Books |
Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights
Kenji Yoshino
By
Published: Jan 21, 2009
Category:
Non Fiction
On the Letters page of a magazine I was idly reading were some angry — make that outraged — blasts from readers.
Accompanying those letters was an explanation — it’s almost an apology — from the editors.
What inspired this agitation?
Just before the election, Holly Peterson — you may remember her as the New York journalist who wrote a novel called The Manny — published a “Social Graces” piece in which she gave advice to potential First Ladies Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain. Her tips for Mrs. McCain were a wet kiss (Sample: “Let your own personality and experience shine. You have a lot to teach us.”) But she more or less instructed Michelle Obama to be selectively black: “Highlight your race only when it’s highly relevant or serves to deepen a discussion.” And she reminded Mrs. Obama never to forget "how much good fortune America had bestowed on both her and her husband over so many years.”
Her race is irrelevant? Her good fortune was bestowed?
You may wonder why, during the normal course of editing, the editors didn’t perceive those views might stir up some trouble.
I’ll hazard a guess. The editors didn’t recognize that Peterson’s views were genteel racism because they share those views. They’d be shocked to read that, just as Holly Peterson — who I know slightly — wouldn’t recognize herself as someone who wants to bitch-slap Michelle Obama.
But there it is. A white woman who lives on Park Avenue, is married to an investment banker, and knows, by virtue of her background and life experience, exactly how to behave in every situation, presumes to tell an accomplished African-American how to get ahead without pissing her off.
Shorthand: Michelle….know your place.
As it happens, I read this page of letters as I was making my way through Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights. Amazing timing. Kenji Yoshino’s book is all about people censoring themselves, hiding their true nature, playing roles — going along to get along.
And, Kenji Yoshino argues, it’s not just the African-American woman who straightens her hair and dresses in conservative suits. It’s the gay man who looks and acts straight. It’s the Jew who’s not too Jew-y. It’s me. It’s you. It’s even Holly Peterson.
“Everyone covers,” he writes. “To cover is to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream.”
You protest: Hey, I couldn’t be more mainstream.
Yoshino’s response: “In our increasingly diverse society, all of us are outside the mainstream in some way.”
And how do we deal with that? We “cover”. Consider:
Famous examples of covering abound. Ramón Estévez covered his ethnicity when he changed his name to Martin Sheen, as did Krishna Bhanji when he changed his name to Ben Kingsley. Margaret Thatcher covered her status as a woman when she trained with a voice coach to lower the timbre of her voice. Long after they came out as lesbians, Rosie O’Donnell and Mary Cheney still covered, keeping their same-sex partners out of the public eye. Issur Danielovitch Demsky covered his Judaism when he became Kirk Douglas, as did Joseph Levitch when he became Jerry Lewis. Franklin Delano Roosevelt covered his disability by ensuring his wheelchair was always hidden behind a desk before his Cabinet entered.
Those men and women weren’t wrong to “cover”, says Yoshino. Over many years, the first wave of civil rights legislation was a towering success. But woe to the man or woman who challenges the establishment on more subtle grounds.
In his book — which is fascinating as memoir, riveting as history and challenging as legal argument — Yoshino presents an argument that couldn’t be more disturbing. Our courts (and, sometimes, our journalists) have, he says, scant sympathy for men and women who refuse to "cover".
Wave your freak flag, and you’re going to pay.
Exhibit A: Kenji Yoshino. His parents sent him to Exeter, an elite New England boarding school. His next stop was Harvard, where he took a crushing five or six courses a semester and still did so well he won a Rhodes Scholarship. Law school (Yale) followed, then teaching law (Yale again). He’s now Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale.
And he’s gay.
Well into his 20s, that wasn’t a fact that Yoshino easily accepted or shared. He’s Japanese, and although his parents live in the United States and have largely assimilated, a gay son is an embarrassment for a traditional Japanese family. Coming out was powerful — “One ends the sentence a different person” — but each new person represented a fresh closet.
And the “covering” issue? Yoshino writes that he was “out”, but not so anyone would be offended. He didn’t preen. He didn’t strip off his shirt and dance wildly in gay clubs. He didn’t even bring his lover to official functions. He just worked hard and achieved a lot — his sexuality seemed more like an afterthought than a key fact.
And he paid the price for all of it.
Because we “cover”, Yoshino says, our civil rights are truncated. Everyone’s. Even — and perhaps especially — the “straight white guy”. And so, he writes, we need to understand that civil rights is just “a sliver of a universal project of human flourishing.” We need to move civil rights beyond the law, deep into the culture. We need to throw off the shackles of assimilation and accommodation and become our authentic selves.
If you have read The Drama of the Gifted Child, some of this argument is familiar to you. What will be new to most readers are the cases that show what happens to those who don’t play by mainstream rules. If you like the little guy to win, they’re not fun reading. And some of the writing is quite technical. So while “Covering” is short, just 200 pages, if you’re like me — neither a lawyer nor a law groupie — you’ll skim some.
No matter how much you don’t get, this book’s important takeaway couldn’t be clearer. Though “the mainstream is a myth”, success in America is sill “white and bland”. The new discrimination “targets minority cultures rather than minority persons”. And the only way out is for us, as individuals, to develop autonomy.
Are Barack and Michelle Obama authentic, or are they covering? It’s a tantalizing question — just as tantalizing as wondering about Holly Peterson. But it’s rather more to the point for me to understand if I wear old button-down shirts, khakis and boat shoes because I like that look — or because I don’t want anyone to think I’m a Jew-y Jew.
I’ll be thinking about “Covering” for a long, long time.
To buy “Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights” from Amazon.com, click here.
To visit Kenji Yoshino’s web site, click here.
