Kenji Yoshino's Covering Analysis

Kenji Yoshino’s Covering, explores assimilation of minorities to the Western cultural ideals and how the failure to assimilate to Western culture threatens the civil rights of minority groups. Kenji Yoshino, as a gay Asian American shares his experience with assimilation and how discrimination perpetuates against people who refuse to conform to the American white culture. People in the Western Society are discriminated against daily based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. For a person living in the Western Society it is ideal to be a white heterosexual male; if a person is anything but a white heterosexual male, they are forced to conform through conversion, passing, or covering. “Conversion”, “passing”, and “covering” are forms of …show more content…
The covering of affiliation is the avoidance of behaviors widely associated with an individual’s identity (catalyst). Identifiers that help form affiliations to an individual’s race, when put on paper is race and when skin color cannot help to make the assumption is dialect and accents. In 2002, a study was conducted to show the impact of discrimination against those who flaunt their racial identity, most of the time unknowingly. A name is an evident indicator of race. No individual has control over their given name or their race but names stem from culture and discrimination is made of the basis of names. In the study resumes were presented to employers, the only thing that differentiated the resumes were the names that headed them. One resume consisted of a “’white sounding’ ” name like Paul Smith or Donald George, while the other consisted of an “’African-American’ ” sounding name such as LaShonda Jones or Jamar Wilson (137). Of the two resumes, the “‘white’ resumes received 50 percent more callbacks from employers than the ’African-American’ ones” (137). Though this study was conducted thirteen years ago, names still effect the perception of ethnic people in America. An individual with a name Daquan is perceived as a thug and an individual with a name LaTora is perceived as ghetto. This stigmatizes and assumptions placed on names influence how women of …show more content…
In certain setting and situations individuals lack control over the axes of appearance and affiliation but when it comes to the axes of activism and association in covering the choice to assimilate and cover those axes is the individuals. The axes of activism and association coincide, because in both circumstances the individual discriminated against is in power to choose whether or not they assimilate by covering. Activism is the advocacy or opposition of an individual’s group’s identity and association is the avoidance of an individual’s group members (catalyst). If an individual is opposed to their group’s identity they are more likely to avoid their members of their group. Activism and association is about forming a class distinction. Women of color who are looking to progress will marry outside of their race—they will marry a white man. The women of color who detach themselves from their racial groups seek to “negate every possible stereotype” about their race through their behaviors, beliefs, and associations (129). In an attempt to elevate themselves, women of color will also put other women of color down thinking it will erase their “racial identity” (129). In an attempt to conform, women of color will endure pain by pretending to be okay with discriminatory comments and also degrade themselves