Dropping the Mask

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. In November 1971, a man showed up at a flight counter for Northwest Orient Airlines in Portland. He asked to buy a one-way ticket to Seattle. The man provided his name when he bought the ticket.

Dan Cooper. He was carrying a black briefcase. Once on board the aircraft and on route to Seattle, the man showed a flight attendant the contents of his briefcase. It looked like a bomb.

In return for releasing passengers unharmed, he demanded $200,000 when the plane landed. He also added an odd request. He wanted four parachutes. After the plane landed in Seattle, the ransom and parachutes were delivered.

Dan Cooper allowed the passengers to disembark but kept the crew on board. He demanded the plane be refueled and fly to Mexico City. The plane took off a second time. The hijacker ordered the crew to stay in the cockpit.

He also demanded the curtains between the coach cabin and first class be closed. With no one watching him, he opened the rear exit on the plane and leaped with his parachute and his money into a moonless night. Dan Cooper was never caught. His identity remains a mystery.

Clearly, the man who showed up at the airline counter that day was not who he said he was. The story of his hijacking while real is the stuff of movies and novels. Today on the show, we look at how many of us go to great lengths to disguise who we are. Most of the time, it isn't because we're planning anything nefarious.

It's because we want to fit in or be taken seriously. But such disguises don't just fool others. They have powerful effects on us. What happens when we pretend we are not who we are this week on Hidden Brain?

Who are we really and how much of our real selves can be showed in the world? These are questions all of us wrestle with. Sometimes we decide to bear it all. Other times we decide to cover up.

Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar at New York University who studies the effects these choices have on us and on those around us. Kenji Yoshino, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you so much for having me. 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. 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. If 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. And I am certain that on this day my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision.

When I think back to photographs I've seen of FDR, I often see him 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. 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. I understand that FDR also had a car specially designed for him. Yeah.

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. What's striking about the story of course is that people knew that the president had a disability that he had polioed wasn't a secret.

But yet he went to these lengths in some ways to give the impression that he was okay. 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.

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.

Do those waiting with dated dress for that favorite media catchphrase the U-turn? I have only one thing to say. U-turn if you want to. The ladies not for turning.

Listening to that clip Kenji, it's hard not to notice Margaret Thatcher's distinctive speaking voice. Yes absolutely. And one of the things that 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.

Wow. 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, your aggressor'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.

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. No confidence on money, no confidence on the economy. So yes, the vital number would be glad to hand it all over.

But what is the point? Then try to get elected to Parliament, only to hand over your sterling and the hand over the ball. And of course, I mean, she was known as the Iron Lady and in some ways that voice added to that impression. Exactly right.

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 grocery daughter, but in some ways she again was giving people the illusion that she wasn't.

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. 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 recruiting 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 where the director Richard Attenborough, who had spent years trying to make the movie, was going to give him the part. And during this moment when I'm staring in the mirror, Attenborough walked into the dressing room, Dicky slumped into a chair. I thought, oh dear, this doesn't look good.

Slumpty 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.

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 displaying the role of Gandhi? Yeah.

So Ben Kingsley was born Krishna Banji. And he changed his name when he began his theatrical career because he thought that his birth name would limit the roles that he would be able to acquire. So the irony is that he became Ben Kingsley, but then also went back to playing Gandhi. So there's a kind of Russian doll nesting quality to this.

But the thing that he has in common with the other two figures you were describing is again, he understood that it could be career consequential for him to present himself as his full authentic self. And he modulated aspects of his identity because he knew exactly what the culture needed from him. And he assimilated to that culture. And of course, he's not the only actor to have done.

So there is a long list of actors and musicians and performers who have changed their names to have stage names that sound more charismatic, if you will, than their given names. 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. All these figures were very visible. Franklin Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, and Ben Kingsley lived in the public eye. And yet there were aspects of themselves that they played down.

They were hiding, but hiding in plain sight. When we come back, the subtle ways in which we all disguise our identities and what this subterfuge costs us. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar at New York University. He says that people who feel shame about their identities or fear how they will be treated by others often disguise themselves in three ways, all of which he has done himself. Kenji, let's spend a little time with your own story. You first realized you needed to disguise who you were when you were at boarding school.

