. Reasonable people can disagree.The first two parts are a pleasant read and can be insightful and inspiring in the way that a good novel can be. However, the third bears no stylistic relationship, and is theoretically superficial, and would have benefited from fuller and deeper analysis. The end result is something of a chimera, each part making better sense on its own, but having a jarring impact when forced together.
    • 5/5
      An important and brilliant piece of scholarship, that has the added perk of being beautifully written. "Covering" is an important concept that helps clarify how people of all background negotiate their identity in the public and private sphere. Yoshino's personal narrative is interwoven with more conventional scholarly analysis, and what results is one of the best legal books of the past decade or so. A must read.
    • 5/5
      The story of an Asian from Japan who happens to be gay and an attorney. Well-written, easy ready. Good resources cited.