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Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
01:08:59
Have you ever downplayed some aspect of your identity? Maybe you don’t hide it, but you don’t bring it up with certain people, either. It turns out that these subtle disguises can have powerful effects on how we view ourselves. This week, we talk with legal scholar Kenji Yoshino about what happens when we soften or edit our true selves.
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- [00:00]
Shankar Vedantam
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. In November 1971, a man showed up at a flight counter for Northwest Orient Airlines in Portland. He asked to buy a one way ticket to Seattle. The man provided his name when he bought the ticket. Dan Cooper. He was carrying a black briefcase. Once on board the aircraft and en route to Seattle, the man showed a flight attendant the contents of his briefcase. It looked like a bomb. In return for releasing passengers unharmed, he demanded $200,000. When the plane landed, he also added an odd request. He wanted four parachutes. After the plane landed in Seattle, the ransom and parachutes were delivered. Dan Cooper allowed the passengers to disembark, but kept the crew on board. He demanded the plane be refueled and fly to Mexico City. The plane took off a second time. The hijacker ordered the crew to stay in the cockpit. He also demanded the curtains between the coach cabin and first class be closed. With no one watching him, he opened the rear exit on the plane and leaped with his parachute and his money into a moonless night. Dan Cooper was never caught. His identity remains a mystery. Clearly, the man who showed up at the airline counter that day was not who he said he was. The story of his hijacking, while real, is the stuff of movies and novels. Today on the show, we look at how many of us go to great lengths to disguise who we are. Most of the time it isn't because we are planning anything nefarious. It's because we want to fit in or be taken seriously. But such disguises don't just fool others. They have powerful effects on us. What happens when we pretend we are not who we are? This week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Abbott. Let's talk about a small thing that can make a big difference if you have diabetes. The Freestyle Libre 3 sensor. The sensor gives you real time glucose readings so you can see the impact of every meal and activity. To make better choices, this is progress, you can try the sensor at FreestyleLibre US terms and conditions apply for prescription only safety info found @freestylelibre US support for hidden brain comes from ADT. From ADT comes trusted neighbor, the new standard in home access. Through the ADT app, you easily grant and automate event based or scheduled access for planned guests without interrupting your day. And notify trusted individuals of events like alarms or packages. Visit ADT.com when every second counts. Count on ADT requires ADT complete pro monitoring plan and compatible devices. Copyright 2025 ADT LLC. All rights reserved. Who are we really and how much of our real selves can we show to the world? These are questions all of us wrestle with. Sometimes we decide to bear it all. Other times we decide to cover up. Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar at New York University who studies the effects these choices have on us and on those around us. Kenji Yoshino, welcome to Hidden Brain.
- [04:00]
Kenji Yoshino
Thank you so much for having me.
- [04:03]
Shankar Vedantam
Kenji, take me back in time to the story of a very prominent American who went to great lengths to manage how people saw him. You've studied America's 32nd president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Tell me his story.
- [04:18]
Kenji Yoshino
So Franklin Delano Roosevelt was struck by polio, and in the wake of that, had a motor disability where he was in a wheelchair. And he made every effort to. To downplay this to the American public, and that included having photographs taken of him only from the waist up. And he was able to minimize or edit his public Persona so that his disability was in the background rather than in the foreground of his interactions with others.
- [04:51]
Margaret Thatcher
And I am certain that on this day, my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the presidency, I will address them with a candor and a decision which the President.
- [05:06]
Shankar Vedantam
When I think back to photographs I've seen of fdr, I often see him, you know, sitting behind a desk with people standing around him. And of course, he looks very presidential when he does that. But perhaps some of this was also with a view to hiding the fact that he found it difficult to stand and to walk.
- [05:22]
Kenji Yoshino
That's exactly right. And in fact, we know that he used to make sure that he was seated behind a table before his cabinet entered so that nobody needed to see him kind of laboriously getting in or out of his seat. So it was a very kind of manicured and orchestrated and choreographed appearance that he gave to the world.
- [05:49]
Shankar Vedantam
I understand that FDR also had a car specially designed for him.
- [05:55]
Kenji Yoshino
Yes. So this is a car that he could drive with his hands only, so things like the gas pedal or the brakes could all be manipulated through his hands. And he made a special point of being photographed driving around in this car to give the impression that he was just as capable of driving as anybody else.
- [06:20]
Shankar Vedantam
What's striking about the story, of course, is that people knew that the President had a disability, that he had polio. It wasn't a secret. But yet he went to these lengths in some ways to give the impression that he was okay.
- [06:32]
Kenji Yoshino
That's exactly right. So, again, he wasn't trying to fool anybody, nor could he have, but what he was trying to do was to soften the impression that this made a difference.
- [06:45]
Shankar Vedantam
I want to play you some tape, Kenji, featuring Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of Britain. In 1980, the year she gave the speech, unemployment was rising in Britain and the economy was in recession. Some of her critics urged her to execute a U turn, reversing the changes she had made. Here's how she responded to those waiting.
- [07:06]
Margaret Thatcher
With bated breath for that favorite media catchphrase, the U turn. I have only one thing to say. You turn if you want to the ladies not for turning.
- [07:22]
Shankar Vedantam
Listening to that clip, Kenji, it's hard not to notice Margaret Thatcher's distinctive speaking voice.
- [07:28]
Kenji Yoshino
Yes, absolutely. And one of the things that, like, you know, fdr, she did was to carefully, you know, orchestrate her speaking voice. So when she was first standing for prime minister, her handlers came to her and said, you need to go into voice coaching.
- [07:48]
Shankar Vedantam
Wow.
- [07:48]
Kenji Yoshino
And what they were doing was saying to her, look, you speak with a working class accent, so you need to posh up your voice. You're a grocer's daughter. And so they told her that the voice coaching would allow her to lower her voice so that she would have more executive voice.
- [08:05]
Shankar Vedantam
Wow.
- [08:06]
Kenji Yoshino
She dutifully went into the voice coaching and emerged on the other side with a more patrician, resonant voice. And her voice became one of the most distinctive aspects of her, where when you hear that voice, you hear the voice of authority.