What did you feel you needed to hide? 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. 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. 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?

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 and the compensate for some perceived lack in another domain. Poetry was a great solace for me because it allowed me to articulate what I was going through without necessarily being so public about it. So poetry was more public than thought, but it was more private than prose. And I found a great comfort in being able to express myself without feeling I was completely exposed.

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? 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 God that wasn't even sure I believed in for conversion to heterosexuality.

So this is the most aggressive form of assimilation where you desire to change the underlying identity altogether. And it's very difficult, Shankar, for me to remember that young man knelt down in prayer because he so ardently wished the annihilation of the human being I have become. So I'm now currently happily married, my husband and I have two kids and so on and so forth. But that would have been unimaginable to that young man.

This is 1991. He just thought, if I'm going to have any kind of life at all, not just a professional life, but also perhaps more importantly to him at the time, a personal life of marriage and children that it was inconceivable that you could be an openly gay person and have that life. So what I desperately wanted was to convert and to change the underlying identity. At some point during your time in England, Kenji, you went to see a psychiatrist.

Tell me what happened when you talk with him and how it turned out. There was one pivotal conversation that became a touchdown for a 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, and words that I'll never forget, it is not perverted. It is thwarted. And that sort of paradigm shift from thinking about my own desires as being something that were properly stigmatized to thinking that this is actually just something that is blocked, right, is was just a transformative shift to my own thinking.

So the synthesized help to accept your identity as a gay man, but when you return to the United States to go to law school, were you open about being gay? 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. Kenji saw the school was offering a class about sexual orientation in the law. He desperately wanted to take the course, but wondered what message it would send.

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 taking a class called sexual orientation law were members of the LGBTQIA plus community and then maybe some women, some righteous straight women, but a straight man would not be caught touching a class like this with a school.

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. This is a point of real tension in my relationship with him because Paul quite rightly felt that I was downplaying him or hiding him in ways that suggested I was ashamed of the relationship and that 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 verbatim at this time for me.

So eventually Kenji 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? 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 he would be 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. It just happens to be gay on the side as an extracurricular activity.

Then you will, if you are the gay rights professor who teaches gay rights subjects and rights on gay rights issues and works on gay rights cases. Unfortunately, of course, it was the latter that I wanted to do. This was now 1996, the time when the ice was finally breaking up on the LGBTQI plus landscape. The Roma versus Evans case had just been decided.

It was really clear that we're barreling our way towards Lawrence versus Texas in 2003, which was the round before the gay rights movement. And I did not want to be on the sidelines for that. But what he was clearly saying was, if you want to get tenure here, you really need to manage your identity. And there's just a limit to how gay you can be in this environment and expect to succeed.

In other words, be gay, but don't slant it. Exactly. And the reason that that was so utterly painful for me was that 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. You don't need to pass.

But you do need to, as you put it, shunker, 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 the moment when I had this pit in my stomach and I realized that I needed to engage in more kind of identity management when I thought that the era of that was long over in my own life. So wonder you came by a book that transformed your understanding of what was happening to you and what was happening around you.

Can you pick me a picture of this epiphany, can you? Yes, I'm sure this will resonate with most readers, right, who read a book and it's so aptly described something in their own life that they realize that they will never be able to see the world in the same way again. And that book for me was Irving Goffman's book, Stigma, notes on the management of spoiled identity. So Irving Goffman is a very eminent sociologist and one of the things that he was smartest about was the presentation of the self.

So in this book about Stigma, he said that individuals who are quite open about the fact that they belong to a stigmatized group, open because they either cannot or will not, you know, hide that fact. Nonetheless, expand an enormous amount of energy to downplay that identity so that others around them can have greater comfort. And he called this phenomenon covering. And the reason that this was so transformative for me was that I understood to my very bones, right, what I was being asked to do, but I didn't have a word for it.

