Kenji Yoshino's Covering The Hidden Assault On Our Civil Rights

Conversion, passing, and covering; these are the three movements that Kenji Yoshino describes how America moves through gay rights in his novel, Covering the Hidden Assault on our Civil Rights. Covering is something that everyone does, and is defined as “to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream” (ix) as Yoshino describes. Kenji Yoshino writes Covering from his own experiences as a gay Japanese American lawyer. Yoshino was raised by his parents to be “100% American in America and 100% Japanese in Japan” (118) and believed that many other minority students were getting the same advice. From reading Covering, I have discovered that despite agreeing with Yoshino in many ways, I have also found that although being American in America was maybe the best then, it has changed throughout the years and many parents now teach their children to embrace their race wherever they are. Parents are a big influence on the way their children, thinks, acts, and even talks. The way that Yoshino was raised was …show more content…
has grown and transformed, it becomes quite the opposite. I rarely ever see minority races trying to avoid who they really are by assimilating to the white culture to such a degree as in the 70’s. What I see is that parents actually want their children to embrace their cultural background because so many of them are born in America or mixed that they don’t know their full identity. When I was just about four years old my mother enrolled my brother, sister, and me to dance at a Chinese studio. This was all a part of getting to know our Chinese background. I continued this for 14 years because I loved how the company had mixture of dances from all over Asia and included ballet. It just shows how America has accepted more culturally different people and let them bring their culture to the U.S. Opposite to what Yoshino was taught, I learned to accept not only who I am, but also what I am