Add Prime to get Fast, Free delivery

Available instantly

Audiobook
$0.00
with membership trial

Hardcover
$12.00

Paperback
$11.86

$11.86 with 34 percent savings

List Price: $18.00

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

FREE delivery April 4 - 17 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35

Or fastest delivery April 3 - 15

$$11.86 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Returns

30-day refund/replacement

Payment

Secure transaction

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

$9.99

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

A few pages are water stained A few pages are water stained See less

FREE delivery Monday, March 24 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35. Order within 7 hrs 17 mins

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

$$11.86 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Enhancements you chose aren't available for this seller. Details

${cardName} not available for the seller you chose

${cardName} unavailable for quantities greater than ${maxQuantity}.

Sold by Mina Basmati and Fulfilled by Amazon.

Add to List

Added to

Unable to add item to List. Please try again.

Other sellers on Amazon

New & Used (67) from $7.57 & FREE Shipping

Image Unavailable

Image not available for
Color:

To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Kenji Yoshino

Follow

Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights Paperback – February 20, 2007

by Kenji Yoshino (Author)

4.6 227 ratings

See all formats and editions

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$11.86","priceAmount":11.86,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"11","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"86","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"VYG5HuA5aRLnYGSYs0xmUgFJNUrioDq9Iv4iesWOkoXr67p6UKfVEeArK7R8gYwUj%2FwfybjNgL9iSexpcBfc6%2F4w0CJXG8Lt3uLhOQAj0fiRSM7YexqeP%2BNlBjZJBli9TGa0ErmUfgI%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$9.99","priceAmount":9.99,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"9","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"99","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"VYG5HuA5aRLnYGSYs0xmUgFJNUrioDq9eyP5B9LiIa1kxGo8HZmRTefJq8YFa%2FbJG5feSTy7vQcnDoFZSw2AkOQIvbpr9cJQa7MDqt4j%2BPxD86CGa44Rh9nikKEqweO7Z%2BqR4PhkqeaIEBOn7LwIuqTKmusSubGJYDOJO8E%2BCS0vlZkxcuOl326tEAXPHlB1","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

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 that the work of American civil rights law will 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 of covering 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.

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

Editorial Reviews

Review

“[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

“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

“[Covering] is, at heart, a memoir written by a legal scholar who might have missed his calling as a poet. . . . Powerful.”—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? . . . The beauty of Yoshino’s book lies in the poetry he brings to telling his own story.”—O: The Oprah 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

“Yoshino introduces a new term into the American social lexicon: ‘covering’ is the new ‘passing,’ the new ‘closet.’ . . . Provocative and affecting, Covering challenges us to be as open with one another as Yoshino is willing to be with us.”—The Boston Globe

“The poignancy of [Yoshino’s] personal victory is as compelling as any other piece of his treatise.”—Los Angeles Times

“[A] sober, rigorous and touching treatise on behalf of the disenfranchised that comes not a moment too soon . . . In times to come, this book could be viewed as a seminal work.”—Chicago Sun-Times

“[Yoshino] eloquently weaves memoir and legal text in this lovely, moving, and persuasive book. . . . Real, raw, and beautiful.”—Edge Providence

“[A] brilliantly argued and engaging book . . . a finely grained memoir of young man’s struggles to come to terms with his sexuality . . . a powerful argument for a whole new way of thinking about civil rights and how our society deals with difference. Kenji Yoshino is the face and voice of the new civil rights.”—Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed

“Magnificent . . . so eloquently and powerfully written I literally could not put it down. Sweeping in breadth, brilliantly argued, and filled with insight, humor, and erudition . . . 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

About the Author

Kenji Yoshino is 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 of Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights; A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare’s Plays Teach Us About Justice; and Speak Now: Marriage Equality on Trial. Yoshino’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. He lives in New York with his husband and two children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

AN UNCOVERED SELF

Send the beloved child on a journey,” the Japanese proverb says. So when I turned thirteen, my parents sent me to boarding school. I could see they wished to keep me close, but worried about the effects of tenderness. Small for my age, not so much quiet as silent, I was tarrying at the threshold of adolescence. A singer, I was stricken when my clean boy soprano, that noise only boys can make, broke into a sublunary baritone.

So off I went, to boarding school and radical reinvention. The need for self-reliance called into being a self on which I could rely. As no one knew me there, no one could challenge the authenticity of this brighter self. Seemingly overnight, I became full of speeches, sociable. I have never worked so hard, or been so happily appetitive, as in those years.

