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Covering

The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights

Kenji Yoshino

$35

Paperback

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English
Random House USA Inc
15 June 2007
An important new vision for how we can redefine the Civil Rights debate explored through the lens of Yoshino's personal experience as a gay, Asian-American scholar.

A lyrical memoir that identifies the pressure to conform as a hidden threat to our civil rights, drawing on the author's life as a gay Asian American man and his career as an acclaimed legal scholar.

"" Kenji

Yoshino offers his personal search for authenticity as an encouragement for everyone to think deeply about the ways in which all of us have covered our true selves. . . . We really do feel newly inspired.""-The New York Times Book Review

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.

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. The devout are instructed to minimize expressions of faith, and individuals with disabilities are urged to conceal the paraphernalia that permit them to function.

Given its pervasiveness, we may experience this pressure to be a simple fact of social life.

Against conventional understanding, Kenji Yoshino argues thatthe work ofAmerican civil rights lawwill not be complete until it attends to the harms of coerced conformity.

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.

At the same time, Yoshino is responsive to the American exasperation with identity politics, which often seems like an endless parade of groups asking for state and social solicitude. He observes that the ubiquity ofcoveringprovides an opportunity to lift civil rights into a higher, more universal register. Since we all experience the covering demand, we can all make common cause around a new civil rights paradigm based on our desire for authenticity-a desire that brings us together rather than driving us apart.

Praise for Covering

""Yoshino argues convincingly in this book, part luminous, moving memoir, part cogent, level-headed treatise, that covering is going to become more and more a civil rights issue as the nation (and the nation's courts) struggle with an increasingly multiethnic America.""-San Francisco Chronicle

"" A

remarkable debut . . .

Yoshino's

sense of justice is pragmatic and infectious.""-Time Out New York
By:  
Imprint:   Random House USA Inc
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 203mm,  Width: 131mm,  Spine: 16mm
Weight:   215g
ISBN:   9780375760211
ISBN 10:   0375760210
Pages:   304
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Kenji Yoshinois the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law. A graduate of Yale Law School, where he taught from 1998 to 2008, he is the author ofCovering- The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights;A Thousand Times More Fair- What Shakespeare's Plays Teach Us About Justice;andSpeak Now- Marriage Equality on Trial. Yoshino's writing has appeared inTheNew York Times, TheWashington Post,andLos Angeles Times. He lives in New York with his husband and two children.

Reviews for Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights

Praise for Covering This brilliantly argued and engaging book does two things at once, and it does them both astonishingly well. First, it's a finely grained memoir of young man s struggles to come to terms with his sexuality, and second, it's a powerful argument for a whole new way of thinking about civil rights and how our society deals with difference. This book challenges us all to confront our own unacknowledged biases, and it demands that we take seriously the idea that there are many different ways to be human. Kenji Yoshino is the face and the voice of the new civil rights. -Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed Kenji Yoshino has not only given us an important, compelling new way to understand civil rights law, a major accomplishment in itself, but with great bravery and honesty, he has forged his argument from the cauldron of his own experience. In clear, lyrical prose, Covering quite literally brings the law to life. The result is a book about our public and private selves as convincing to the spirit as it is to the mind. -Adam Haslett, author of You Are Not A Stranger Here Kenji Yoshino's work is often moving and always clarifying. Covering elaborates an original, arresting account of identity and authenticity in American culture. -Anthony Appiah, author of The Ethics of Identity and Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor Of Philosophy at Princeton University This stunning book introduces three faces of the remarkable Kenji Yoshino: a writer of poetic beauty; a soul of rare reflectivity and decency; and a brilliant lawyer and scholar, passionately committed to uncovering human rights. Like W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, this book fearlessly blends gripping narrative with insightful analysis to further the cause of human emancipation. And like those classics, it should explode into America's consciousness. -Harold Hongju Koh Dean, Yale Law School and former Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Covering is a magnificent work - so eloquently and powerfully written I literally could not put it down. Sweeping in breadth, brilliantly argued, and filled with insight, humor, and erudition, it offers a fundamentally new perspective on civil rights and discrimination law. This extraordinary book is many things at once: an intensely moving personal memoir; a breathtaking historical and cultural synthesis of assimilation and American equality law; an explosive new paradigm for transcending the morass of identity politics; and in parts, pure poetry. No one interested in civil rights, sexuality, discrimination - or simply human flourishing - can afford to miss it. -Amy Chua, author of World on Fire In this stunning, original book, Kenji Yoshino demonstrates that the struggle for gay rights is not only a struggle to liberate gays---it is a struggle to free all of us, straight and gay, male and female, white and black, from the pressures and temptations to cover vital aspects of ourselves and deprive ourselves and others of our full humanity. Yoshino is both poet and lawyer, and by joining an exquisitely observed personal memoir with a historical analysis of civil rights, he shows why gay rights is so controversial at present, why covering is the issue of contention, and why the covering demand, universal in application, is the civil rights issue of our time. This is a beautifully written, brilliant and hopeful book, offering a new understanding of what is at stake in our fight for human rights. -Carol Gilligan, author of In a Different Voice


  • Winner of Triangle Awards (Gay Nonfiction) 2007

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