I had a word for yes, change your identity. That was conversion. I had a word for you can have the identity, but hide it from everybody that was passing. But I did not have the word for you can be gay and say that you're gay, but make sure that you soften it, mute it, edit it, downplay it so that other people around you can feel more comfortable.

So this I'm out of the closet, but I'm still being asked to assimilate in these ways was what I was really struggling with. And I couldn't name it. And what Irving Goffman did, and it's really like a throwaway line. 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 forever more 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. 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 color background, but she goes to great lengths not to sound overly feminine or overly blue color. 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 that important insight there is that when we're talking about conversion or when we're talking about passing, these are not strategies that are available to everybody. So if you have immutable identity like race, you're 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. 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, Donald Roosevelt, Ben Kingsley, there's nothing that they could do to convert or to pass with regard to their identities, whether that was disability or gender or race or national origin. But they were all able to cover by modifying aspects of their identity. So I will cover by making sure I'm only photographed from the waist up to hide my disability or I will cover by going to voice coaching to scrub my working class accent or I will cover by changing my name so that people don't have immediate associations about what roles I might be appropriate for and pigeonholmy in a very narrow area of the theater world.

These are all acts of covering and they testify to how universal this is. Think about a hard driving workplace. You're a new mom. You're a very sensitive 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. 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 Bea Shuranda 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, the way you never ever talk about your children and you constantly talk about your infinite capacity to take on more work. My terminology is covering.

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. In fact, sometimes journalists would comment on how beautiful her eyes were.

That was an incredibly painful irony. One of the richness 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. You would imagine that she would lean heavily into her disability and her identity as a person who was blind among other things. The fact that she engaged in this cosmetic adjustment to appear more 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 clear that in all these instances, I'm not victim-blaming. I'm not saying that 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. I'm interested in 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.

That to me shows how much further we have to go in achieving full equality alongside these stigmatized traits. Are all self-cousetic interventions in some ways forms of covering? I mean, from the very trivial about the bald man who has a combover or the person who is dying their hair because their hair is turning gray. Are these all examples of covering?

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, Ken, she knocked it off, you're driving everyone to destruction. And I said, well, wait a minute, Shunker, this is my authentic self. This is who I am.

I just happen to be an incredibly obnoxious person. And you told me that you valued authenticity in the workplace. And so this is what you get. I would offer to you that that is covering, that you're requiring of me, but that a world in which I win that argument with you is a world in which none of us want to live.

So that means that there are some forms of covering that are at least neutral, but potentially even positive or even essential to the smooth functioning of a workplace or of a community. And that in turn pushes me to the harder question of, okay, if they're good forms of covering and bad forms of covering, how do we distinguish between the good and bad forms? And to me, it's really about societal values. That's my answer of how we distinguish between the good and the bad forms.

Because if you actually say to somebody, yes, you have to downplay your obnoxious personality and I say, well, that's an impingement on my authenticity, you have a really good answer to that, right? Which is to say that we ask everybody to adhere to those norms and we understand that that might harm some people in their self-presentation more than others, but this is a tax that we're willing to exact in the name of the community because we think this is an utterly defensible value. On the other hand, if you said to me, well, you know, we believe in the inclusion of women in the workplace, but to go back to the earlier example, if you want to get a promotion, stop talking about your kids. If you say that to women 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.

So that's the inconsistency I want to challenge. When we come back, how covering complicates our understanding of what it means to belong? You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Where's my shoe?

Real life is a lot. Clean cut meals means eating well doesn't need to be. I'm Connor. And I'm E-Hole.

We make ink up meals for people who want to eat well. Without making a whole thing of it. Chef designed breakfast, lunch and interruptions. High protein, balanced and delicious.

Ready for real life. Clean cut meals, fuel for real life in super value and centra. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar at New York University.

He's the author of covering the Hidden Assault on our civil rights. Kenji, by the year 2001, you had long since come out as a gay man to your parents, they're 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? 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 that perspective, it was just a different level of publicity. And so they were essentially saying, it's fine for you to be out of the closet, but please don't draw this level of activism and advocacy to this role.

