Overview

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. Given its pervasiveness, we may experience this pressure to be a simple fact of social life. Against conventional understanding, Kenji Yoshino argues that the demand to cover can pose a hidden threat to our civil rights. 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. 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. In a wide-ranging analysis, Yoshino demonstrates that American civil rights law has generally ignored the threat posed by these covering demands. With passion and rigor, he shows that the work of civil rights will not be complete until it attends to the harms of coerced conformity.

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9781515912118

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As healing as it is polemical, this book has tremendous potential as a touchstone in the struggle for universal human dignity. ---Publishers Weekly Starred Review

Author Information

Kenji Yoshino is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of Law. Previously, he taught at Yale Law School, where he served as deputy dean and became the inaugural Guido Calabresi Professor in 2006. He is also the author of Speak Now and A Thousand Times More Fair. Patrick Lawlor has recorded over three hundred audiobooks in just about every genre. He has been an Audie Award finalist multiple times and has garnered several AudioFile Earphones Awards, a Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Award, and many Library Journal and Kirkus starred audio reviews.

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