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 bring you a favorite conversation with legal scholar Kenji Yoshino. He introduces us to the concept of "covering," and talks about what happens when we soften or edit our true selves. Then, we revisit our "Your Questions Answered" segment in which Kenji answers listener questions and comments about his work.

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 onboard. 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 are 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. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Audible. From Andy Weir, author of Project Hail Mary and the Martian Comes Exoplanet, written by Benjamin Percy, starring Anthony Mackie, Ariana DeBose, and John Leguizamo. One crew, three timelines. After a quantum anomaly tears their starship apart, survivors crash land in different eras, hunted by an alien intelligence that could consume humanity.

• 2:52Shankar Vedantam?

  They must communicate across time to survive. Listen now. Go to audible.com/exoplanetseries. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. The mighty dollar. Once upon a time, it had a whole menu named after it. Now, no more. But $1 a day lets you add Progressive Renters Insurance to your auto insurance. Learn more at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates and other insurers. Average premium cost based on Progressive Home Data from 2025. Product and prices may vary by state. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Dell.

• 3:35Shankar Vedantam?

  This Black Friday, give a gift that goes beyond the box, the Dell XPS 13 laptop. It's the thinnest, lightest XPS laptop yet, with a long battery life, beautiful design, and powerful performance with Intel Core processors. Find perks like Dell Rewards, fast free shipping, and flexible financing. Head to dell.com/deals. That's dell.com/deals. 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.

• 4:18Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 4:35Shankar 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.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:38Shankar 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.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:21Shankar Vedantam?

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

• 6:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:52Shankar 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.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:17Shankar 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.

• 7:54Shankar Vedantam?

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

• 8:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:20Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  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 grosser'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.

• 8:37Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:11Shankar Vedantam?

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

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Exactly right.

• 9:28Shankar 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 way, she again was giving people the illusion that she wasn't.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:13Shankar 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.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:03Shankar 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?

• 11:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:56Speaker 01

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

• 12:06Shankar 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.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:48Shankar 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.

• 13:00Shankar Vedantam?

  They were hiding, but hiding in plain sight.

• 13:06Shankar 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.

• 13:30Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Pfizer. If your brain still remembers how to use a card catalog or find a number in a phone book, then remember this. RSV can be a serious respiratory virus, especially if you're over 50 with certain health conditions or over 75. There's no prescription treatment, but one dose of a vaccine can help protect you. Find out more at PfizerForAll.com. Pfizer, how do yesterday?

• 14:02Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. The mighty dollar. Once upon a time, it had a whole menu named after it. Now, no more. But $1 a day lets you add Progressive Renters Insurance to your auto insurance. Learn more at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates and other insurers. Average premium cost based on Progressive Home data from 2025. Product and prices may vary by state.

• 14:36Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 14:40Shankar 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.

• 14:57Shankar 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?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:47Shankar 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?

• 15:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:48Shankar 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.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  It was 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.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:15Shankar 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.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:13Shankar 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?

• 19:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:04Shankar 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.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  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 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 and 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.

• 21:02Shankar 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.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  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 affection were all sort of verboten at this time for me.

• 21:39Shankar 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?

• 21:54Speaker 01

  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

• 22:38Speaker 01

  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 LGBTQIA+ 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, you really need to manage your identity.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  And there's just a limit to how gay you can be in this environment and expect to succeed.

• 23:32Shankar Vedantam?

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

• 23:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:24Shankar 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?

• 24:34Speaker 01

  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

• 25:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  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

• 26:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:08Shankar 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.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  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 cover.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  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 origin.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  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, right? 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.

• 29:45Shankar 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.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:41Shankar 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.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  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 of these instances, I'm not victim blaming.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:22Shankar Vedantam?

  Are all sort of cosmetic interventions, in some ways, forms of covering? I mean, from the very trivial about the bald man who has a comb over, or the person who is dying their hair because their hair is turning gray. Are these all examples of covering?

• 32:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:23Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  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?

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Which is to say, so 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. And that's the inconsistency I want to challenge.

• 34:58Shankar Vedantam?

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

• 35:04Shankar Vedantam?