- [08:20]
Margaret Thatcher
No confidence on money, no confidence on the economy. So, yes, the right honorable gentleman would be glad to hand it all over, but what is the point in trying to get elected to Parliament only to hand over your sterling and to hand over the powers of this House to you?
- [08:38]
Shankar Vedantam
And of course, I mean, she was known as the Iron lady. And in some ways, that voice added to that impression.
- [08:45]
Kenji Yoshino
Exactly right.
- [08:56]
Shankar Vedantam
So in this case, Margaret Thatcher wasn't hiding a physical disability. She was hiding the fact that she came from a blue collar. But again, it wasn't a secret that she came from a blue collar background. People knew that she was a grocer's daughter, but in some ways, she, again, was giving people the illusion that she wasn't.
- [09:13]
Kenji Yoshino
Exactly. So here we have a second example of someone who is not trying to hide who they are, but is trying to sort of manage or soften or engage in impression management because she knows that she has a quality that is an outsider quality that people are not going to accept as easily in someone who occupies a position of power.
- [09:41]
Shankar Vedantam
I want to play you another piece of tape, Kenji. This one features an actor Ben Kingsley talking about what it was like to be offered the lead role in the movie Gandhi, a performance for which he would ultimately receive an Academy Award. He's recounting here how it felt like to look in the mirror after he was made to look like Mahatma Gandhi. He didn't know at this point whether director Richard Attenborough, who had spent years trying to make the movie, was going to give him the part.
- [10:08]
Margaret Thatcher
And during this moment where I'm staring in the mirror, Attenborough walked into the dressing room. Dickie slumped into a chair. I thought, oh, dear, this doesn't look good. He slumped, he collapsed. I didn't realize that it was the collapse of a man who'd reached the end of a very, very, very long journey, because from his collapsed posture, he murmured, ben, I want you to do it.
- [10:32]
Shankar Vedantam
So, Kenji actors, of course, are professionally trained to disguise themselves. Ben Kingsley was pretending to be someone he was not. But you say he wasn't just playing the role of Gandhi.
- [10:43]
Kenji Yoshino
Yeah. So Ben Kingsley was born Krishna Banji, and he changed his name when he began his theatrical career because he thought that his birth name would limit the roles that he would be able to acquire. So the irony is that he became Ben Kingsley, but then also went back to playing Gandhi. So there's a kind of Russian doll nesting quality to this. But the thing that he has in common with the other two figures you were describing is, again, he understood that it could be career consequential for him to present himself as his full, authentic self. And he modulated aspects of his identity because he knew exactly what the culture needed from him and he assimilated to that culture.
- [11:35]
Shankar Vedantam
And, of course, he's not the only actor to have done so. There is a long list of actors and musicians and performers who have changed their names to have stage names that sound more charismatic, if you will, than their given names.
- [11:49]
Kenji Yoshino
Absolutely. And they tend to be sort of more popular names that are in the semantic stock. Right. And so you tend to see actors changing their names in the direction of something that will be more kind of broadly intelligible, more memorable, more part of the semantic stock. Right. Of the country that they're performing in.
- [12:17]
Shankar Vedantam
All these figures were very visible. Franklin Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher and Ben Kingsley lived in the public eye. And yet there were aspects of themselves that they played down. They were hiding, but hiding in plain sight. When we come back, the subtle ways in which we all disguise our identities and what this subterfuge costs us. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar at New York University. He says that people who feel shame about their identities or fear how they will be treated by others often disguise themselves in three ways, all of which he has done himself. Kenji, let's spend a little time with your own story. You first realized you needed to disguise who you were when you were at boarding school. What did you feel you needed to hide?
- [13:34]
Kenji Yoshino
I came to the realization that I was gay fairly early in my life. And I think I knew that from a very young age, but was still in this phase of hoping that this would go away. And one of the ways in which I willed it to go away was by having a girlfriend. And, of course, this has collateral consequences on other people. So I look back with regret on what I put her through because I wasn't able to be my fully authentic self. But this was in the mid-80s, and I think that this is unfortunately a very common narrative.
- [14:12]
Shankar Vedantam
I understand that when you got to college, you directed all your energies into academic pursuits. Were you using your studies to hide your identity now?
- [14:23]
Kenji Yoshino
Yes. I think that this is something that I have heard in a lot of LGBT individuals, and perhaps more generally individuals who are kind of overachievers in one domain of their life in order to compensate for some perceived lack in another domain. Poetry was a great solace for me because it allowed me to articulate what I was going through without necessarily being so public about it. So poetry was more public than thought, but it was more private than prose. And I found a great comfort in being able to express myself without feeling I was completely exposed.
- [15:13]
Shankar Vedantam
So after college, you went to England on a Rhodes Scholarship, but you became depressed when you were in England. Tell me what happened, Kenji.
- [15:21]
Kenji Yoshino
It is a very, very dark time in my life. The only consistent foray I made from my college rooms in the first months I was there was to go to the college chapel where I prayed to gods I wasn't even sure I believed in for conversion to heterosexuality. So this is the most aggressive form of assimilation where you desire to change the underlying identity altogether. And it's very difficult, Shankar, for me to remember that young man knelt down in prayer because he so ardently wished the annihilation of the human being I have become. So I'm now currently happily married. My husband and I have two kids, and so on and so forth. But that would have been unimaginable to that young. This is 1991. He just thought, if I'm Going to have any kind of life at all, not just a professional life, but also, perhaps more importantly to him at the time, a personal life of marriage and children. That it was inconceivable that you could be an openly gay person and have that life. So what I desperately wanted was to convert and to change the underlying identity.
- [16:40]
Shankar Vedantam
At some point during your time in England, Kenji, you went to see a psychiatrist. Tell me what happened when you talked with him and how it turned out.
- [16:49]
Kenji Yoshino
There was one pivotal conversation that became a touchstone for my young adult life where he at one point said, can you just describe to me what it feels like to be attracted to somebody? Like, who are you attracted to describe someone who is attractive? And I said, I absolutely cannot do that because it is perverted. And he said, in words that I will never forget, it is not perverted. It is thwarted. And that sort of paradigm shift, from thinking about my own desires as being something that were properly stigmatized to thinking that this is actually just something that is blocked right, was just a transformative shift in my own thinking.
