Winner, 2006 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Award

Winner, 2006 Myers Outstanding Book Award

In this remarkable and elegant work, acclaimed Yale Law School professor Kenji Yoshino fuses legal manifesto and poetic memoir to call for a redefinition of civil rights in our law and culture.

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

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 of the covering demand provides 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.

Yoshino’s argument draws deeply on his personal experiences as a gay Asian American. He follows the Romantics in his belief that if a human life is described with enough particularity, the universal will speak through it. The result is a work that combines one of the most moving memoirs written in years with a landmark manifesto on the civil rights of the future.

Praise for Covering:

“Seldom has a work of such careful intellectual rigor and fairness been so deeply touching. Yoshino, a law professor at Yale and a gay, Asian-American man, masterfully melds autobiography and legal scholarship in this book, marking a move from more traditional pleas for civil equality to a case for individual autonomy in identity politics.... [A]n eloquent, poetic protest against the hidden prejudices embedded in American civil rights legislation ... this book has tremendous potential as a touchstone in the struggle for universal human dignity.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“A lush, frequently elegant account . . . .  Yoshino is a skillful narrative guide with a gift for describing the small dramas of still situations.” 
—Legal Affairs

“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. And he presents his story and weaves in the legal cases in such an engaging way that we really do feel newly inspired.” 
—The New York Times Sunday Book Review
 
“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
 
“[Covering] is, at heart, a memoir, written by a legal scholar who might have missed his calling as a poet.  In some of its most powerful sections, Yoshino [struggles] with what it means to be a gay man. . . .  This probably says less about the writer’s personal courage?he’s got that in spades, as one discovers throughout the book?than about the pervasiveness and strength of the societal pressures he so eloquently describes.” 
—The Village Voice
 
“Who’d expect a book on civil rights and the law to be warmly personal, elegantly written, and threaded with memorable images?  [T]he beauty of Yoshino's book lies in the poetry he brings to telling his own story.” 
—O Magazine
 

 
Kenji Yoshino is the deputy dean for intellectual life and professor of law at Yale Law School. For more information about Yoshino’s work, visit www.kenjiyoshino.com.