Yet physically I remained a small dark thing altogether. I remember thinking during a soccer practice that I must have had a lot of natural muscle once, to feel so punished as I watched those boys scissor the air with their blond high school legs. Their bodies hummed to a frequency not my own as balls sailed fluently into nets. I sensed these bodies knew other bodies, as I knew calculus or Shakespeare. That knowledge flaunted itself in the lilt of small hairs off their necks.

I would not have been able to say I was gay and these others were straight. I knew only I was asked not to be myself, and that to fail to meet that demand was to make myself illegible, my future unimaginable. I hoped time would soften the difference between others and me, but knew it would do the opposite.

To evade my fate, I acquired a girlfriend. I have a memory of my dormitory’s stairwell, where boys would kiss girls good night before curfew. I am standing on the bottom step looking down at her. She is Filipina, a year older, her fluency in French standing for her urbanity. The waver of shadow superimposes an ambivalence on the sweet certainty of her face. I wonder what is more abject than this—my brain urging the bloodrush and attention that comes so naturally, so involuntarily, to others.

Of course, it was not wonderful to be her, either. Yet it was many years before I would speculate about the other side of that kiss. Only after I came out did I listen to the rueful stories of gay men—how one picked fights with his wife to avoid sex, how another wished his girlfriend would turn into a pizza at nightfall. The trials of those who love the closeted have yet to be told. I was nowhere near imagining them then.

My rising anxiety gave me limitless life force in other spheres. I remember a biology lab in which we observed a spear-headed water worm. Like a starfish, it could grow back anything we razored off it, even to the point of generating multiple versions of itself. I saw myself in that gliding shape. Arrow-shaped, it never arrived where it wanted to go. But it knew, when cut, to grow.

As I moved from high school to college, my mill of activity became more frenetic, a way of keeping the world at bay. At Harvard, I took five or six courses a semester, and as many extracurriculars, foreclosing time for thought, for breath. Friends complained I was walled up, a Jericho waiting for its Joshua. Yet alongside my silence was a ravening urge to speak. So I began to study poetry—a childhood passion—more formally, finding solace in a language more public than thought but more private than prose. Instead of writing an analytic thesis to graduate as an English major, I petitioned to write a collection of my own poems.

Writing these poems gave me more pleasure than anything before. That year, the only reason anything had to be, was to be a poem—the icicles making their small clear points on the eaves, the broken gate that clacked double knuckled on its hinge, the bitter flesh star at the heart of a lemon. Poetry was my medium, as rigid and formal and obscure as its author. On Saturday nights, I would sit in my cement-block dorm room with my face lit green by my IBM’s glow, agonizing not over women, or men, but line breaks. I thought myself happy, and in some sense I was.

The readers of my collection understood as much of me as I did. One grader took it on faith: “I cannot see what you have seen. But I can see that you have seen.” The other did not. Impatient, he quoted Marvin Bell’s line about how to become a writer is to become “less and less embarrassed about more and more.”

Neither grader had license to say the collection was hard to read for a different reason: it was full of pain. The collection ends in crisis—the last poem, titled “The Infanticide of My Professions,” was about the selves we had to kill in young adulthood. The word “profession” carried its double sense of façade and occupation. The poem expressed the hope I would destroy the selves I only professed to be, and be left with one with a natural vocation. That hope was smothered by the fear I might murder the real self or, worse, that I might find that self to be a tragic one. I still find this poem difficult to read.

Yet when I wrote it, I acted as if I could carry the world before me. My curricular and extracurricular frenzy had won me a Rhodes scholarship to England. (Perhaps the closeted should not be permitted to compete for these fellowships—we have the advantage of those Saturday nights.) But the carbonation in my veins when I won was less joy than relief. I had a new precocity to balance against my backwardness, this social acceptance to weigh against my refusal of life.

One person saw through me. The poetry professor who had supervised my thesis was a Pre-Raphaelite figure. A whippet-thin chain smoker, she had waist-length auburn hair and eyebrows sharp as circumflex accents. She was the best teacher I have ever had—she returned each poem marked up in three colors, one for each pass she had taken over it. She gave me a nickname: Radiating Naivete. “Radiating Naivete,” she would say when we bumped into each other near midnight at Caffé Paradiso, “have you entered the realm of the erotic yet?” In a letter she gave me at graduation, she described sitting on a plane next to an emergency exit. There was an arc painted next to the handle, each end of which was marked with a scarlet word: “Engage” and “Disengage.” The handle was on “Disengage.” She said it made her think of me.

I was not ready when emergency came. Until then, I had been splendidly noncommittal: neither Japanese nor American, neither poet nor pragmatist, neither straight nor gay. But it seemed all ambiguities had to be resolved that year. I had to choose citizenship—the red Japanese passport or the blue American one, the two colors of blood. I had to choose a career—literature or law. Most of all, I had to choose—or choose to acknowledge—the sexuality that roiled the surface that summer when I fell bewilderingly in love.