- [17:39]
Shankar Vedantam
So this insight helped you accept your identity as a gay man, but when you returned to the United States to go to law school, were you open about being gay?
- [17:48]
Kenji Yoshino
I was not. And I think about this as a movement from one phase of assimilation to another. So if the first phase was trying to convert and responding to really the demand for conversion which I experienced in society at large, the second phase was, I'm not going to convert, but I am going to pass. And what I mean by that is I had by that point accepted the fact that I was gay and I was not trying to change the underlying identity, but I was nonetheless extremely closeted and not willing to share that identity with anyone in the community around me.
- [18:30]
Shankar Vedantam
Kenji saw the school was offering a class about sexual orientation in the law. He desperately wanted to take the course, but wondered what message it would send.
- [18:41]
Kenji Yoshino
And I really debated whether or not I should take the class, because I thought if I sign up for this class, it's a very small community. The class lists are all posted in the hallway. And the moment where I put my name on that list, I have effectively outed myself to the entire community. I thought at that time the only people who would be caught, you know, taking a class called Sexual Orientation the Law were members of the LGBTQIA community. And then maybe some women, some righteous straight woman, but a straight man would not be caught, you know, touching a class like this with a 10 foot pole.
- [19:28]
Shankar Vedantam
Kenji eventually started to come out of the closet. He Got a boyfriend, Paul, but went to great lengths to hide Paul from the world.
- [19:36]
Kenji Yoshino
This is a point of real tension in my relationship with him because Paul, quite rightly, you know, felt that I was downplaying him or hiding him in ways that suggested I was ashamed of the relationship and that, you know, he really deserved better. And the idea of holding somebody's hand in public or showing public displays of same sex, you know, affection were all sort of verboten at this time for me.
- [20:06]
Shankar Vedantam
So eventually, Kenji, you became a law professor, and at one point, you received a piece of advice from a colleague that backed up your decision to disguise yourself in the way that you were disguising yourself. What was this advice?
- [20:21]
Kenji Yoshino
So the advice that I got when I started teaching as a junior professor was by a very well meaning, very kind colleague who wanted only good things for me. And he put his arm around me as we were walking down the hall, and he said, you know, Kenji, you'll have a lot smoother ride to getting tenure if you are a homosexual professional rather than a professional homosexual. And I knew exactly what he meant. What he meant was, you'll do much better if you are the mainstream constitutional law professor who teaches separation of powers and federalism and judicial review and just happens to be gay on the side as an extracurricular activity, than you will if you are the gay rights professor who teaches gay rights subjects and writes on gay rights issues and works on gay rights cases. Unfortunately, of course, it was the latter that I wanted to do. This was now 1996, a time when the ice was finally breaking up on the LGBTQI landscape. The Romer vs Evans case had just been decided. It was really clear that we were barreling our way towards Lawrence versus Texas in 2003, which was the Brown v. Board of the gay rights movement. And I did not want to be on the sidelines for that. But what he was clearly saying was, if you want to get tenure here, you really need to manage your identity, and there's just a limit to how gay you can be in this environment and expect to succeed.
- [21:58]
Shankar Vedantam
So, in other words, be gay, but don't flaunt it.
- [22:02]
Kenji Yoshino
Exactly. And the reason that that was so utterly painful for me was it was someone I really admired and trusted. And he was saying, actually, there's another hurdle that you need to wrestle with, right? Which is you don't need to be straight, right? So you don't need to convert, you don't need to be in the closet. That is, you don't need to pass, but you do need to, as you put it, Shankar, not flaunt. You need to downplay, mute, edit your identity so that the rest of us can feel more comfortable around you. So that was a moment when I had this pit in my stomach, and I realized that I needed to engage in yet more kind of identity management when I thought that the era of that was long over in my own life.
- [22:50]
Shankar Vedantam
So one day you came by a book that transformed your understanding of what was happening to you and what was happening around you. Can you paint me a picture of this epiphany, Kenji?
- [23:01]
Kenji Yoshino
Yes. I'm sure this will resonate with most readers, right, who read a book and it so aptly describes something in their own life that they realize that they will never be able to see the world in the same way again. And that book for me was Erving Goffman's book, Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. So Erving Goffman is a very eminent sociologist, and one of the things that he was smartest about was the presentation of the self. So in this book about stigma, he said that individuals who are quite open about the fact that they belong to a stigmatized group, open because they either cannot or will not, you know, hide that fact, nonetheless expend an enormous amount of energy to downplay that identity so that others around them can have greater comfort. And he called this phenomenon covering. And the reason that this was so transformative for me was that I understood to my very bones right, what I was being asked to do. But I didn't have a word for it. I had a word for, yes, change your identity. That was conversion. I had a word for, you can have the identity but hide it from everybody that was passing. But I did not have the word for, you can be gay and say that you're gay, but make sure that you soften it, mute it, edit it, downplay it so that other people around you can feel more comfortable. So this I am out of the closet, but I'm still being asked to assimilate in these ways was what I was really struggling with, and I couldn't name it. And what Irving Goffman did, and it's really like a throwaway line. I think it's two pages in his book where he talks about this, but he just gave me a word that changed my life because I thought this is what I was being asked to do when that wonderful colleague of mine said to me, be a homosexual professional rather than a professional homosexual. Because that colleague was not saying, don't be gay or don't say that you're gay. He was saying, it's fine for you to be gay and say that you're gay, but don't flaunt it. And covering was what he was asking me to do. So I knew that would forevermore be attuned to these covering demands as a kind of assimilation I would be asked to engage in on the other side of the closet door.
- [25:34]
Shankar Vedantam
And of course, once you had the vocabulary for this, you started to see examples of this in the larger culture. Everyone knew that FDR had polio, but he goes to great lengths to disguise the fact that he has polio. Everyone knows that Margaret Thatcher is a woman and came from a blue collar background, but she goes to great lengths not to sound overly feminine or overly blue collar.
