Book Plug: Covering by Kenji Yoshino

I have just finished reading Covering: the Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights by Kenji Yoshino.



Yoshino is a law professor at Yale University and his book (published by Random House) is both a work of legal scholarship as well as a memoir about growing up gay and Japanese American, and his research on issues of civil rights as a Yale law school professor.

His basic argument is that all people cover, in the sense that we hide or mute parts of our identities, our personalities, from the general public--and that this covering demand, made most explicitly on certain groups of people like gay men, racial minorities, and pregnant women, is an assault on civil rights.

Using his own life as a text for interpretation, he traces the stages of his gay identity through three stages: conversion, passing, and covering. He sees covering as a form of assimilation--and tracing the legal precedents of Title VII, he also sees the ways in which the American legal system has sought to create legal jurisprudence that emphasizes a common American culture of conformity.

There are many more things to say about Yoshino's argument and the main message of his book--which is that it is imperative, in our day and age, to think about the covering demands we are placing on people and to understand them as limiting civil rights. As Yoshino writes:

"We must find a way to protect difference that does not balkanize the country into separate fiefdoms of competing identity groups. We need a new paradigm of civil rights."

What I appreciate about his book is the elegance of his prose--the way that he weaves his gender/sexual/racial identity into the larger legal narrative he is telling. And that he makes this all very accessible to a broad audience interested in issues of identity, of assimilation, and of course, of civil and human rights.

And if you want to actually see and hear Yoshino discuss these issues (and you have a good 30 minutes to spare), you can hear his lecture at UCLA law school on this clip.

How do I know I'm Asian American?

I seem to be fond of obvious questions: What is Asian American Literature? How do I know I'm Asian American? But the truth is, I think if you start to really probe beneath the surface, you can see that the answers are not quite so obvious and the questions were meant to be provocative rather than simplistic.

The inspiration for today's post came from the discussion thread two days ago that followed my post about humor (particularly ethnic humor). Click here for the link. The comments started to dialogue about difference, particularly race, class, and gender differences (and we can throw in a host of others, like nationality and sexuality but you get my gist). Is there ever a time in a child's life when s/he is an innocent being, either without an awareness of difference or without judgment surrounding difference?

And more specifically, when do kids start to recognize racial difference, to see themselves as raced little people and to have values associated with those observations?

Any social psychologists in the blogosphere?

I don't know if I can recall the first time I was aware of my racial difference. One childhood incident does come to mind of being with my immigrant Chinese father in a park (I'm coding him this way so you get a feel for what he looks and sounds like) and I'm probably four or five and we're flying a kite, and this blond haired boy comes out of nowhere and leaps around us. He does this once, and when he does it a second time my father calls after him and says "I know what you're trying to do, stay away from our kite!" and that's when I see the pocketknife in the kid's hand. He seemed so big, that kid, like he was a teenager. But maybe he was only 13. And what I remember distinctly was that my Dad was both angry and ashamed. I could, of course, be wrong--and maybe I'm ascribing to my father my own emotions--that I became embarrassed and ashamed that we had been targeted by this kid. And somehow, in hindsight, I think it had to do with the fact that the kid was white and we were Asian.

I fully recognize that I could be reading backwards into this--except that this anecdote is one I only told for the first time a year ago--because it was a memory I had held so closely with feelings of shame and embarrassment that I had never wanted to discuss it with anyone before. And I always felt it had to do with my father's Chinese-ness, so perhaps there was something I overheard, something my memory is blocking about the kid replying to my father. Something my father said under his breath.

At any rate, is this how I knew I was Asian American or Chinese American or at least not white? I'm not sure. But I do think that my recognition of racial difference began around the time I was 5, coinciding with going to kindergarten and public school and playing with other kids in my mixed-race neighborhood (hey, this was California after all, and while not a racial dream state in the 1970s, I still lived in a racially mixed neighborhood).

So I guess I'm asking you, dear readers: when did YOU recognize your racial difference from others and start to think about race? How do you know what race you are even today?

[coda: I want to be really clear and say that I am not using "race" as a substitute for saying "people of color"--we ALL have a "race" and in as much as we choose to agree (consciously or not) in the construction of this very real fabrication (see the post Getting rid of race (December 14) if you are confused by my mumbo-jumbo language), having a racial identity is something that all of us have, even if those of us of a darker hue may think about it more often].

I'm Asian, You're Asian -- Let's Be Best Friends

Imagine this scenario: You are Asian American and in a social situation/gathering in which Asian Americans are definitely in the minority. At this social gathering you spot someone with an Asian face. Do you immediately go over to him/her? Do you make eye contact? Do you give the head nod? Do you ignore him/her and just mingle with other people?

I had this question put to me a few years ago by an Asian American friend who didn't understand why I was so fixated on issues of race. She, in this scenario, would not feel any special reason to go over to the fellow Asian person. I, on the other hand, would have definitely made an effort to find my fellow ethnic/racial counterpart, if not immediately than at some point during the gathering.

Now, having said that, I fully realize that just because we share a racial (and possibly ethnic) identity doesn't mean we'll be best friends. That we'll even like one another or have things in common to talk about or share common experiences.

So why make an effort to talk to the Asian American person? Because it's lonely to be the only one. Because we may, in fact, have common experiences as Asian Americans. Because as irrational as it may seem to be drawn towards someone based on race, it is a category one uses to make distinctions in a crowd--to organize the world.