The Japanese character for erotic desire is the same as that for color. Some say this commonality arises from the Buddhist teaching that desire, like color, distracts us from enlightenment by calling us to the things of this world. The world’s colorless wave broke kaleidoscopically over me when I met Brian. We lived together after graduation while we attended summer school—he to complete medical school prerequisites, I to prepare for my time in En-gland. Brian was the first in his family to attend college and was, like me, hungry to prove himself. But unlike me, he had directed his intensity outward, devoting his college years to ceaseless public service. This moved me.

One glittering afternoon, we walked along the Charles River. It was a Sunday—the riverside drive was hedged with sawhorses, closed to cars. The cyclists sheared the air. Dazzled by the needles of light stitching the water, I turned to watch him watch them. I noticed his eyelashes were reflected in his eyes, like awnings in windowpanes. As I tried to make sense of that reflection, I found I could not look away. His irises were brown, clouding into orange, with brighter flecks around his pupils. Then it became as important not to look as to look, as I feared I would be lost in a rush of bronze motes.

It hardly mattered that I knew he was straight. I experienced my desire for him, which was a pent-up desire for many men, as having an absolute absolved necessity. Just as the brain seems larger than the skull that contains it, so did my desire seem grossly to exceed the contours of my body. I thought if I could only make him experience the strength of what I felt, he could not demur.

I had, in one sense, chosen the right man. Brian responded with compassion. Yet my desire was now not only thwarted, but exposed. Brian made me acknowledge my knowledge; he made me own myself. I snapped back into my skin. And I felt something in me crack—like a safe, a whip.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (February 20, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375760210
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375760211
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.14 x 0.63 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #84,308 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #28 in Civil Rights Law (Books)
- #255 in Discrimination & Racism
- #625 in Sociology Reference

Customer Reviews:
4.6 227 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Kenji Yoshino

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Kenji Yoshino is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of Law and the Director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging. A graduate of Harvard (AB summa cum laude), Oxford (MSc as a Rhodes Scholar) and Yale (JD), he specializes in constitutional law, antidiscrimination law, and law and literature. He received tenure at Yale Law School, where he served as Deputy Dean before moving to NYU.

Yoshino has published in major academic journals, including the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. He has also written for more popular forums, including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Yoshino is the author of three books. His fourth book (co-authored with David Glasgow), Say the Right Thing: How to Talk About Identity, Diversity, and Justice, will be published by Simon and Schuster in February 2023.

Yoshino has served as the President of the Harvard Board of Overseers. He currently serves on the Board of the Brennan Center for Justice, on advisory boards for diversity and inclusion for Morgan Stanley and Charter Communications, and on the board of his children’s school. He has won numerous awards for his teaching and scholarship, including the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, the Peck medal in jurisprudence, and the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

He lives in Manhattan with his husband, two children, and a Great Dane

Related products with free delivery on eligible orders

Page 1 of 1Start overPage 1 of 1

Sponsored | Try Prime for unlimited fast, free shipping

Feedback

Edward Mendlowitz CPA

Paperback

$24.95
Feedback

Eddie Cephus

Paperback

$19.99
Feedback

Danny Gruber

Paperback

$18.92
Feedback

Talzoya

Paperback

$16.95
Feedback

Don M Tucker PhD

Hardcover

$48.00
Feedback

Rich Rostron

Paperback

$15.00
Feedback

Kathleen J. Fitzgerald

Paperback

-38%$39.54
List:$63.99

Looking for specific info?

Customer reviews

227 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Review this product

Write a customer review

Customers say

Customers find the book insightful, informative, and analytical. They praise the writing quality as passionate and skillful. The writing is described as poetic, engaging, and graphic. Overall, customers consider it a great value for the price and appreciate the economical prose that brings the moments to life.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Select to learn more

Insight Writing quality Elegance Value for money

16 customers mention "Insight"16 positive0 negative

Customers find the book insightful and informative. They describe it as ground-breaking thinking eloquently presented. The book is analytical and lyrical, with interesting discussion and legal jurisprudence. It's well-researched and worth reading.

"...The legal aspects are surprisingly fascinating in Yoshino's hands, but the more personal parts of his book are the most illuminating, in particular,..." Read more

"...parents--all is told in spare, economical prose that brings these moments to life...." Read more

"...The discussion was interesting enough, but when he read the Epilogue, I immediately thought, "I have to have that in my Commonplace Book."..." Read more

"A work of stunning honesty and clarity...." Read more

13 customers mention "Writing quality"13 positive0 negative

Customers praise the book's writing quality. They find it passionate, skillful, and thought-provoking. The author is described as a skilled writer who combines political and philosophical ideas in an interesting way. Readers describe the book as honest and inspiring.