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

• 35:19Speaker 03

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• 35:50Shankar Vedantam?

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• 36:34Shankar Vedantam?

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• 36:47Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 36:52Shankar Vedantam?

  Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar at New York University. He's the author of Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights.

• 37:02Shankar Vedantam?

  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?

• 37:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:40Shankar Vedantam?

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

• 38:47Speaker 01

  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 Jean 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 Jean Doku.

• 39:14Shankar Vedantam?

  I see.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:31Shankar Vedantam?

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

• 39:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:55Shankar 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.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  I think about this all the time as a parent now, where 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, 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 going to get hate mail. You're going to get 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. So this is not

• 40:48Speaker 01

  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, "I really deeply appreciated that sentiment and probably was not able to hear

• 41:30Speaker 01

  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."

• 41:41Shankar 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.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  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, 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 kindler, gentler America with regard to race, and so you would be

• 42:48Speaker 01

  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."

• 43:05Shankar 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.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  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

• 44:04Speaker 01

  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 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

• 44:47Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 45:18Shankar 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?

• 45:48Speaker 01

  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, 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

• 46:31Speaker 01

  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 we have more in common than not 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.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 47:50Shankar 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?

• 48:02Speaker 01

  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 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

• 48:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 49:00Shankar 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.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  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 Reves, 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.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  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."

• 50:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:41Shankar Vedantam?

  Yes.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:51Shankar Vedantam?

  Why?

• 50:53Speaker 01

  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 interment of over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry without any due process or criminal charges."

• 51:23Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  So essentially, how stupid do you think I am? 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 interment 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."

• 52:52Speaker 01

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

• 53:38Shankar 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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• 54:41Shankar 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 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.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  This is one of the most remarkable findings of the Deloitte 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 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. And the thing that's so important about the fact

• 56:04Speaker 01

  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 look like

• 56:48Speaker 01

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

• 56:57Shankar 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.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  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 interversion.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  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 1/3, according to our definition of American society, and are constantly being asked to torque themselves, to lie down on the procrustian bed of extroversion. So that we have this extrovert ideal in American society that says that a true leader is a kind of backflapping, 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

• 58:30Speaker 01

  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, at a certain point of time, oh, what about introversion or what about depression or mental health issues? That, you know, other people might say,

• 59:13Speaker 01

  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 be celebrate leaders who are great orders,

• 59:57Speaker 01

  but we should also celebrate leaders who are great listeners.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:00:56Shankar Vedantam?

  When I think about something like addiction, for example, or the ways in which addiction has 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.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

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

• 1:02:05Shankar 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.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  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,

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:03:22Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  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 kind of sentimental, more daily terms, of 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, right, 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,

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  you know, 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, 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.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:05:02Shankar 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?

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  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, or stories, or anecdotes that just illustrate to people the power of authenticity.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:06:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  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 a 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.

• 1:06:47Shankar Vedantam?

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

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  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, sad, you know, dramatic, you know, 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.

• 1:08:20Shankar 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.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  100% right.

• 1:08:41Shankar 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.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:09:32Shankar 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.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  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, 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 sexual orientation? 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.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  So I want to say that I think all of us as human beings like make these lightning fast decisions. And I think all I'm asking is, is that we just drive those decisions a little bit more to the surface of our consciousness.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  So that, you know, 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.

• 1:11:52Shankar Vedantam?

  In the years since I first launched the Hidden Brain Podcast, we've explored many ideas and concepts that have made me see the world in a new way. Covering is one of those ideas. Once you know what covering is, you start to see it everywhere, in yourself and in the people around you. We all cover parts of who we are, often without realizing we're doing so.

• 1:12:16Shankar Vedantam?

  As you've listened to this conversation, have you thought about some aspect of your identity that you soften or downplay? What's driving your decision to de-emphasize this part of yourself?

• 1:12:31Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, listeners share stories about the parts of themselves that they cover. And we talk about situations in which covering may be an act of kindness. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:13:05Speaker 04

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• 1:13:09Speaker 06

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• 1:13:19Speaker 05

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• 1:13:52Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:13:57Shankar Vedantam?

  Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar at New York University.

