Covering

The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights

By: Kenji Yoshino

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

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.

©2006 Kenji Yoshino (P)2016 Tantor

Critic reviews

"As healing as it is polemical, this book has tremendous potential as a touchstone in the struggle for universal human dignity." ( Publishers Weekly)

Humane Advocacy in Law and Life

It's hard to imagine anyone wielding power (that is, being wielded by power) explicitly following Yoshino, and that's okay. What disheartens me is that so few who could, such as academics, do. Yoshino's forced reasoned conversation, for example, isn't employed as he describes, which is as a conversation that reveals values and effects so that it becomes plain what all the parties actually want and what is allowed and what forbidden. instead, when it is employed, it is just another function to be performed and thereby checked off the list of protocols. Still, we would do well to heed the example of this book's way of thinking