- [25:57]
Kenji Yoshino
That's exactly right. So once I had this term covering, I was able to see it everywhere. In fact, I was unable not to see it everywhere in social life. And the important insight there is that when we're talking about conversion or when we're talking about passing, these are not strategies that are available to everybody. So if you have immutable identity like race, you're gonna be limited in how much you can convert that or pass. But notice what happens when we get to covering. Covering demands direct themselves at the behavioral aspects of an identity. So that means every single person can cover. So unlike conversion and passing, covering is a truly universal experience for anyone who has a stigmatized or outsider identity. And I would add to that that I think we understand it is not normal to be completely normal along all dimensions, that all of us have some outsider identities. And so therefore all of us will have experienced the covering demand. So again, Margaret Thatcher, Franklin, Delano Roosevelt, Ben Kingsley, there's nothing that they could do to convert or to pass with regard to their identities, whether that was disability or gender or race or national origin. But they were all able to cover by modifying aspects of their identity. So I will cover by making sure I'm only photographed from the waist up to hide my disability. Or I will cover by going to voice coaching to scrub my working class accent. Or I will cover by changing my name so that people don't have immediate associations about what roles I might be appropriate for and pigeonhole me in a very narrow area of the theater world. These are all acts of covering, and they testify to how universal this is.
- [28:11]
Shankar Vedantam
Think about a hard driving workplace. You're a new mom. Do you hesitate to put up pictures of your children on your desk? That's what Kenji would call covering. He cites studies that show that in such workplaces women face a motherhood penalty.
- [28:27]
Kenji Yoshino
There are social science studies that are quite depressing on this point. Oh, she's now a caregiver, she'll be less committed to work. There's a follow on study by Beatrice Aranda and Peter Glick that says, is there anything that women can do to mitigate or eliminate the motherhood penalty? As it turns out, there's nothing you can do to eliminate it. But you can mitigate the motherhood penalty if you engage in behavior that is work, devotional, where you never ever talk about your children and you constantly talk about your infinite capacity to take on more work. That, in my terminology, is covering.
- [29:07]
Shankar Vedantam
I'm thinking about the famous writer and activist Helen Keller. She was blind, but she was uncomfortable about being photographed from angles that showed her protruding eye at one point. She later had her eyes replaced with glass eyes. And in fact, sometimes, you know, journalists would comment on how beautiful her eyes were.
- [29:26]
Kenji Yoshino
That was an incredibly painful irony. And one of the richnesses of that anecdote that you just told is that if you were to ask somebody who the most famous disability rights advocate was, they would probably say Helen Keller. So you would imagine that she would lean heavily into her disability and her identity as a person who was blind, among other things. But the fact that she engaged in this cosmetic adjustment to appear more kind of normal and mainstream testifies to the fact that none of us ever evolve away from the force of these covering demands. I also want to make really clear that in all these instances, I'm not victim blaming. I'm not saying that, oh, FDR or Margaret Thatcher or Ben Kingsley or Helen Keller were self hating or that they should have had more pride in their identity. I'm actually not interested in that at all. What I'm interested in is looking at the societal demand that in order to be seen as a full, equal, dignified member of society, that you would need to downplay or edit these aspects of your identity. And that to me shows how much further we have to go in achieving full equality. Alongside these stigmatized traits are all sort.
- [30:49]
Shankar Vedantam
Of cosmetic interventions in some ways forms of covering? I mean, you know, from the very trivial about the, you know, the bald man who has a comb over or you know, the person who is dying their hair because their hair is turning gray. Are these all examples of covering?
- [31:04]
Kenji Yoshino
I always answer that by saying, yes, there are all forms of covering, but not all forms of covering are problematic. So if I came to work alongside you and I was rapidly obnoxious to everybody in the workplace, and you finally took me aside and said, kenji, knock it off. You're driving everyone to distraction. And I said, well, wait a minute, Shankar, this is my authentic self. This is who I am. I just happen to be an incredibly obnoxious person. And you told me that you valued authenticity in the workplace and so this is what you get. I would offer to you that that is covering that you're requiring of me, but that a world in which I win that argument with you is a world in which none of us want to live. So that means that there are some forms of covering that are at least neutral, but potentially even positive or even essential to the smooth functioning of a workplace or of a community. And that in turn pushes me to the harder question of, okay, if they're good forms of covering and bad forms of covering, how do we distinguish between the good and bad forms? And to me it's really about societal values. That's my answer of how we distinguish between the good and the bad forms. Because if you actually say to somebody, yes, you have to, you know, downplay your obnoxious personality, and I say, well, that's an impingement on my authenticity. You have a really good answer to that. Right. Which is to say that we ask everybody to adhere to those norms and we understand that that might harm some people in their self presentation more than others. But this is a tax that we're willing to exact in the name of the community because we think this is an utterly defensible value. On the other hand, if you said to me, well, you know, we believe in the inclusion of women in the workplace. But to go back to the earlier example, if you want to get a promotion, stop talking about your kids. If you say that to a woman and you wouldn't say that to a man, then that's a covering demand that I would have a problem with because there the covering demand is not backed by a community value. And that's the inconsistency I want to challenge.
- [33:24]
Shankar Vedantam
When we come back how covering complicates our understanding of what it means to belong. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar at New York University. He's the author of the Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights. Kenji, by the year 2001, you had long since come out as a gay man to your parents. They are of Japanese ancestry, but you found yourself having a tense discussion with them about an article about you that was about to be published. In the New York Times. What was this article, and how did this conversation with your parents unfold?
- [34:23]
Kenji Yoshino
The New York Times article was a profile on me and my work on covering, and it was a very positive piece that might, in other circumstances, have been a cause for celebration. But the article explicitly talked about the fact that I was an openly gay man. With my permission, you know, of course. And the thing that was challenging about this was that, again, my parents were the very first people that I had told that I was gay. But this was something different. You know, this was being in the New York Times and being advertised as an openly gay person to the world. And so from their perspective, it was just a different level of publicity. And so they were essentially saying, it's fine for you to be out of the closet, but please don't draw this level of activism and advocacy to this role. So essentially, please downplay or cover. And the most poignant thing that my mother said to me was, you know, if this is published, then I won't be able to go home, meaning go home to Japan, because gay rights was in a much different place in Japan than it was, you know, in the United States.
- [35:42]
Shankar Vedantam
Your mother used a Japanese term in this conversation that you didn't understand. What was this term? Kenji.