• 1:14:04Shankar Vedantam?

  He studies how our decisions to soften or edit how we present ourselves to others can impact us and those around us. In this edition of our recurring segment, Your Questions Answered, Kenji answers your questions on how to tap into our most authentic selves, even when doing so feels difficult.

• 1:14:25Shankar Vedantam?

  Kenji, you use the sociological term covering to describe the behavior of hiding parts of ourselves from those around us. How is covering different from what is sometimes called passing?

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  I'm so glad that you asked that, Shankar, because this is something that comes up over and over again as a misconception or confusion between the two terms. And I totally understand why the two terms might seem like they would merge into each other. But the big difference between passing and covering is that when you're passing, people literally do not know that you belong to the group. Whereas when you're covering, people know you belong to the group, but nonetheless ask you or pressure you to downplay or edit or mute it. And the reason I think this is so important is that only certain groups in our society have the capacity to pass, but everyone has a capacity to cover.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  So even the groups that are not able to pass with regard to that identity can often experience enormous pressure to mute or downplay or edit their identity so that they're more acceptable to the people around them.

• 1:15:35Shankar Vedantam?

  In our last conversation, Kenji, you told me that everyone covers and that precisely because all of us cover to some extent, this is an idea that can help to unify us, that we can look at the decisions that other people make to cover with compassion rather than criticism. What, what do you mean by this?

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  We did a study with Deloitte and we found that, you know, 45% of straight white men reported covering. And on the one hand, I want to contrast that with the 79% of black respondents or the 83% of LGBTQIA+ individuals who reported covering. But this 45% statistic has always remained with me, Shankar, because it suggests how universal the covering demand is. So when I looked at that data point, I thought, well, how on earth do straight white men, ostensibly the most privileged cohort, you know, in our society, have to manage or modulate their identity? And the data was there, so we had answers.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  So among the top ways in which those individuals reported covering were things like age, religion, mentor, a physical disability or illness, socioeconomic status, and even veteran status. And so once you see that, it really becomes a universal project of human flourishing. This is not an us versus them dynamic where my capacity to be more open, authentic about myself diminishes anyone else's capacity to be open and authentic about themselves. So oftentimes, when I frame this, people hear it as an inclusion project or an us versus them project, and they respond by saying, well, I'm a straight white man,

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  but I had to cover the fact that I came from a very straight and socioeconomic background. So why aren't I included in this paradigm or this idea? And I always say to them, of course you are included in this idea. There's nothing that would bar you from being included in this. In fact, you know, a pure rigorous analysis of what covering is, which is again, asking people to downplay an outsider identity so that others around them can feel more comfortable around them, would exactly apply to the person who, you know, could be an investment banker today as a straight white man, but grew up in a trailer park and feels like he has to manage that in his day to day interactions with others.

• 1:18:01Shankar Vedantam?

  Let's turn to the listener questions. A few listeners wrote in to ask about how covering relates to imposter syndrome. Have you noticed an overlap in these psychological experiences, either anecdotally or in your research, Kenji?

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I think that these ideas are very allied to the idea of covering. So I think of imposter syndrome as, you know, I feel like I am an imposter in my job. So let's say I'm a law professor and I feel like I don't deserve to be one. I feel like everybody else around me is unbelievably competent and good at what they do, and I'm simply not up to scratch, and so I have to fake it till I make it. And that sort of gets at exactly the same concern that I'm trying to get at with covering, because I think we have to ask the question of which is the more healthy community? Is it one where I feel like an imposter and I keep that to myself?

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  Or is it the environment in which I say, I do feel like an imposter and I share my concerns with others? And they, more often than not, in my experience, share back to me, oh, that's how I feel as well, or that's not how I feel now, but that's how I felt when I was just starting out, you know, as you were just starting out, if I'm, you know, new to the scene. So I think it's pretty obvious, at least to me, that it's a much healthier organization or society in which we can all be candid about who we are and, you know, the vulnerabilities that we have, because that is just part of the human condition. To be human is to be vulnerable. To be human is to sometimes feel like you're an imposter. To be human is to sometimes feel the need to cover.

