2008 Carolina Summer Reading Program: A Place To Practice Your "DDI Chops"

This year, incoming students who participate in the Carolina Summer Reading Program will be discussing Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights by Kenji Yoshino, Professor of Law at Yale University School of Law.

The book fits well with the topics that I have been considering in this blog as a way to supplement CFE's Teaching for Inclusion manual. Peter A. Coclanis, Chair of the Carolina Summer Reading Program Committee and Albert R. Newsome Professor of History writes that:

In Covering, Yoshino deftly blends autobiography and legal reasoning to make a case for the profound importance of individualism, autonomy, and self-expression in our conceptualization of civil and political rights. By introducing sociologist Erving Goffman's notion of "covering" — how people are formally or informally coerced into toning down stigmatized identities, even when such identities are known — into the legal lexicon, Yoshino has both broadened and calibrated more finely the way we think and talk about identity politics and civil rights.

Yoshino, who is Japanese-American and gay, draws much on his own identity markers in Covering, but the overall thesis is applicable to any and all people whose identities, for one reason or another, are subject to stigma and who, as a result, are prone to "covering" behaviors. In Yoshino's view, such behaviors — based on differences in race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability status, etc. — are not only harmful psychologically to those forced to cover, but also morally impoverishing to socially-dominant groups, and threatening to the civil rights of us all. In calling for broad social acceptance of individuality and self-expression, Yoshino challenges us to think more clearly about who we are and about what constitutes true equality, social justice, and human dignity.

It will be interesting to see what sort of conversations take place among students and faculty around this book. Will readers of this book accept the definition of personal identity that underlies the author's arguments, or will they interrogate Yoshino's assumptions further? Developing the skills to encourage such discussions is one of the main objectives of the Difficult Dialogues Initiative.