Dropping the Mask

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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. 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.

• 0:45Shankar Vedantam?

  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

• 1:25Shankar Vedantam?

  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're planning anything nefarious. It's because we want to fit in or be taken seriously.

• 2:08Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 2:29Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:14Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:57Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 4:24Shankar 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.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  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 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 the foreground of his interactions with others.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  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...

• 5:27Shankar 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.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:11Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that FDR also had a car specially designed for him?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:41Shankar 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 OK.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:06Shankar 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.

• 7:26Speaker 04

  To those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say. U-turn if you want to. The ladies, not for turning.

• 7:44Shankar Vedantam?

  Listening to that clip, Kenji, it's hard not to notice Margaret Thatcher's distinctive speaking voice.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. And one of the things that, like, you know, FDR, she did was to carefully 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.

• 8:09Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  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 presence.

• 8:27Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:41Speaker 04

  ... no competence on money, no competence on the economy. So, yes, the right, honorable gentleman would be glad to hand it all over. And 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 country?

• 9:00Shankar Vedantam?

  And of course, I mean, she was known as the Iron Lady. And in some ways, that voice added to that impression.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Exactly right.

• 9:17Shankar 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 background. 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.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:03Shankar 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.

• 10:29Speaker 05

  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.

• 10:41Speaker 05

  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.

• 10:52Speaker 05

  Then I want you to do it.

• 10:54Shankar 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?

• 11:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  And he modulated aspects of his identity because he knew exactly what the culture needed from him, and he assimilated to that culture.

• 11:57Shankar 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, you know, stage names that sound more charismatic, if you will, than their given names.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:39Shankar 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.

• 12:51Shankar Vedantam?

  They were hiding, but hiding in plain sight.

• 12:57Shankar Vedantam?

  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 Vedantam.

• 13:20Shankar Vedantam?

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• 14:03Shankar Vedantam?

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• 14:41Shankar Vedantam?

  And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. 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.

• 15:10Shankar Vedantam?

  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?

• 15:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:00Shankar 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?

• 16:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:01Shankar 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.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:19Shankar Vedantam?

  Huh.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  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 man. This is 1991.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:28Shankar 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.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  There was one pivotal conversation that became a touchdown 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.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  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, is, was just a transformative shift in my own thinking.

• 19:27Shankar 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?

• 19:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 20:18Shankar Vedantam?

  Kenji saw the school was offering a class about sexual orientation and the law. He desperately wanted to take the course, but wondered what message it would send.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  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.

• 20:36Shankar Vedantam?

  Right.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  The class lists are all posted in the hallway. And the moment where I put my name on that list, I have effectively added 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 in the Law were members of the LGBTQIA+ community and then maybe some women, some righteous straight women. But a straight man would not be caught, you know, touching a class like this with a 10-foot pole.

• 21:16Shankar 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.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:53Shankar 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?

• 22:08Speaker 02

  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

• 22:51Speaker 02

  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, the time when the ICE was finally breaking up on the LGBTQI plus landscape. The Romer versus 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, 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,

• 23:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:46Shankar Vedantam?

  In other words, be gay, but don't flaunt it.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  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, i.e. 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.

• 24:38Shankar 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?

• 24:48Speaker 02

  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 Irving Goffman's book, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. So Irving 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,

• 25:31Speaker 02

  open because they either cannot or will not 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.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  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'm 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.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  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 I 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.

• 27:21Shankar 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.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  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 an immutable identity like race, you're going to 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

• 28:29Speaker 02

  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. 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

• 29:12Speaker 02

  origin. But they were all able to cover by modifying aspects of their identities. 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.

• 29:59Shankar 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.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:54Shankar 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 journalists would comment on how beautiful her eyes were.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 32:36Shankar Vedantam?

  Are all sort 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?

• 32:52Speaker 02

  I always answer that by saying, yes, they're 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.

• 33:37Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  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, OK, if there are 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 downplay your obnoxious personality. And I say, well, that's an impingement on my authenticity. You have a really good answer to that, right?

• 34:20Speaker 02

  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-representation 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, 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.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  And that's the inconsistency I want to challenge.

• 35:11Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, how covering complicates our understanding of what it means to belong.

• 35:18Shankar Vedantam?

  You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 35:33Shankar Vedantam?

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• 36:15Shankar Vedantam?

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• 36:34Shankar Vedantam?

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• 37:10Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm 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. 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?

• 37:45Speaker 02

  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, 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. 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.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  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, 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 in the United States.

• 39:03Shankar Vedantam?

  Your mother used a Japanese term in this conversation that you didn't understand. What was this term, Kenji?

• 39:10Speaker 02

  This is a term that I believe would be unfamiliar to many Japanese people as well because it was transliteration. So she said, "We understand that you're gay, but why do you have to be a John Doku?" 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 penny dropped and I realized that she was talking about Joan of Arc and the transliteration of Joan of Arc is John Doku.

• 39:37Shankar Vedantam?

  I see.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  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 land well for anybody.

• 39:54Shankar Vedantam?

  So in other words, live your life, be a gay person, but don't make it your cause.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Exactly. And it was a version of the, "It's fine for you to be a homosexual professional, but don't be a professional homosexual. Don't make this your cause."

• 40:18Shankar 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 going to get hate mail.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  I think about this all the time as a parent now, where, you know, I have a... Well, 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 were saying, "Oh, my gosh, you're going to get hate mail. You're going to get, you know, death threats. You're going to 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.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  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

• 41:55Speaker 02

  seeing it through the lens of a child rather than the lens of a parent, sort of desperate with worry about their child.

• 42:04Shankar 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.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  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

• 43:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 43:28Shankar Vedantam?