"...His penetrating book is a hybrid between a revelatory memoir and a level-headed treatise on the unacceptability of the current legal doctrine around..." Read more

"...one agrees with all of his arguments or not, Yoshino's writing invariably engages and fascinates...." Read more

"...Anyhow, this is a really well written, and a very throughout, book. Ehrenreich, Chua, and Appiah were correct...." Read more

"...monographs is thwarted through the simplest of means: the scholar-author is also a poet...." Read more

4 customers mention "Elegance"4 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's elegance. They find it both elegant and hard-hitting, with a graphic style that details the author's experiences.

"Kenji Yoshino's book manages a difficult feat: it is simultaneously elegant and hard-hitting...." Read more

"An amazing look at the subtle and not so subtle ways we learn how to assimilate into the wider culture, what we give up when we do that, and how..." Read more

"Yoshino , was very graphic , detailed all of his experiences , as well as analyzed Covering...." Read more

"A beautiful, analytical and lyrical book about the law. There aren't many books that meet that description. Yoshino is brilliant." Read more

3 customers mention "Value for money"3 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's value for money. They mention it's a bargain price and great value. The prose is economical, bringing these moments to life.

"...awkward coming-out to his Japanese parents--all is told in spare, economical prose that brings these moments to life...." Read more

"...Still a bargain price and great value. Would buy from the vendor again." Read more

"...It was cheaper than the book store and plus they ran out at one point. Thanks a lot!" Read more

Reviews with images

See all photos

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews. Please reload the page.

Ed Uyeshima
A Most Eloquent and Personal Plea for Upholding Individual Civil Liberties
Reviewed in the United States on February 1, 2006
Verified Purchase

In lucid terms that escape the legalese that burdens related books, Yale Law School professor Kenji Yoshino discusses a topic that I never really knew had a formal definition. He describes "covering" as the purposeful act of toning down a "disfavored identity" to fit into the mainstream. Since notions of disfavored identities can get subjective, anyone can cover, whether people are members of ethnic minority groups hiding specific cultural behaviors or even white males hiding less discernible problems such as depression, alcoholism or backgrounds that embarrass them. Consequently, given the pervasiveness of such behavior, covering would seem comparatively innocuous, but Yoshino provides ample evidence that covering is a hidden assault on our civil rights. Moreover, it is becoming more of a civil rights issue as the nation's courts struggle with an increasingly multi-ethnic America.

His penetrating book is a hybrid between a revelatory memoir and a level-headed treatise on the unacceptability of the current legal doctrine around our civil rights. Toward the latter point, Yoshino discusses covering within the broader context of often egregious civil rights injustices. As he explains it, the courts are mired in group-based identity politics and driven by calls for equality. For example, to sue successfully under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment, a group claiming discrimination has one of two options. First, the group could argue that it has been denied a fundamental right, like the right to vote. Alternatively, it can contend that the law in question employs a suspect classification, i.e., that the law unjustly singles out a particular group. To argue successfully that it has been penalized by a suspect classification, a group must show that its members have historically been victimized and deserve greater protection from the courts. Given these options, Yoshino describes the increasing wariness about identity politics in a country continually spawning new identities. The current legal trend shows the courts to be veering increasingly toward protecting only the immutable aspects of identity.

The legal aspects are surprisingly fascinating in Yoshino's hands, but the more personal parts of his book are the most illuminating, in particular, Yoshino's journey out of the closet. Using his own history as a touch point, he explains the three distinct phases of gay history - conversion, passing, and covering - each defined by various pressures that enforce conformity. During the conversion phase (recreated in films like Todd Haynes's "Far From Heaven" and James Ivory's "Maurice"), gays were pressured to become heterosexual through electro-shock treatments or aversion therapy. During the passing stage, gays were relegated to the closet since mental health professionals were not providing a cure for mainstream acceptance, and having a hidden identity was the only viable way to be tolerated in society. Yoshino contends we are currently in the third phase, covering, where being gay is passively acceptable as long as people offended by it do not have to witness such an alternative lifestyle.

From one perspective, one can consider it progress that covering even occurs even though the religious right still makes an emphatic effort to convert gays or keep them out of jobs that could pass such supposedly deviant behavior to susceptible children. This is where Yoshino's personal struggles to cover inform the book. His bracing honesty is refreshing in showing how coming out is despite the dramatic convention of TV-movies, not a declaration that liberates one in a single moment, but a far more gradual process where defining what it means to be gay becomes even more nebulous within the constant ambiguity around gay legal issues. Yoshino eloquently clarifies how the pervasiveness of societal pressures can waylay a person caught in the crossfire between acceptance and personal liberation.

