Kenji Yoshino's Covering: The Hidden Assault On Our Civil Rights

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In the “Preface” and a chapter of Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights called “The New Civil Rights,” Kenji Yoshino, the Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU, questions the traditionally accepted idea of assimilation by bringing about the new idea of ‘covering.’ Covering, as Yoshino, describes it, is ‘to tone down a disfavored identity to fit the mainstream’(540). He recounts how he covers in his everyday life because he is homosexual and how even with the shift in societal views towards his sexuality, he still feels the need to cover due to what he calls ‘covering demands.’ The fact that Yoshino still perceives it necessary to cover his sexuality reflects on how there is wrongly a difference between our civil …show more content…

W. Winnicot regarding the ‘True Self’ and the ‘False Self.’ One’s True Self is the authentic one, the one that is truly completely them while the False Self is the mask that one dons for the world for protection due to covering demands. Covering demands include racism, homophobia, sexism, religious discrimination, and many more assaults on our individuality and personal rights. While normally the True Self and False Self live in harmony, Winnicot explains that there are extreme cases in which he believes the False Self can overtake the True Self. In the book Female Chauvinist Pigs, written by Ariel Levy, a staff writer for the New Yorker, Levy brings up the book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. In this novel, a slave named Tom is so loyal to his owner that he not only does not need to be shackled (because he would never run away), but he also sends nothing but kind words to his master when he sells him down the river and separates him from his family. His act of conformity and covering is what is called ‘tomming,’ which is to submit to what others believe you represent. In Tom’s case, his owner believe he represented property and treated him as such and therefore Tom came to believe that he was, in fact, no better than property. He adapts to his environment but allows his False Self, his slave image, to overtake his True Self and overpower his love for his own

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