- [35:48]
Kenji Yoshino
This is a term that I believe would be unfamiliar to many Japanese people as well, because it was a transliterationist. So she said, we understand that you're gay, but why do you have to be a gendar ku? And I was like, what? What is that? And she said, you know, the woman who heard voices. And I was like, what on earth are you talking about? Until the kind of penny dropped, and I realized that she was talking about Joan of Arc and the transliteration of Joan of Arc as Jeanne d'aquina.
- [36:16]
Shankar Vedantam
I see.
- [36:17]
Kenji Yoshino
So essentially what she was saying is, it's fine for you to be gay, but why do you need to be a banner carrier for this identity? Why do you need to be an advocate or an activist with perhaps the implication of. And we all know what happened to Joan of Arc in the end, so this doesn't end well for anybody.
- [36:33]
Shankar Vedantam
So in other words, live your life, be a gay person, but don't make it your cause.
- [36:37]
Kenji Yoshino
Exactly. And it was a version of the, it's fine for you to be homosexual professional, but don't be a professional homosexual. Don't make this your cause.
- [36:56]
Shankar Vedantam
One of the concerns that your parents had was not just the effects that this would have on them, but the effects that it would have on you. They were worried that you were gonna get hate mail.
- [37:06]
Kenji Yoshino
I think about this all the time as a parent now, where, you know, I have a. My parents are extraordinarily wonderful, supportive people. But since my husband and I have had our two kids, I think about this all the time as one of the most poignant things that they said to me. Because, of course, when you're a kid, you know, in your. I think I was in my 30s by that point, so not so much of a kid. You don't like to think of yourself as somebody whose parents need to look out for them in those ways. So when they're saying, oh, my gosh, you're gonna get hate mail, you're gonna get, you know, death threats, you're gonna get this or that, I was just like, well, that's kind of my business. I'm fully able to take care of myself. I'm going into this with eyes wide open. So this is not something that you need to worry about. I'm much more concerned about what you're saying about yourselves and much less concerned about my own sort of risk profile. But now that I'm a father, I totally see where they are coming from, where in some ways, there's nothing more painful than thinking, oh, my gosh, my child could be the subject or object of hatred or hate mail or vitriol of some kind. And it's not something that I, as a parent, can protect them from. So I think that's what they're trying to convey to me. So as a parent, I have made sure to reconnect with them on this particular point to say, you know, I really deeply appreciated that sentiment and probably was not able to hear it at the time because I was only seeing it through the lens of a child rather than the lens of a parent sort of desperate with worry about their child.
- [38:42]
Shankar Vedantam
So you told your parents that you already got hate mail, and your father was shocked and surprised by that, that you already were getting hate mail. And it struck you that in some ways, this detail that may have been connected to his own experience as a young man from Japan who came to the United states in the 1950s. Tell me what went through your mind at that point, Kenji.
- [39:06]
Kenji Yoshino
I can only speculate here because this is something that I don't really know because it's not really something that is talked about openly in our family. But I can only imagine what anti Japanese sentiment must have been like in the middle of the 20th century when he came over very, very young, you know, after he graduated from high school and was going to college. So if you think about this era after World War II, the anti Japanese sentiment must have been enormous. So I do sometimes think that they thought, well, we suffered through all of this because we had to, but we thought that you were going to grow up in a kinder, gentler America with regard to race, and so you would be able to kind of write your own ticket. But now you are embracing or identifying with this identity that is so stigmatized that you're essentially going to have to go through all of this prejudice that we went through just on a different dimension.
- [40:07]
Shankar Vedantam
Your parents had a view of assimilation that is quite different than yours. Your dad sort of describes himself as sort of the stereotypical success story of the American dream and the value of assimilation. Tell me how your views about assimilation have come to differ from your parents, Kenji.
- [40:27]
Kenji Yoshino
I want to say that they differ, but I also feel that I owe them an incredible amount for the fact that I can hold a position that's different from theirs. So to explain this, I think my dad's attitude towards assimilation was this. You know, I'm going to be 100% American in America and 100% Japanese in Japan. And so he was deeply, you know, assimilated and went from being a young immigrant to this country to ending his life as a, you know, charit professor at Harvard in the business school. So he had a very storied career. And I really did think, I do think that he felt that this ability to code switch seamlessly between the two cultures was what he wanted to do. And my view was I actually don't want to code switch. I don't want to assimilate in either country. Like, I want to be myself. I want to be the same person regardless of where. Where I am. And to the extent that environment is inhospitable to the person that I really am, then I will not live there. I will not work there. Right? So I think one of the reasons why I cooled on Japan as a place to live or work was that I just felt like LGBTQIA rights were just in a different place than they were in the United States. But the two stories are intricated with each other, right? Because I don't think that I could have the life that I am privileged enough to live right now if he hadn't lived his life so that he actually created the conditions of, you know, privilege and advantage, whether that was education, educational or familial nurture or self confidence or what have you that allowed me to live the life that I'm living now.
- [42:20]
Shankar Vedantam
It's striking, Kenji, because I feel like the idea of assimilation, the idea of the melting pot, like we leave our identities behind, we forget that we were Irish or Jewish or gay or black, that we come to America, and then we all become this new thing which is an American. I think that's held up as being a value, an important ideal. You're pointing in some ways to the dark side of assimilation. Can you talk about that a moment?
- [42:49]
Kenji Yoshino
I certainly can. So, yes, I actually see the allure of the melting pot ideal, of the idea that we need sort of what the political scientist Robert Putnam calls bridging capital, of these supervening identities that sort of bring us all together, like the identity of being an American. But Robert Putnam also talks about the importance of bonding capital. And he says if we melt totally into the pot, you know, that's a problem too. And part of the capital that we need to offer to society is the kind of capital we build only internal to communities. So the LGBT community, for example, or the Asian American community, being a part of those communities actually enriches the whole rather than impoverishing it. So we can't be tilted over one wing in one direction or the other. So someone who bridges too much would say, why do you keep banging on about your identity like you should just leave it behind? The only identity that you have is this identity as American or this identity as a citizen of the world or as a human being or what have you. And I believe that, you know, we have more in common than not, you know, as human beings. And it's really important to keep that steadily visible, but not at the expense of understanding all the differences that we also retain. And this kind of sense that there are parts of us that rightly refuse to melt into the pot, and that I belong to sub communities within the United States that are different from this kind of generic idea of the American. And when you tell me to melt into the pot, that always means, right, that the marginalized group is assimilating and conforming to the norms set by the dominant group. So it has really an egalitarian effects to quickly or categorically say, let's all embrace the melting pot ideal. Because some people are much more comfortable with that ideal, because they shape that ideal than the others who are being told to melt into it.