  Your parents had a view of assimilation that is quite different than yours. Your dad describes himself as 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.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  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, I'm going to be 100% American in America and 100% Japanese in Japan. And so he was deeply assimilated and went from being a young immigrant to this country to ending his life as a chaired 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.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  And my view was, I actually don't want to code-switch. I don't want to assimilate in either country. I want to be myself. I want to be the same person regardless of 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. 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, 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

• 45:15Speaker 02

  life, so that he actually created the conditions of privilege and advantage, whether that was educational or familial nurture or self-confidence or what have you, that allowed me to live the life that I'm living now.

• 45:41Shankar 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, you know, 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, you know, an important ideal. You're pointing in some ways to the dark side of assimilation. Can you talk about that a moment?

• 46:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  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.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  And that I belong to subcommunities 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 that the marginalized group is assimilating and conforming to the norms set by the dominant group. So it has really an egalitarian effect 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've shaped that ideal than the others who are being told to melt into it.

• 48:13Shankar 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?

• 48:25Speaker 02

  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 I think most academics are gobsmacked to receive sometime in 2012, where they said, look, 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.

• 49:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 49:23Shankar 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 offer from NYU. Tell me that story, Kenji.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  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 Rivas, reached out to me and he said, "We know you have a chair at Yale that's very dear to you," which is Guido Calabrese Professorship of Law.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  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 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." Wow. 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. Yes. But I had literally written, finished writing

• 51:06Speaker 02

  the book on covering, and I knew that it would be a form of covering to accept the chair without some kind of protest. Why? So I said, "Ricky, 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." Wow. And I said, "I can't be honored with the

• 51:49Speaker 02

  name of an individual who has so dishonored my people."

• 51:55Speaker 02

  So he took that away. He immediately got it. And he said, please don't make any sudden movements. Don't go to none of the 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.

• 52:38Speaker 02

  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, 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

• 53:22Speaker 02

  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 today as the Chief Justice Earl Warren, Professor of Constitutional Law.

• 54:01Shankar 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.

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• 54:47Shankar Vedantam?

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• 55:20Shankar Vedantam?

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• 55:53Shankar 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.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  This is one of the most remarkable findings of the Lloyd's study, which is 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 low. 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.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  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 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

• 57:58Speaker 02

  look like if we were all empowered to be a little bit more ourselves.

• 58:08Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm thinking also just of behavioral things. Perhaps I'm a shy person. Perhaps I'm a sad person. And perhaps being shy and being sad are not celebrated in the workplace. I'm not going to 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.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  I am so glad that you said that because oftentimes people say, well, that's a kind of false equivalence of your shyness is not the same as my race. And I, by no means, am saying that they're 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.

• 58:56Speaker 02

  But, all that said, if we look at introversion, one of my favorite books of all time is Susan Kane'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 her 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 backslapping, glad-handing, charismatic person, and that the introvert really needs to adapt to that modality if they want to get anywhere in life.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  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, at a certain point of time, oh, what about introversion? Or what about depression or mental health issues? That 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?

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  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 be celebrate leaders who are great orders, but we should also celebrate leaders who are great listeners.

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  Similarly, with depression, I'm so delighted that we're finally having the mental health, you know, 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. 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.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  If you need help, this is where you can get help. We're here for you.

• 1:02:08Shankar Vedantam?

  When I think about something like addiction, for example, or the ways in which addiction has touched so many lives in this country, it has touched the lives of people who are rich and poor and black and white and 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 addictions in the workplace, but also in social life.

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  In 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 pretending the problem doesn't exist or shaming them into even worse cycles or spirals of addiction or depression.

• 1:03:17Shankar 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.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  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 I continue to say, we love you. And so that idea, and you could frame it in less sentimental, more daily terms.

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  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 as a straight person,

• 1:05:30Speaker 02

  and everyone says, oh, Kenji's a great guy, we accept him, he belongs in this community. I'm never going to 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.

• 1:06:13Shankar 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?

• 1:06:22Speaker 02

  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, you know, when I was offered this chair and I had to debate whether or not to speak up. Like, 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, they're stories, they're anecdotes that just illustrate to people the power of authenticity.

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  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 and I didn't. 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, Earl Warren, Professorship of Constitutional Law, then I feel completely differently about it. I remember that that was a time

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  in which I brought my authenticity to the table and the other side rose to the occasion of honoring that authenticity.

• 1:07:59Shankar Vedantam?

  You also talk about something called diffuse storytelling. What is diffuse storytelling, Kenji?

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  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 sharing 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 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.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  Like, it can be when I'm leaving to go to my kid's 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, set, 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.

• 1:09:31Shankar 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, as you say, a set piece that's delivered from a podium.

• 1:09:43Speaker 02

  100% right.

• 1:09:52Shankar 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.

• 1:10:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:10:44Shankar 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.

• 1:10:57Speaker 02

  This is a funny one, which is that we're never done with with covering. The supermarket story is where, you know, my, 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, 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

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  time. And then I thought, oh, I'm gonna say this isn't for me. This is for my husband. And then I, I thought about it and I thought, well, I'm not gonna say this. And then, and this is gonna 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 gonna throw my, my, Ron, my husband, under the bus. So I'm not gonna 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 sexuality? And I was like, no, if I'm covering something, I'm covering his trashy 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

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:13:04Shankar 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 Thing: How to Talk About Identity, Diversity, and Justice. Kenji, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 1:13:23Speaker 02

  It was such a pleasure. Thank you.

• 1:13:32Shankar Vedantam?

  Do you have follow up questions about covering an identity for Kenji Yoshino? If you'd be willing to share your questions with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at [email protected]. That email address again is [email protected]. Use the subject line, Covering.

• 1:14:00Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

• 1:14:19Shankar Vedantam?

  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.hidenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, go to apple.co/hidenbrain.

• 1:14:45Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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