|
Much
like its author, Covering is a hybrid: Kenji Yoshino
began his education as a poet and finished as a lawyer; Covering
blends memoir with legal analysis, passion with reality, the
individual with the universal. Addressing the future of civil
rights via its past and its present (and his own), Yoshino
manages not only to elucidate the ways in which the current
civil rights movement finds itself lost but also to draw a
map to help it out of those dark woods.
Currently,
Yoshino says discrimination, as a societal entity, is transitioning.
Discrimination has moved beyond mere being and mere existence:
Groups are no longer targeted simply because they are different.
A gay person is equal to a straight person, just as a black
person is equal to a white person—as long as they act
straight and white. In other words, discrimination no longer
attacks the gay for being gay or the black for being black
but for acting the way they are.
Therefore,
civil rights laws must evolve along the same trajectory as
discrimination: Rather than protect a person because he is
a certain way, the law must protect him because he behaves
as such. Civil rights laws need to focus now on liberty rather
than equality: the freedom to display same-sex affection in
public, the freedom to speak foreign languages in the workplace,
the freedom not to cover. Ultimately, civil rights laws need
to protect the freedom to be the authentic, true self that
exists within every person, whether or not that person belongs
to a traditional minority group. That is, these laws must
protect the on-the-clock construction worker's freedom to
belt out Céline Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" just as it must
protect my freedom to hold my lover's hand in the movie theater.
Ultimately,
Yoshino admits, something as abstract as a law cannot protect
the entire spectrum of human behavior. Instead, he sees the
law as being a complement to social activism and change. The
real solution is something he calls a "reason-forcing conversation."
Assimilation and covering, in some cases, are necessary evils:
Psychotic homicidal maniacs should not have the freedom to
act like psychotic homicidal maniacs, just as a 911 operator
who lives in rural Kentucky needs to speak English, rather
than Spanish or Portuguese or Zulu, at work. When confronted
with a demand to cover, though, Yoshino wants us to ask why
and to determine whether covering is justified. Even if the
law is unable to assist in this reason-forcing conversation,
those who care about civil rights should make their own demands:
the demand to converse, the demand to justify, and the demand
to have a reason-forcing conversation.
Stylistically,
Covering is solid. Though Covering contains
many legal and philosophical explanations, Yoshino never allows
his prose to become dry or leaden. Rather, the lines of prose
read almost as if they were lines of poetry, elegantly shedding
light on various gems that Yoshino decides to illuminate.
Further, Yoshino has managed not only to discover the perfect
ratio of personal narrative and objective analysis but also
to find the best way to mix the two. Because he does focus
on his own individual experience, as well as the experiences
of others, Yoshino never lets his arguments for liberty become
too abstract, too ethereal, or too intellectual.
The argument
itself, however, is a bit more susceptible to questioning.
By the end, Yoshino appears too idealistic, not only in his
summary of contemporary discrimination and civil rights but
also in his faith in society's ability to overcome society.
Yoshino addresses discrimination only as a social entity—an
abstract cultural phenomenon distilled from particularity—and
not any one individual's own discriminatory opinions. His
ultimate solution to discrimination seems to boil down to
"Let's talk about this." While that approach may work to quell
any sort of discrimination in a specific group of people—such
as intellectuals, academics, the literate—I cannot imagine
RuPaul and Carson Kressley emerging victorious from a "reason-forcing
conversation" over crumpets and tea with the murderers of
Matthew Shepard and Fred Phelps, head of the organization
that runs godhatesfag.com and godhatesamerica.com. Talking
certainly has the ability to incite change, but any civil
rights program must have ways to deal with the extremists
who hold their hands over their ears and sing "LA LA LA" while
they tie you to a fence post or force you to the back of the
bus. Yoshino's new paradigm, for the most part, seems to lack
that sort of safeguard.
On the
whole, however, the book does move the goal of human flourishing,
as Yoshino puts it, a step in the right direction. Perhaps
it alone will not hold up an entire movement, but, to twist
a proverb a bit, every journey begins with a single word,
and Yoshino has written quite a few of them.
(March,
2007)
|
