"People Have the Right to Be Just Who They Are": Kenji Yoshino's Book "Covering"

In many ways, the career Kenji Yoshino, Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law, has been the epitome of "model minority" success, excelling at the elite prep school Phillips Exeter Academy and at Harvard from which he graduated, summa cum laude with a B.A. in English literature in 1991, being a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford M.Sc. in management studies in 1993), being an editor of the Yale Law Journal and earning a Yale J.D. in 1996. He was a full professor at Yale by 2003 and the Calebresi Professor in 2006.

His resume shows no bumps in the road to the top, but being a double minority -- obviously of Japanese ancestry and secretly gay -- provided plenty of pain and shame. Yoshino wanted to be a poet, but felt he had to hide his homosexual passion. Sublimation of feelings and compensatory drive to success are common in life stories both of children of immigrants and gay men. In Covering (winner of the 2006 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Award), Yoshino tells his own story of rejecting passing-- that is, coming out -- very well. Being an academically very successful Asian American (I am well aware that Japan is an archipelago not directly connected to Asia, but Asian/Pacific Islander is commonly shortened to "Asian") probably made passing easier to succeed in doing, though no less painful to do.

Yoshino is less interested in "passing" (as what one is not) than with "covering." The distinction, deriving from sociologist Erving Goffman's (1963) book Stigma is between hiding what one thinks is a discreditable attribute (what one thinks is a discreditable attribute because of how the attribute is denigrated by others within the society) and muting the attribute that discredits one (not least to himself or herself!). An example that Goffman used was the paralysis of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was not shown during his lifetime in a wheelchair.

For gay men, any reference to being gay is regarded by some as "flaunting it." Yoshino's mother resigned herself to having a gay son, but deplored what she considered his Joan of Arc quest for martyrdom -- or at least for attention as a champion of one kind of his people, gay people. (An irony of this is that he avoided cases involving sexual orientation to show that he was not obsessed with it.) She warned him of becoming a lightning rod (and reminded him that his visibility as a "deviant" had consequences for his parents: "If you speak so loudly, our world becomes very small.")

His parents went all-out in assimilating within the US, and Yoshino discovered how American he was in Japan, where he found conforming impossible. At the elite schools he attended, teachers and fellow students (and, at least implicitly, his parents) applauded him for fitting in (for being a coconut or banana -- white on the inside), and he at least felt that after coming out to his colleagues, he was rewarded for not "making an issue" of it. (A cynic might append "until he got tenure.")

Lawyers seek legal solutions, whether drafting laws or litigating using existing ones. Yoshino has been frustrated by losing cases in which courts have ruled that it is OK to discriminate against "displays" of difference from majority culture -- a black American Airlines employee fired for wearing her hair in cornrows, courts upholding a US Army ban on wearing yarmulkes, etc. The underlying principal is "immutable characteristics." Skin color and religious affiliation are protected (and against all the evidence of wholesale failure or "reparative therapy," there is strong Christianist insistence that sexual orientation as is "choice" to justify continuing discrimination). Yoshino provides several interesting instances in which mothers are pressured to keep that status and role invisible within the workplace (working being treated as a "choice").

Yoshino is not opposed to all covering, only to coerced covering -- coerced for no other purpose than to perpetuate inferiorization of differences that are not job-related. He argues that "the demand to cover is anything but trivial, It is the symbolic heartland of inequality -- what reassures one group of its superiority to another" (and makes those who do not naturally fit -- who are not straight white males -- of their inferiority). The rhetorics of "color blindness" and "don't ask, don't tell" are instances and indicators that the "dominant reaction to difference has been to instruct the mainstream to ignore it and the outsider group to mute it."

(Yoshino also notes that minority group members are often very eager to put down those who do not conform as well as they have -- a fervor for policing any variations from norms not unknown on epinions BTW. Norms are internalized and helplessness seems to enhance an eagerness to police others as a way of identifying with the power(s) that be. Black professionals exhort their "brothers" to "dress white," Asian Americans pillory FOBs ("fresh off the boat," though it should be "fresh off the plane" these days, Jews are told by other Jews not to come across as "too Jewish," etc.)

Yoshino seeks to shift both the social and the legal conception of civil rights from equal treatment to those who simulate/emulate the most conventional white male way of being to accepting freedom, that is, to accept racial minorities not "acting white," and to accept markers of ethnicity (the cornrows, the yarmulkes, etc.) that do not impinge on doing whatever work the worker does. If a demand to conformity is not job-related, it is not legitimate to Yoshino, and the burden of proof that some requirement that burdens suspect classes is rational should be on those aiming to enforce it. For Yoshino, this extends beyond traditionally protected categories ("classic civil rights groups"/legally "suspect categories") to include obesity (another category regarded as a "choice"

There is something utopian in pressing for conversation about demands for assimilation that burden and alienate minorities. Lawsuits occur when people feel they have no feasible way of talking to each other. In the US that is very often. Yoshino's book may help some people think about whether their expectations are rational, but will not be read by those most in need of stimulation to think about freedom to be -- and to appear -- different.

Yoshino writes very well, both about himself and about pressures to conform. I think that his reading of gay history is quite superficial, but still highly recommend the book. On AC this month, I have posted many reviews of books and movies representing gay men here and there. Yoshino's defiance of conformity seems particularly apt to discuss on the 40th anniversary of what was gay FREEDOM Day, even mindful that it was long ago compromised into "pride day." Like Yoshino's book, the assertion of a freedom to be who you are, indexed my quotation from the Village People anthem "I Am What I Am (and for the Right I'll Stand)," far exceeds gay men rejecting micro and macro histories of shame.