• 1:19:42Shankar Vedantam?

  So the United States is facing a lot of governmental upheaval and political tensions at the moment, and this has led families and friends to sometimes find themselves on opposite sides of the political divide. Quite a few listeners wrote in about that experience, including listener Claudia, who finds herself avoiding the topic of politics with friends who do not share her views.

• 1:20:04Speaker 05

  But I feel very strongly about politics and what is happening in the United States right now. In fact, I feel it's really a major part of my identity. And even though those friends kind of know, because they know me, that I must be liberal, I never talk about that. I never bring it up, because I just can't face upsetting people. And I feel badly about that. I feel inauthentic because of that.

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  I really appreciate the honesty and the obvious passion that Claudia is bringing to this, so I first want to thank you, Claudia, for that question. And note that you're certainly not alone. I get this over and over again. In some ways, it has pushed me to try to think more deeply about this, because my original answer was, if you're dealing with this at the organizational level, that organizations have a very legitimate interest in asking people to tamp down their identities with regard to politics. So just to elaborate, I came down to that conclusion by asking myself this question

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  of, are there forms of covering that are actually beneficial or good? And my thought was, well, of course there are. Like, if I showed up, you know, at your organization tomorrow, Shankar, and was rapidly obnoxious to everybody, and you said, Kenji, you got to knock it off. You're driving everyone to distraction. And I said, well, I just happen to be an incredibly obnoxious person, and you told me that I could uncover my authentic self. So what's the problem? And so, obviously, some forms of covering are not only neutral, but actually beneficial to the smooth functioning of an organization or a society. So then the million-dollar question becomes, if I'm admitting that some forms of covering

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  are good and some forms are bad, then how do we winnow out the good from the bad? What is the touchstone that we would use? And my touchstone has always been community or organizational values. As we get more and more polarized as a society, could we find a way, even if it's not my workplace, if it's my social group, to find a way to speak to each other across these divides? Because, as Claudia was saying, it is a core part of many of our identities. We feel inauthentic when we leave that aside and we rub elbows or engage with people without divulging that about ourselves. And ultimately, it really prevents us from seeing the common humanity that we all share, despite really sometimes acrimonious disputes about our politics.

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  So I'm all for this idea that, you know, covering your politics is a form of covering. And I'm increasingly of the view that we should find ways to uncover with regard to our politics, so that we can actually have a bit of a détente in the polarized environment that we're seeing now.

• 1:23:17Shankar Vedantam?

  We've talked a lot about how covering can be used to minimize the parts of our identities that may reveal our lack of power. A listener named Louise wrote in to ask about that idea. Louise works in a job in which she interacts with people from very different socioeconomic backgrounds, from high government officials to citizens who are struggling to make ends meet.

• 1:23:39Speaker 07

  And I think in every conversation I have, I kind of put forward different aspects of my identity as a way of trying to, like, narrow the power differential to create a connection with someone. Even if it means masking something that I feel is my authentic self, I still may do it, because I want the other person to feel comfortable in that situation. So I'm just wondering about the nuances of how you use identities and what, whether covering is about the kind of really trying to mask marginalized identities only, or can be about just differential power in relationships?

• 1:24:21Shankar Vedantam?

  What do you think, Kenji? Can covering be used as an empathetic strategy to help others feel safer within a certain kind of environment?

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And this goes back to the not all forms of covering are bad, or even if, and this will take the previous analysis one step further, even if it is a harm and I experience it as a privation to my identity to have to cover, it's a competing goods analysis. So being my authentic self is a good, and I heard Louise saying that. But, you know, empathizing with others and creating a welcoming environment for others is also a good. So there may be times where she would feel, oh, I'm actually modulating my own identity in ways that I'm not perfectly comfortable with, but I understand why I'm doing it. I'm doing it in order to increase the comfort of the person that I'm speaking to, in particular if there is a power differential between me and that other individual.

