As an openly gay Asian American, Kenji Yoshino’s entire life has been a struggle with the concept of assimilation. Yoshino resists the traditional American ideal of the great “melting pot,” because it demands assimilation and detracts from authenticity by encouraging people to conform to a certain American standard. Yoshino, the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at the NYU School of Law, spoke Thursday evening in the Kennedy Auditorium about prejudices inherent in American culture and Civil Rights legislation, and about his own journey of personal acceptance as an academic scholar.
Yoshino sees three stages of assimilation: Conversion, passing, and covering. Yoshino is able to remember and point to the times in his life when he went through all of these stages. After realizing his sexuality as an undergrad at Harvard, he felt the need to convert to the status quo and entered into a serious depression during his graduate studies at Oxford. He did not feel as though he could succeed as a gay man and prayed instead that he could be straight.
When Yoshino finally came to terms with his sexuality, he still did not feel comfortable with others knowing his true identity. In other words, he knew that he was gay but still wished to pass as a straight man. He was so afraid of “outing” himself to the law community that he did not want to take a class about LGBT rights that was being offered at Oxford. Yoshino spoke to the professor, who told Yoshino that if he bought the books and did the readings, the professor would be happy to talk with him in a private setting. Yoshino took advantage of this opportunity and discovered his passion for constitutional law and LGBT rights.
When Yoshino was hired as a junior faculty member at Yale, he was advised by a colleague to “be a homosexual professional, not a professional homosexual.” What Yoshino was effectively being asked to do was downplay his true identity. By this time he was openly gay but was still pressured to cover up his identity. For several years Yoshino followed this suggestion and did not teach about gay rights or participate as an activist, but eventually realized that to live comfortably, he had to challenge the demand that he tone down his identity, and he hasn’t looked back since.
Yoshino thinks that the three phases of conversion, passing and covering do not apply on just a personal level, but also are stages that the LGBT rights movement as a whole has gone through. Throughout the early part of the 20th century, gay people were urged to try to convert. Towards the end of the century, the change was made from conversion to passing, a change that is exemplified in the rules regarding enrolling in the military. The “don’t ask don’t tell” policy that was implemented in 1993 is an example of the government asking gay individuals to pass as straight. Somewhere around the turn of the century, with the gay marriage debate, arose the covering phase, where gay individuals are accepted but encouraged to cover their identities by not flaunting their sexuality.
There is an inherent murkiness in the legal solutions to this sort discrimination, Yoshino said. It is easier, under the law, to protest against categorical exclusion; African Americans fought categorical exclusion successfully in the 1960s. When the discrimination is not against identity but rather the apparentness of that identity, then claims are much harder to make. “For many of our social ills,” said Yoshino, “the answer is not legal, it’s cultural. The law is too blunt an instrument to catch the fine-grained issues at play.”
So what is the solution, if claims of discrimination of this kind are nearly impossible to validate? Yoshino emphasized the importance of dialogue. If we are to solve these deep-seated issues, we must move beyond the traditional legal frameworks to fight discrimination. “It’s about winnowing out good forms of assimilation from bad forms of assimilation,” Yoshino said.
Yoshino sees three stages of assimilation: Conversion, passing, and covering. Yoshino is able to remember and point to the times in his life when he went through all of these stages. After realizing his sexuality as an undergrad at Harvard, he felt the need to convert to the status quo and entered into a serious depression during his graduate studies at Oxford. He did not feel as though he could succeed as a gay man and prayed instead that he could be straight.
When Yoshino finally came to terms with his sexuality, he still did not feel comfortable with others knowing his true identity. In other words, he knew that he was gay but still wished to pass as a straight man. He was so afraid of “outing” himself to the law community that he did not want to take a class about LGBT rights that was being offered at Oxford. Yoshino spoke to the professor, who told Yoshino that if he bought the books and did the readings, the professor would be happy to talk with him in a private setting. Yoshino took advantage of this opportunity and discovered his passion for constitutional law and LGBT rights.
When Yoshino was hired as a junior faculty member at Yale, he was advised by a colleague to “be a homosexual professional, not a professional homosexual.” What Yoshino was effectively being asked to do was downplay his true identity. By this time he was openly gay but was still pressured to cover up his identity. For several years Yoshino followed this suggestion and did not teach about gay rights or participate as an activist, but eventually realized that to live comfortably, he had to challenge the demand that he tone down his identity, and he hasn’t looked back since.
Yoshino thinks that the three phases of conversion, passing and covering do not apply on just a personal level, but also are stages that the LGBT rights movement as a whole has gone through. Throughout the early part of the 20th century, gay people were urged to try to convert. Towards the end of the century, the change was made from conversion to passing, a change that is exemplified in the rules regarding enrolling in the military. The “don’t ask don’t tell” policy that was implemented in 1993 is an example of the government asking gay individuals to pass as straight. Somewhere around the turn of the century, with the gay marriage debate, arose the covering phase, where gay individuals are accepted but encouraged to cover their identities by not flaunting their sexuality.
There is an inherent murkiness in the legal solutions to this sort discrimination, Yoshino said. It is easier, under the law, to protest against categorical exclusion; African Americans fought categorical exclusion successfully in the 1960s. When the discrimination is not against identity but rather the apparentness of that identity, then claims are much harder to make. “For many of our social ills,” said Yoshino, “the answer is not legal, it’s cultural. The law is too blunt an instrument to catch the fine-grained issues at play.”
So what is the solution, if claims of discrimination of this kind are nearly impossible to validate? Yoshino emphasized the importance of dialogue. If we are to solve these deep-seated issues, we must move beyond the traditional legal frameworks to fight discrimination. “It’s about winnowing out good forms of assimilation from bad forms of assimilation,” Yoshino said.
