Yoshino’s “Preface” from “Covering”

Kenji Yoshino, in the “Preface” from his book Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, discusses the concept of covering. Covering, as Yoshino defines it, is when an individual covers up a part of themselves in order to better fit into society. While this is essentially just assimilation, Yoshino concedes that the act of covering “is often necessary to fluid social interaction, to peaceful coexistence, and even to the dialogue through which difference is valued,” (Yoshino 983). So, people will cover their ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, religion, disabilities, and more in order to achieve these positive effects. For example, Selena Jilani admits in her article “My Daughter Passes for White” that when she was younger she would hide her ethnicity by throwing her “chicken tikka sandwiches, lovingly made by my mother, in the trash, so as not to infuse the school
with the odor of cumin and suffer my classmates’ incessant jokes,” (Jilani). Jilani covered her Pakistani background in order to assimilate and avoid all the negatives associated with standing out.

Personally, I believe that the aforementioned “peaceful coexistence” is the most powerful of the motivators to cover. At the end of the day, humans are social, group animals. If an individual in the group expresses an unpopular opinion or criticizes the group for something, there will always be the chance that that individual is removed from the group and isolated. This fear of isolation drives the individual to accept assimilation and to not make waves, creating a seemingly peaceful coexistence.

When people reject assimilation and stand up in defiance of the determined social norm, it can be hard to include them because they are standing against this peaceful coexistence. I believe that this defiance is also not well accepted because of envy from within the group. As Yoshino says so confidently, “Everyone covers…whether consciously or not” (Yoshino 981). So, when an individual doesn’t cover, the other members of the group are envious of that person’s willpower and feel angry with themselves for not doing the same. No one likes to admit that they’ve made a mistake and, depending on the scenario, it could be too late for them to resolve this error. So the group falls in on itself harder to assure each other that they are in the right and they exclude the individual.

This envy and exclusion can be seen with Jilani, the woman who threw out her chicken tikka sandwiches from earlier. Jilani’s daughter outwardly presents as white and “Among her peers, my daughter fits in the way I craved,” (Jilani). Here, the envy towards her daughter is quite clearly shown as she will not have to face the same challenges that Jilani faced despite having the same ethnicity. This envy inspires Jilani to view her daughter as a separate case from her own and, in a sense, exclude her. Jilani rationalizes this because, “After all, my bullies in school all looked like the daughter I have now,” (Jilani). Jilani associates her daughter not with herself, but with the group she has been trying so hard to assimilate into her whole life.