• 1:25:17Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, I think especially when it comes to dealing with small children, all of us do this almost automatically, right? We don't speak to a three-year-old, you know, as if you were an adult. You actually try and speak to the three-year-old in a way that makes the three-year-old feel, you know, maybe, you know, I, this other person, this very large human being actually understands me. We sometimes, you know, get down on our hands and knees to get down to the level of the three-year-old. And all of those are, in some ways, forms of covering, right? We're covering the fact that I am basically four times as big as you are and eight times as old as you are, and I have very different interests, and I'm suppressing all of that in order to make a connection with you. And I think, at an intuitive level, all of us understand that's exactly the way to behave.

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I think that when we sort of analyze covering, we want to take ourselves through a series of questions. So the first one is, am I covering at all? And we talked about, you know, many different ways in which we can cover, a long appearance, or affiliation, or advocacy, or association. Even if we are covering, we might not experience it to be harmful. So the second question is, if I am covering, does it hurt? And we talked last time, I think, a little bit about Margaret Thatcher and how she seemed to cover her gender and her socioeconomic status, but didn't experience it as a harm. So big deal, right? You're just one of the lucky ones if it's a no harm, no foul kind of situation. But even if you are covering and it's hurtful, there might be situations where it's warranted.

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  So you can ask, is there some other overriding good, other than my own authenticity, that's relevant here? And then if you get to the very bottom, the last question of, yes, I am covering, yes, it hurts me, no, there's no reason to justify this covering, then you're really at the bottom, you know, which is to say, when and how am I going to challenge myself or my society to allow me to bring more of my authenticity to the table? So I want to be really careful here in saying, again, I'm not saying that all forms of covering are bad. What I am saying is that oftentimes people say, well, this is just part of being a human being. What's the big deal, Kenji? We all have to adjust in order to fit into society, so this is universal.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  And I'm saying, what could the potential be if we could flip the script on that and say, because it's universal, it has the capacity to unify us around a culture of greater authenticity, so that no matter what our background is, we've all had this experience, we're at the very bottom of that flow chart that I just described. We're covering where it hurts, where we think that there isn't a justification on the other side, and we often just grin and bear it. What would the world look like if we didn't do that and pushed, again, you know, against the idea that we need to engage in this witless conformity simply for the sake of assimilation itself?

• 1:28:06Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Your Questions Answered, our segment in which we bring back researchers we featured on the show to answer listener questions. After the break, Kenji Ushino will answer more questions about why we cover and offer ways to tap into our authentic selves. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:28:33Speaker 04

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• 1:29:03Speaker 06

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• 1:29:21Shankar 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 ourselves more of the time. Kenji, in our original conversation, we talked about how the US has been described as a melting pot. To varying degrees, newcomers to the country feel pressure to assimilate into the culture. That assimilation often requires covering. A listener named Lexi had a question related to this phenomenon.

• 1:29:55Speaker 03

  A lot of us are, you know, multiple generations down of being a descendant of the melting pot and feel really lost because our specifics of our identities are really are a mystery to us and elude us. So what if one really knows and can feel that they're covering a lot, but is very unsure of what they're covering? Because there's not this strong force underneath it of identity to want to break through. How does one uncover what they're covering?

• 1:30:37Shankar Vedantam?

  So it's a very interesting question, Kenji. Can you cover some aspect of your identity that is weakly held or not a part of your identity that you yourself understand fully?

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  This is a really brilliant question. So I want to thank Lexi for this one as well. What I want to say is I think the answer is yes. And I think that the way we look at it is to begin with a false assumption about authenticity. Oftentimes, I think that people think of authenticity as there is this authentic self. Think of like a marble statue that's underneath a drape. And all I need to do if I'm covering is to whip off that drape, you know, off of my authentic self, and the statue will be there and it's fully resplendent glory. And I will be able to show the self that I have always known existed to the rest of the world.

• 1:31:33Speaker 01

  What Lexi is pointing out is that that is not true for her. And in fact, I would want to offer that that's not really true for anyone, that ourselves are so fluid, so narrative and structured, that even over the course of a very short period of time, what we experience in ourselves to be the authentic core of who we are, can actually change and morph over time. So this idea that we fully know ourselves and that ourselves are stable is a very strange assumption, that kind of statue under a drape assumption. Because where would the entire tradition of, say, you know, Western psychoanalysis be if that were true, right?