- [44:52]
Shankar Vedantam
I understand that you have conducted surveys in corporate environments that find that covering negatively impacts individual sense of self and diminishes their commitment to their organizations.
- [45:04]
Kenji Yoshino
I really lean on my wonderful colleagues at the management consultancy Deloitte for the empirical work on this. But I got the kind of call that, you know, I think most academics are kind of gobsmacked to receive sometime in 2012, where they said, look like this idea of covering is a game changer, but no one in our world is going to believe anything that you say unless you have data. You're not an empiricist. We are. So let's do a survey and figure out what the incidence impact of covering is. And so I, of course, said yes. The survey came back to robustly support the hypothesis that people were covering at a very high rate. We found 61% of people overall reported covering. And of that 61%, 60 to 73%, depending on the axis of covering, said that this was somewhat too extremely detrimental to their sense of self.
- [46:02]
Shankar Vedantam
I understand that you faced a moment a number of years ago that brought all of your complex views about assimilation into play. It had to do with a wonderful job offering from NYU. Tell me that story, Kenji.
- [46:15]
Kenji Yoshino
This comes from 2008, and it's actually one of my favorite stories to tell because I think it ennobles everybody who took part in it or honors everybody who took part in it because it's a story of change and growth. So in 2008, my husband and I are thinking about starting a family, and we decide that we need to be in the same city to do that. So I applied to schools in New York, was fortunate enough to get some offers, and then the recruitment season began. So the then dean of nyu, Ricky Rives, reached out to me and he said, we know you have a chair at Yale that's very dear to you, which is the Guido Calabresi Professorship of Law. It was named after the judge for whom I clerked on the second Circuit and the former dean of the law school and a great mentor of mine, not, by the way, the mentor who gave me that, you know, advice. And then he said, we've scoured our existing chairs to find one that would be comparable in terms of its significance to you. We couldn't find one. And so we took the extraordinary step of raising $5 million to endow a new chair.
- [47:22]
Shankar Vedantam
Wow.
- [47:23]
Kenji Yoshino
And that chair is going to be named to honor your contributions at the intersection of constitutional law and civil rights. And we're going to name it the Earl Warren Professorship of Constitutional Law. And every people pleasing bone in my body, Shankar wanted to take the chair which had been given with all the goodwill in the world.
- [47:42]
Shankar Vedantam
Yes.
- [47:43]
Kenji Yoshino
But I had literally written, finished writing the book on covering, and I knew that it would be A form of covering to accept the chair without some kind of protest.
- [47:53]
Shankar Vedantam
Why?
- [47:54]
Kenji Yoshino
So I said, ricky, like, I can't take that chair. And he was astonished, and I could tell a little bit annoyed. And he said, why on earth not? I hope you understand how much work went into this. And I said, yes, I'm aware of that. But as you may know, I'm of Japanese descent. And as you may know, as Attorney General of California, Earl Warren superintended the internment of over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry without any due process or criminal charges.
- [48:24]
Shankar Vedantam
Wow.
- [48:25]
Kenji Yoshino
And I said, I can't be honored with the name of an individual who has so dishonored my people. So he took that away. He immediately got it. And he said, please don't make any sudden movements. You know, don't go to another school. I'll call you back in three days. And three days later, he called back and he said, I have a new chair for you. And I said, lay it on me. I'm all ears. And he said, we want to offer you the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professorship of Constitutional Law. And this time, I was the one who was a little bit annoyed and certainly astonished because I thought, well, wait a minute. I just rejected the Earl Warren professorship three days ago. You're now tacking the words Chief justice to the front of it and flipping it back to me as if this were a new chair. So essentially, how stupid do you think I am? Like, what's going on here? And he said, please hear me out. In the days since our last conversation, I've read a biography of Earl Warren. And he said, as Chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, who wrote canonical opinions like Brown v. Board of Education or Loving versus Virginia, which legalized interracial marriage in the United States, that the thing he most regretted about his career was the internment of the Japanese. So he said, you know, given your commitment to civil rights and given your commitments to diversity and inclusion, I take your life work to be taking people along this journey or maturity curve of understanding how many different valid ways there are to be a human being. And he said, given that Earl Warren was able to travel so far along that path in a single lifetime, we actually think that it would be a wonderful emblem of the power of your work to hold his name, but to hold the title that he held when he was completing rather than beginning that journey. So I said, ricky, that chair I can take. And so I am speaking to you today as the Chief Justice Earl Warren professor of Constitutional Law.
- [50:40]
Shankar Vedantam
When we come back, techniques to uncover our true identities and help others do the same. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Legal scholar Kenji Yoshino has spent decades thinking about how people mask their identities in order to conform to both real and imagined pressures from those around them. He's also thought a lot about how we can be more of ourselves more of the time. Kenji, you sometimes hear from people who disagree with you. They say, you know, you may be a gay man and feel the need to hide, but I'm straight and I feel the need to hide too. Maybe it's because I'm overweight or elderly or drink too much. Maybe I have a mental illness that's stigmatized. Maybe I'm just shy. Tell me about these encounters, Kenji.
- [51:37]
Kenji Yoshino
This is one of the most remarkable findings of the Deloitte study, which was that we found that 45% of straight white men reported covering. And I think my colleagues found that really surprising. And I didn't find it surprising at all because I had spent, you know, many years after publishing the book where white men would come to me and say, here are all the identities that I have to cover. So if anything, I was surprised that that number was so.
- [52:04]
Shankar Vedantam
Hmm.
