In his new book COVERING: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, acclaimed Yale Law School professor Kenji Yoshino presents a new way of thinking about civil rights.  Why do we let the pressures of society force us to “cover,” to tone down an aspect of our personality so we fit in with the mainstream?  Who decides what is and isn’t socially acceptable?  And, in a culture that often unfairly demands conformity, how can we present our authentic selves?  Fusing legal manifesto with his own personal story, Yoshino throws down the gauntlet for a new paradigm of civil rights.

Yoshino argues that each of us, every one, covers, and the demand to cover can pose a hidden threat to our civil rights. Today race, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, religion, and disability are all protected by civil rights, but 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 the civil rights revolution has stalled and the law has generally ignored the threat posed by these covering demands.
What distinguishes Covering from prior books on identity politics is that while Yoshino presents a progressive agenda, he challenges many of the pieties of traditional liberalism.  He not only argues against the balkanization of America into different identity groups, but also draws on his expertise in law to articulate the limits of what law can do.  The result is a transcendent vision of civil rights that focuses on the freedoms that draw us together as Americans rather than on the distinctions that drive us apart.  This is a vision in which we all--conservative or liberal--have a stake, because it addresses the yearning for human emancipation that exists within us all.

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.  

Kenji Yoshino is professor of law and deputy dean for intellectual life at Yale Law School.  He was educated at Harvard, Oxford (where he was a Rhodes Scholar), and Yale Law School.  A specialist in constitutional law, antidiscrimination law, and law and literature, he has published work in a wide variety of academic journals, including the Columbia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and Yale Law Journal.  His writing has been featured in The Boston Globe, The Nation, The New York Times, and The Village Voice and he has appeared on "The Charlie Rose Show", and Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor".

Reviews: 

“Seldom has a work of such careful intellectual rigor and fairness been so deeply touching…this book has tremendous potential as a touchstone in the struggle for universal human dignity.”
-- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“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

“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

“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

“The personal and political collide head-on in /Covering/, Yale law professor Kenji Yoshino’s remarkable debut . . . . [Yoshino’s] sense of justice is pragmatic and infectious.”
--Time Out New York

“[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

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