• 1:32:18Speaker 01

  I don't fully know myself. You don't fully know yourself. And what Lexi is saying, perhaps simply more honestly than the rest of us, is that there are parts of herself that she doesn't understand or know. So does the concept of covering still make sense if you yourself don't know what's underneath the drape? And I think that it can. And here's why I think it can. I think it can because I like to think of covering not as an adjective that modifies the noun performance, but as an adjective that modifies the word demand. So I'm actually not interested in looking at other people and psychoanalyzing them and try to figure out whether they're covering or not.

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  Because the same behavior can be seen in two people, and one of them could be covering and one of them could not be covering. So it's pointless and in fact, perhaps invasive and insulting for me to eyeball somebody and think I know exactly what's going on inside that person's head. So I actually don't like to think about covering that way as modifying a performance. I like to think about covering as modifying a demand. So my question is, when I look at the environment, does the environment seem inhospitable, either to authenticity in general, or does it make a covering demand that says, say, in a male-dominated workplace, you can be a woman in this workplace, but only if you cover any difference that

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  you might have with regard to your parenting responsibilities, or we want you to be as tearless or aggressive or as analytical as the stereotypical male? And of course, many, many women are naturally that way. That's not the point. The point is that this demand is being made, you know, oftentimes reflexively, without any kind of justification behind it. So when we think about covering demands rather than covering performances, I think we get some traction on this problem of saying, I actually don't need to know who I am in order to say, actually, that demand seems really illegitimate to me. And the whole process of finding who I am is going to be much facilitated if those demands are retired.

• 1:34:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Covering is often a survival strategy that arises from the societal norms we face. This next question comes from listener Anne, who helps survivors of sexual abuse navigate life and work.

• 1:34:35Speaker 06

  There is such a recoil around the disclosure of sexual abuse that this holds the strategy of covering tightly in place for sexual abuse survivors. It is also true and well researched that healing and recovery comes through being acknowledged, accepted, and given the recognition that this thing that happened and the story lived with was no fault of the survivor. I wonder when our society, which causes so much sexual abuse, will also have the courage and opening to hear about it. Do you have any thoughts on this?

• 1:35:08Shankar Vedantam?

  I think Anne is getting at something of a catch 22 here, Kenji. It's important that we discuss topics like sexual abuse, but people who've experienced abuse don't always feel safe talking about it. How do we navigate this tension without putting, in some ways, additional pressure on the most vulnerable people who are the victims?

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  Yes, it's a really deep problem. And I want to, again, thank Anne for that and to thank you for framing it as a catch 22. So if someone sort of recoils or has a negative reaction or stigmatizes being the victim of sexual assault in some way, that sends a really clear signal about how you're supposed to behave. But if you don't challenge it, then the covering demand will never go away. So how do we cut that Gordian knot? I think the answer, Shankar, is allyship of just understanding that people who watch the covering demand transpire can intervene as allies, even if they haven't had the experience themselves.

• 1:36:09Speaker 01

  So very often, I see people, you know, reacting and thinking, well, you know, this is a stigmatic comment made about sexual abuse, but it's not for me to intervene as an ally because I have not experienced this myself, so I don't really have standing or, you know, the kind of authority to step in and say, you know, that wasn't great, you know, what you said, could you please rethink or rephrase that? But if you think about what the alternative is, which is then you're sort of stepping out of the field and forcing individuals who are themselves actually the victims of sexual abuse to speak up for themselves, then, you know, I think the case for allyship gets a lot stronger. So a lot of the work that, you know, we encourage people to do at my center is to

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  say, please step in as an ally, but be smart about how you intervene. So say, like, I, you know, want to be careful because I'm not, you know, directly affected by this, but, you know, that comment didn't land well on me for XYZ reasons. Can you please reframe or explain, right, your comment? And so if we have like a whole sort of army of allies stepping in to not call people out, but to call people in, right, on these covering demands that they're making, then I think we can make some real headway without unduly burdening the people who are most directly affected by those covering demands.

• 1:37:28Shankar Vedantam?