The best way to make progress, Yoshino concludes, is to move beyond the legal issues. According to Yoshino, civil rights lawsuits should focus on individual rights, which unify all groups around common values. Instead of focusing on marginalized groups clamoring for special status, courts would ideally say that all people have a right to be who they want to be. As a precedent, Yoshino points out the 2003 case, Lawrence vs. Texas, in which the court decriminalized same-sex sodomy not based on equality rights of gays but because it violated the fundamental rights of all people to control what they do in the bedroom. It's a powerful idea which could lead to a new jurisprudence of liberty, but there is a challenging road toward realizing such legislation. One could argue that the unequal treatment of minority groups is what makes us realize what our liberties actually are.

Though he doubts the continuing usefulness of equal protection law, Yoshino might underestimate how much his contentions based on personal freedoms will continue to depend on equality arguments. However, what's exciting about the covering paradigm of civil rights is that it's universal. Yoshino hopes that the direction that courts are moving in is happening in a world where the notion of mainstream is fracturing. In the final analysis, Yoshino dares to put the law aside. He argues that we should leave behind equality doctrine for a new, radical focus on personal liberties that the Supreme Court may be unlikely to pursue beyond Lawrence. He argues that law generally should take a backseat to cultural change. Litigation should give way to conversation to confront covering. This is superb, groundbreaking thinking eloquently presented.

Read more

24 people found this helpful

Helpful

Report
klavierspiel
Elegant as silk, sharp as a scalpel
Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2006
Verified Purchase
Kenji Yoshino's book manages a difficult feat: it is simultaneously elegant and hard-hitting. Yoshino, a professor at Yale Law School, blends memoir and legal history as he charts the changing attitude of American society toward homosexuality. Formerly, gays were treated as if they had a deadly disease--if they were not willing to change, forcible means such as lobotomy and electroshock therapy were at hand to "convert" them. Next, they were left alone as long as they were willing to hide their sexuality. The riots of Stonewall and the AIDS plague were watersheds in changing this attitude, as gay men and women demanded to be recognized as such AND treated as human beings.

While much progress has been made in achieving equality, Yoshino shows how far there is to go. While legal protections now exist for many classes, protection for behavior is much spottier. Minorities are allowed a measure of freedom, but flaunting difference; wearing dreadlocks on the job, for example, or publicly marrying a same-sex partner, can cost one employment or housing, without legal recourse. Yoshino broadens his argument in the final portion of _Covering_ to show that the demand that minority groups assimilate and adhere to the behavioral rules of the majority hurts racial minorities and women as well as gays. He argues that ultimately individual efforts--one-on-one conversations--will achieve victory against coerced assimiliation rather than legislation.

Whether one agrees with all of his arguments or not, Yoshino's writing invariably engages and fascinates. His recounting of his divided cultural background, his first steps toward self-recognition, his awkward coming-out to his Japanese parents--all is told in spare, economical prose that brings these moments to life. He packs a remarkable amount of history and argument into a relatively short book. Reading _Covering_ adds a new dimension to understanding the ongoing struggle of gay men and women toward equality.

Read more

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Report

Top reviews from other countries

Floyd Sully
A Personal Journey
Reviewed in Canada on May 23, 2024
Verified Purchase

The authors personal journey is compelling.

Read more
Report
JLMoura
Great read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 20, 2017
Verified Purchase
Even though book was written 10 years ago, it's still very contemporary. I saw Kenji Yoshino speak in the beginning of the year and his book is great complement. I did not realise I was covering so much.

Read more
Report

See more reviews

Amazon Prime Free Trial

Sorry, there was a problem.

Sorry, there was a problem.

Follow the author

Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights Paperback – February 20, 2007

Purchase options and add-ons

Frequently bought together

Frequently purchased items with fast delivery

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Product details

Videos

About the author

Kenji Yoshino

Related products with free delivery on eligible orders

Looking for specific info?

Customer reviews

Review this product

Customers say

Select to learn more

Images in this review

Reviews with images

A bit damaged

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews. Please reload the page.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Most Eloquent and Personal Plea for Upholding Individual Civil Liberties

5.0 out of 5 stars Elegant as silk, sharp as a scalpel

Top reviews from other countries

5.0 out of 5 stars A Personal Journey

4.0 out of 5 stars Great read

A Most Eloquent and Personal Plea for Upholding Individual Civil Liberties

Elegant as silk, sharp as a scalpel

A Personal Journey

Great read