Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, published in 2006 is both an analysis on society's views on race and sexuality and a collection of autobiographical anecdotes. Kenji Yoshino, the author, is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at the NYU School of Law. He wrote an article in the Yale Law Journal called Covering in 2002, but went into more extensive detail on the subject of covering using legal manifesto and poetic memoirs. The preface of the book best tells the meaning of covering:
"Everyone covers. To cover is to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the main stream. In our diverse society, all of us are outside the mainstream in some way every reader of this book has covered, whether consciously or not, and sometimes at significant personal cost."
Read more about Covering: The Hidden Assault On Our Civil Rights: An Uncovered Self, Part One, Controversies and Reviews of The Book
Famous quotes containing the words civil rights, hidden, assault, civil and/or rights:
“...I was confronted with a virile idealism, an awareness of what man must have for manliness, dignity, and inner liberty which, by contrast, made me see how easy living had made my own group into childishly unthinking people. The Negro’s struggles and despairs have been like fertilizer in the fields of his humanity, while we, like protected children with all our basic needs supplied, have given our attention to superficialities.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 19 (1962)
“One never gets to know a person’s character better than by watching his behavior during decisive moments.... It is always only danger which forces the most deeply hidden strengths and abilities of a human being to come forth.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“This teaching is not practical in the sense in which the New Testament is. It is not always sound sense in practice. The Brahman never proposes courageously to assault evil, but patiently to starve it out. His active faculties are paralyzed by the idea of caste, of impassable limits of destiny and the tyranny of time.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike;
Alike reserved to blame, or to commend,
A timorous foe, and a suspicious friend;
Dreading e’en fools, by flatterers besieged,
And so obliging, that he ne’er obliged;
Like Cato, give his little senate laws,
And sit attentive to his own applause:”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: “I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.””
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)