  As you know, Kenji, the Trump administration ordered the end of DEI frameworks within federal and federally funded workplaces. DEI, of course, stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Listener Erin had a question on this shift in policy.

• 1:37:44Speaker 03

  In light of the current administration's shift away from DEI initiatives, have you observed or heard anecdotally any changes in how people experience or navigate covering in professional or social settings? For those of us who feel especially vulnerable right now, whether due to marginalized identities, neurodivergence, or simply the high personal and professional stakes of authenticity, what

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  Strategies or sources of encouragement might help us navigate these spaces while staying true to ourselves.

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  So I want to be careful about this. I have so much to say because I am a lawyer and we run the only center that I know of on diversity, inclusion and belonging, you know, out of a major law school. So, or one of the few, I should be careful to say. So I first want to respond to this idea about DEI and how DEI has become a kind of newly regulated field and how the federal government has withdrawn support for DEI. So the executive orders that, of course, the president has authority to do because he sits on top of

• 1:39:11Speaker 01

  those workers. So it's the largest employer in the, in the United States. I don't want to undersell that at all, but I want to say that that is where the president's power is at, it's acme. When we get to the, you know, private sector or to universities, the capacity of executive orders to shut down diversity, equity, inclusion practices is much diminished. So I want to just make sure that we're all aware, like, of course, we need to comply with the law, but we shouldn't over comply when, you know, our values are being impinged on by those laws. So I'll leave the legal piece of it, you know, at that. But moving to the more kind of social piece of it, regardless of whether it's legal

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  or not, I think what we're experiencing in this country is an enormous backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion. And that can often result in people feeling less safe to express kind of marginalized, you know, identities in the workplace. And I guess to that, you know, I'd say, you know, two things. I mean, one is that your capacity to either express your own identity or to express support for another person's identity is still perfectly legitimate, legal, you know, socially acceptable, because really the kind of crosshairs have been placed not on DEI absolutely, but rather on the more

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  institutionalized forms of DEI. So when, you know, as a matter of institutional policy, a university or an employer says, you know, we're going to promote individuals, you know, of, from underrepresented groups by giving them, you know, a bump or a thumb on the scale, right? In the promotion process, that's really what's being attacked. My capacity to support a colleague, you know, against a probrious comment that's been made against them, that's still perfectly acceptable. So I should still be able to fully challenge those covering demands. And the final thing, second and final thing that I'll say about this is that I also think that this hearkens back to an earlier change, Shankar, that you

• 1:41:16Speaker 01

  and I had, which has to do with the universality of the covering demand. So that, I think that oftentimes when people feel chilled and say, you know, expressing their neurodiverse identity in the workplace, that, that is because someone thinks, well, how come you get so much solicitude for that identity simply because it's a DNI identity? Whereas I don't get any kind of support for the fact that, you know, I'm the first generation of my family to go to college, or, you know, I, you know, came from a lower socioeconomic background. So simply because I tick the boxes of being a cisgender or a straight

• 1:41:57Speaker 01

  white man, like you think that I've never suffered anything in my life and all lights turned green for me all the way down the highway and that, you know, I'm always on the side of being an ally rather than somebody who has something to manage or cover myself. And I think we can all do ourselves a huge amount of good to say, let's just take it away from the DEI lens, which I think increasingly has just become associated with a zero sum game of if I get a bump, then you get disadvantage, which if you're talking about something like a university class is actually true, right? If you have a set number of people who can be admitted and one person gets a bump, then anyone else who doesn't get the bump gets disadvantage. But covering isn't really like that, that if I can actually

• 1:42:39Speaker 01

  be more authentic, let's stick with the example of being neurodiverse, if I can actually be more open about that, and then someone says to me, well, why can't I be open about these other aspects of my life that I feel like, you know, there's no reason why society should force me to downplay these aspects of my identity, right? And I should be able to articulate them in our community. My answer to that is absolutely, let's have that conversation. Like, there's enough authenticity out there for all of us. And all of us are enriched when we don't sort of limit our aspirations or our identities on the basis of kind of witless conformity. So I think we really need to move past this kind of melting pot

• 1:43:20Speaker 01

  ideal, which only ever worked for certain segments of society in the first place, to say, it's actually more of a mosaic, you know, you know, toss salad kind of approach, right? Where we say, actually, we all come into the society in these different ways and these different starting points. And the huge glory, right, of American society is that there's so many stories and so many identities that people are bringing to the table. And so why would we want to shut down any one of those stories in the name of this kind of witless conformity?