- [52:05]
Kenji Yoshino
But the dominant ways in which straight white men reported covering were things like age, socioeconomic status or background, mental or physical illness or disability, religion and veteran status. And the thing that's so important about the fact that a plurality of the ostensibly most empowered group in society is covering is that it shows that this is truly a universal phenomenon. I go back to what I said earlier, which is to say, if you're outside of the mainstream in any way, you are going to be asked to cover. And oftentimes you're going to experience that as a harm. So no matter how many dominant characteristics we hold, we're going to hold some non dominant ones. And once you see that, then this really becomes a project not about us versus them or, you know, marginalized groups versus non marginalized groups, but really a universal project of authenticity and thinking about what the world might look like, what our individual communities might look like if we were all empowered to be a little bit more ourselves.
- [53:13]
Shankar Vedantam
Hmm. I'm thinking also just of behavioral things. You know, perhaps I'm a shy person, you know, perhaps I'm a sad person. And perhaps being shy and being sad are not celebrated in the workplace. I'm not gonna be seen as an up and comer, as a promising employee if I'm seen to be retiring or depressed. And So I feel the need to cover up what I'm going through.
- [53:39]
Kenji Yoshino
I am so glad that you said that because oftentimes people say, well, you know, that's a kind of false equivalence of, you know, your shyness is not the same as my race. And I by no means am saying that they are the same. There's a kind of sedimented history of subordination in the case of race that there isn't in the case of introversion. But you know, all that said, if we look at introversion, one of my favorite books of all time is Susan Cain's Quiet. The subtitle is the Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking. And she talks about how people who are introverts are about one third according to our definition of American society and are constantly being asked to torque themselves to lie down on the Procrustean bed of extroversion. So that we have this extrovert ideal in American society that says that a true leader is a kind of back slapping, glad handing, charismatic, you know, person and that the introvert really needs to adapt to that modality if they want to get anywhere in life. And she makes a really compelling kind of moral and policy based case for why this shouldn't be the case. Saying that people are just naturally introverted or extroverted. And even in our own history, if you go back in time, our greatest leaders like James Madison or Abraham Lincoln were classic introverts. So this idea that there's something inconsistent between being an introvert and being a leader is something that our own history completely belies. So one of the things that I think is really important is to just keep a weather eye out for these emerging identity categories where if you say, you know, in a certain point of time, oh, what about introversion or what about depression or mental health issues that, you know, other people might say, well, those are kind of tangential or epiphenomenal identities. This is not about sort of race or gender. And so therefore I'm going to ignore it. My analysis would be quite different, which would be a kind of curiosity about those identities to say, please tell me more. Right. And to ask, as we were discussing earlier, what possible justification could an individual have on the other side of asking people to change or cover the underlying identity? So if I say you have to cover because leaders are just extroverts and so you should be ashamed or downplay your introverted identity. Again, our history upends that assumption. So there's nothing inconsistent with being a leader and Being an introvert, we should celebrate leaders who are great orators, but we should also celebrate leaders who are great listeners. Similarly with depression. I'm so delighted that we're finally having the mental health conversation nationally that we need to have. I realize we're still in early days, but I feel like we are talking about it in a way that we have not talked about it in my lifetime. So I view that to be a really positive development here, too. It might be like, oh, but here we want to change the underlying condition. We don't want you to be depressed, you know, so we want you to find help or you want to find medication. But that too, to me, seems like an argument about authenticity and candor, because how are you going to help the person who is struggling with depression more? Are you going to help them by saying, pretend not to be depressed, or are you going to say, we acknowledge that you are depressed. We do not think any less of you because you're depressed. If you need help, this is where you can get help. We're here for you?
- [57:12]
Shankar Vedantam
When I think about something like addiction, for example, or the ways in which addiction is touched so many lives in this country, you know, it has touched the lives of people who are rich and poor and black and white and, you know, every socioeconomic group and every demographic group. But clearly there is a huge stigma about addiction today, and there's a huge demand to cover up, you know, addictions in the workplace, but also in social life.
- [57:36]
Kenji Yoshino
And exactly that way. I really want people to think about this project of uncovering as a project of fighting stigmas that have no basis in morality or in sound policy. We are going to do so much better if we eliminate the blaming, shaming approach towards individuals who are struggling with that addiction and to let them speak frankly about them, because then we actually have some prayer of identifying them and giving them the help that they need, rather than, you know, pretending the problem doesn't exist or shaming them into even worse cycles or spirals of addiction or depression.
- [58:21]
Shankar Vedantam
Kenji, what I hear you arguing is that covering in some ways is a unifying cause, perhaps even sort of a universal civil rights struggle.
- [58:32]
Kenji Yoshino
I entirely believe that. That's exactly what I'm trying to say. I always think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where he talks about, you know, the needs that we need to get met as human beings before we can go to the next level of needs. So that the very bottom is like food and water, obviously, and then there's shelter, but then the one beyond that, which is quite Surprising is belonging, that we really need to belong and feel like we belong to a community or society or we're just going to be unable to thrive. And my project of covering is really trying to make sure that people find a pathway to belonging that is based, as I think it has to be, on authenticity. So at the risk of sounding sentimental, I will again go back to my wonderful parents and to say that they constantly were saying to me as I was growing up, we love you, but I trusted the love, but I didn't trust the you because the you that I was presenting to them was not the real me. So I thought, if I come out to you as gay, I don't know if you will still love me. And it was only after I came out that I trusted them when they said, as they continue to say, we love you. And so that idea, and you could frame it in less kind of sentimental, more daily terms. If I say, shankar, I respect you, but there's something about yourself that you're not fully disclosing to me. You might trust the respect, but you might not trust the you. You might think, well, that respect attaches to some kind of fictional me that I'm presenting to the world rather than my real self. And it's only when I give you the conditions to be fully authentic that I can say I respect you and you can trust the respect and the you. So for me, this project is a project about saying, how do we actually achieve belonging? You don't achieve any kind of belonging if the person who belongs is not really you. So if I say in an extreme case like Pass is a straight person and everyone says, oh, Kenji's a great guy, we accept him, he belongs in this community. I'm never gonna trust that sense of belonging because the person you've included is not me. It's some facsimile of me that I've created in order to be included. So I've not given the community the chance to accept me for who I really am. So I realize it can feel very scary and very risky, but this idea that I could actually say to my community, this is who I truly am. And then the community responds by saying, and you belong as you, that's when I can really trust that sense of belonging.
- [61:18]
Shankar Vedantam
You say that there are a couple of different ways that stories of uncovering can be shared. One is what you call distinct storytelling. What is this, Kenji?
