Pressure To Cover By Kenji Yoshino Summary

Living in Puerto Rico, I remember when I, being less than 10 years old, used to provoke my brother (9 years older than me) to get him mad for childish enjoyment. He would get so mad that we would engage in physical fist fights. My mom would furiously snap at my older brother, even calling him abusive. I knew I started, but I could not say that I did to avoid the punishment. Enraged, he would stare at me and call me out without succeeding in convincing my mother. It was then, when he would conclusively yell either “Of course, because I’m the black one,” or “Yeah, he’s the whiter one. That’s why!” Even though, I am, indeed, of a lighter skin tone than he is, that was not the reason why he was blamed. For my mother, the reason was the age difference

In a country that proclaims to be founded on the ideas of freedom and protection of the citizens’ rights, a country founded in the dreams of many who seek to break chains of oppression or better opportunities, there’s an evident discrepancy in the image. In “Pressure to Cover,” Kenji Yoshino demonstrates through various examples the gaps in the system that has been attemptedly repaired during the Civil Rights movement, especially after so much has been done to pursue the expansion civil rights seemingly without much accomplishment. While Yoshino covers a broad analysis of the discriminatory devices found within American society, it is important to revise one of few superficially discussed ideas in the essay: the role of immutable and mutable traits. I will provide a deeper insight than Yoshino accomplishes into these traits, which do not simply exist as one or the other, but rather as interconnected, relative

Thus, being conveyed in the African American population as a cultural identifier, American Airlines had created a policy that restricted a group of people from fully expressing their culture, discriminatorily forcing them to “fade into the mainstream.” And still, there’s the matter that cultural beliefs and practices are often engraved into one’s identity, which is composed of immutable traits. While the court judged cornrows to be mutable due to the idea that they are simply a chosen hairstyle popularized by a white actress (even though the fact that a white actress uses a mainly African American attribute does not make such attribute a holistic, white, American attribute), cornrows had become an immutable trait for Rogers, explaining her concern and motive to sue for her rights. In such way it becomes noticeable how Yoshino and the courts make it seem as if there’s a standard, universal guideline as to what traits are immutable or mutable, and contrary to that opinion, Roger’s case fully proves that the classification of an attribute as immutable or mutable can only be relative, and that the one opinion that should surpass all classifications of the attribute is that belonging to the one identifying with such