• 1:43:54Shankar Vedantam?

  So in the course of this conversation, Kenji, I think I've come to see how subtle and nuanced the idea of covering is and how it comes in so many different guises and so many different shapes. We got a question from listener Eliana, who emigrated to the United States from Colombia when she was 20 years old. Here's what she told us.

• 1:44:15Speaker 02

  I feel very self-conscious that people would ask me where I was from. And as soon as I said I was from Colombia, they would assume that I was a drug dealer. So I remember vividly wanting to learn English as quickly as possible and with the least amount of accent as possible, so that people could not tell that I was an immigrant from Colombia, from Latin America.

• 1:44:46Shankar Vedantam?

  What do you think of this, Kenji? Is learning to speak a new language without an accent, can that be a form of covering?

• 1:44:53Speaker 01

  Again, it really depends on the experience of the individual. So what I didn't hear her say, but what I intuit from the fact that she called in to express it, right, is that she experienced that as some kind of harm, right? And it really goes back kind of beautifully to the catch 22 point that you referenced, because I view the real culprit here to be not, you know, Eliana, who's covering or not covering, but rather this assumption that people who are from Colombia are drug dealers. So it's that stereotype that we want to retire. So obviously, there's nothing wrong with, you know, learning to speak sort of perfectly assimilated, you know, English. I don't think there's anything

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  wrong with that. But I do worry that if people assimilate in those ways, then the underlying covering demand and, you know, illegitimacy of that demand never gets called out and challenged, right? So I want people to be able to robot the idea of just because I say I'm from Colombia, it's kind of a ridiculous thing to think, right? But I understand where she's coming from, because I've seen these kinds of stereotypes myself of, oh, you must be a drug dealer. It's that that we want to contest. And I just want to note that the more we assimilate, the less that underlying demand is going to be contested.

• 1:46:09Shankar Vedantam?

  This last question comes from a listener named Jane, who writes, how do you help other people discover that they are covering and masking their true selves? I think this is actually a subtle and difficult question, Kenji, especially given the course of the conversation we've had. What do you think?

• 1:46:27Speaker 01

  I'm so glad that this question has come up, because oftentimes people say, well, do you want me to go collar the nearest person in my life and say, you know, I don't think you're being truly authentic or really truthful about, you know, the way you're presenting yourself to the world? And I absolutely am not recommending that. So I want to disassociate myself from that, you know, approach as vehemently as I can. But the thing that we can do is something that I will borrow from the incredible, you know, Harvard Business School professor, Amy Edmondson, who writes about psychological safety. And she defines psychological safety, you know, in the team context, is a team climate marked by mutual

• 1:47:08Speaker 01

  respect and interpersonal trust in which people feel comfortable being themselves. So the way you get somebody to uncover, it's a little bit like asking a bird to eat from your hand. You know, you don't like force feed the bird, right? You just create the environment around the bird so that the bird feels safe enough to do something that might otherwise make it feel quite vulnerable. So it's really about creating the surround sound around individuals, which might actually include, right, sharing your own stories so that people know that this is an environment in which those stories are, you know, welcomed and cherished, right? Rather than sort of derided as why is this person bringing a personal matter into a professional environment, for example. So creating the environment

• 1:47:50Speaker 01

  around the person that makes it safe if and when they choose to share, to lean into their authenticity.

• 1:48:02Shankar Vedantam?

  Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar at New York University. He's the author of Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights. And along with David Glasgow, he is co-author of How Equality Wins: A New Vision for an Inclusive America. Kenji, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 1:48:21Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me back.

• 1:48:32Shankar Vedantam?

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

• 1:48:52Shankar 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 that you won't hear anywhere else. Plus, you'll be providing us with vital support to continue bringing you more episodes of the show. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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