- [61:27]
Kenji Yoshino
Distinct storytelling is kind of what I've been doing at multiple points in this wonderful exchange, Shankar, which is when I talk about a story like, oh, I was on the tenure track and I was told to downplay my sexual orientation if I wanted tenure or not, write on gay topics if I wanted tenure, or when I was offered this chair and I had to debate whether or not to speak up. Those moments where you are being asked to cover and you rejected the covering demand and you came out of it on the other side much stronger than you would have been if you had ducked your head and gone away. Those are what I'm calling distinct stories. They are set pieces or stories or anecdotes that just illustrate to people the power of authenticity. So just to land the plane on this, imagine if I had accepted the very similar sounding chair, the Earl Warren Professorship of Constitutional Law, without pushing back on my dean. I can guarantee you that every time I was introduced, whether on this interview or elsewhere, I would have had like a wave of shame, of like, that was a moment in my life where I should have stuck up for myself when I did it. And here I am stuck with this title for the rest of my life. Whereas because I stuck up for myself in that moment and got that title change. It may seem like a very small thing, but I can tell you that every time I'm introduced as the Chief justice or Warren Professorship of Constitutional Law, then I feel completely differently about it. I remember that that was a time in which I brought my authenticity to the table and the other side rose to the occasion of honoring that authenticity.
- [63:03]
Shankar Vedantam
You also talk about something called diffuse storytelling. What is diffuse storytelling? Kenji?
- [63:09]
Kenji Yoshino
Yeah, we contrast diffuse and by we, I mean my colleagues at Deloitte and my wonderful colleagues here at nyu, Christina Joseph and David Glasgow, we draw a distinction between distinct storytelling and diffuse storytelling. Because when we talk about share your story and the importance of storytelling to create a culture of uncovering talent, I think people feel like they need to have like a set piece where, you know, they're standing at a podium and they're telling a story about their own life. And that can certainly be powerful. That's what I'm talking about when I talk about distinct storytelling. But diffuse storytelling sort of takes a bit of the pressure off, which is to say, not everything needs to be. I'm standing on a stage and I'm giving a speech. It can really just be this diffuse, very offhanded comment. Like it can be when I'm leaving to go to my kids school play, which I did yesterday early from work, I say, that's where I'm going. So if I say that, then that means that other colleagues of mine Realize that if they need to go to some function that's important in their life that's not work related, they too have the permission to do that because I've modeled that for them. So it can be as offhanded as saying, you know, this is a reason I'm leaving early today. It doesn't need to be this big sat dramatic piece that I'm delivering from the podium. It can just be something that I'm talking to somebody over coffee of something that I'm saying at the end of a zoom call or what have you.
- [64:36]
Shankar Vedantam
Or if you're talking about a family member, for example, talking about what you did on the weekend. There are ways in which we can reveal our lives to others without it being, you know, as you say, a set piece that's delivered from a podium.
- [64:48]
Kenji Yoshino
100% right.
- [64:57]
Shankar Vedantam
What do you think the effects are of this kind of uncovering? You have done some research that basically finds that this kind of storytelling, both the distinct and the diffuse form, have benefits.
- [65:08]
Kenji Yoshino
Yes. Our research has mostly been on the side of if people like, expect you to cover, what is the harm to you. So in our survey, like 53% of the people who we surveyed said this is in the Fortune 500. So this is 3,129 respondents across eight different sectors of the Fortune 500 said that their leaders expected them to cover. And of that 53%, 50% said that this somewhat to extremely diminish their commitment to the workplace or their community there. So this is just evidence that, you know, covering demands are hurtful and that they're particularly hurtful when they come from leaders within the organization.
- [65:49]
Shankar Vedantam
I understand. Kenji, some time ago you were at a supermarket and you had an exchange with the cashier. He asked you a question that had to do with your husband, but you didn't tell the cashier about your husband. Tell me that story.
- [66:01]
Kenji Yoshino
Yeah, this is a funny one, which is that we're never done with covering. The supermarket story is where, you know, my husband has this kind of guilty pleasure where he's obsessed with the royal family. And so when I see a kind of trashy tabloid about, you know, the royal family, I will buy it for him. And it's kind of a running gag in our family. And it's just a cute, I think, cute thing that we do for each other as a couple. And, you know, I was getting ribbed by the cashier for, you know, buying this because the other things I was getting were somewhat more highbrow. So he was like, it's not often that we see somebody buying this book and then this tabloid at the same time. And then I thought, oh, I'm gonna say this isn't for me, this is for my husband. And then I thought about it and I thought, well, I'm not going to say this. And then, and this is going to sound like I went through a giant loop, but this all took place in the course of two seconds, right? But I thought, like, I'm not going to throw my, my Ron, my husband under the bus. So I'm not going to say this is for my husband. And I remember thinking like, oh, am I doing this because I'm worried about saying my husband? Like, am I covering my sexual orientation? And I was like, no, if I'm covering something, I'm covering his trash taste in tabloids. And this is actually a very loving, protective thing that I'm doing for him rather than speaking from a place of shame. So I want to say that I think all of us as human beings make these lightning fast decisions and I think all I'm asking is that we just drive those decisions a little bit more to the surface of our consciousness so that we make these decisions in a way that kind of lives out our values about who we are and who we want to be in the world and also who we want to let others be in the world as well.
- [68:09]
Shankar Vedantam
Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar at New York University. He's the author of Covering the Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights along with David Glasgow. He is co author of say the Right how to Talk About Identity, Diversity and Justice. Kenji, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
- [68:28]
Kenji Yoshino
It was such a pleasure. Thank you.
- [68:37]
Shankar Vedantam
Do you have follow up questions about covering and identity for Kenji Yoshino? If you be willing to share your questions with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us@ideashiddenbrain.org that email address again is ideashiddenbrain.org use the subject line covering. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy, Paul Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our Executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's Executive editor. If you love the ideas we explore on Hidden Brain, please consider signing up for our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain plus, it's where you'll find bonus conversations you won't hear anywhere else. Plus you'll be providing us with vital support. To continue bringing you more episodes of the show, Please go to support.hiddenbrain.org if you're using an Apple device, go to Apple co hiddenbrain I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.