So essentially, please downplay or cover. And the most poignant thing that my mother said to me was, you know, if this is published, then I won't be able to go home, meaning go home to Japan, because gay rights was in a much different place in Japan than it was in the United States. Your mother used a Japanese term in this conversation that you didn't understand. What was this term, Kenji?

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-Daku? 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? Well, the kind of penny drops. And I realized that she was talking about Joan of Arc and the transliteration of Joan of Arc ishondaku.

I see. So essentially what she was saying is it's fine for you to be gay, but why do you need to be a banner carrier for this identity? Why do you need to be an advocate or an activist with perhaps the implication of, and we all know what happened to Joan of Arc in the end. So this doesn't end well for anybody.

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

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. I think about this all the time as a parent now where, you know, I have a, well, my parents are extraordinarily wonderful, supportive people. But since my husband and I have had our two kids, I think about this all the time as one of the most poignant things that they said to me. Because of course, when you're a kid, you know, in your, I think it was 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 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're 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 eyes a parent can protect them from. So I think that's what they're trying to convey to me. I'm not a parent. I have made sure to reconnect with them on this particular point to say, you know, I really deeply appreciated that sentiment and probably was not able to hear it at the time because I was only seeing it through the lens of a child rather than the lens of a parent sort of desperate with worry about their child.

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. I can only speculate here because this is something that I don't really know because it's not really something that is talked about openly in our family.

But I can only imagine what anti-Japanese sentiment must have been like in the middle of the 20th century when he came over very, very young, you know, after he graduated from high school and was going to college. So if you think about this era after World War II, the anti-Japanese sentiment must have been enormous. So I do sometimes think that they thought, well, we suffered through all of this because we had to, but we thought that you were going to grow up in a kind of gentler America with regard to race. And so you would be able to kind of write your own ticket.

But now you are embracing or identifying with this identity that is so stigmatized that you're essentially going to have to go through all of this prejudice that we went through just on a different dimension. Your parents had a view of a simulation 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 a simulation. Tell me how your views about a simulation have come to differ from your parents, Kenji.

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 the simulation was this. I'm going to be 100% American and American, 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 chair professor at Harvard in the business school.

So he had a very storied career. And I really did think, I do think that he felt that this ability to code switch seamlessly between the two cultures was what he wanted to do. And my view was I actually don't want to code switch. I don't want to assimilate in either country.

I want to be myself. I want to be the same person regardless of where I am and to the extent that environment is inhospitable to the person that I really am, then I will not live there. I will not work there. So I think one of the reasons why I cooled on Japan as a place to live or work was that I just felt like LGBTQI plus rights were just in a different place than they were in the United States.

But the two stories are intricate with each other because I don't think that I could have the life that I am privileged enough to live right now if he hadn't lived his life so that he actually had 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 am living now. 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? 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, the Asian American community, being a part of those communities reaches the whole rather than impoverishing it. So we can't be tilted over one wing and 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. And that I belong to some 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 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're shaped that ideal than the others who are being told to melt into it. I understand that you have conducted surveys in corporate environments that find that covering negatively impacts individual sense of self and diminishes that commitment to their organizations. I really lean on my wonderful colleagues at 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, 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 and impact of covering is.

And so I, of course, had yes, the survey came back to robustly support the hypothesis that people were covering at a very high rate. We found 61% of people overall reported covering and of that 61%. 60 to 73% depending on the access of covering said that this was somewhat too extremely detrimental to their sense of self. I understand that you faced a moment a number of years ago that brought all of your complex views about a simulation into play.

It had to do with a wonderful job offer from NYU. Tell me that story, Kenji. 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 Rivaz, reached out to me and he said, we know we have a chair, that's very dear to you, which is we know Calibranese, a professorship of law. It was named after the judge from whom I clerked on the second circuit and the former dean of the law school in 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 significance to you.

We couldn't find one. And so we took the extraordinary step of raising $5 million to endow a new chair. 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 please ink bone in my body, shunker, wanted to take the chair which had been given with all the good will in the world. 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. Why? So I said, Ricky, I can't take that chair.

And he was astonished and I could tell a little bit annoyed and he said, why 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, or a war on superintendent, the internment of over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry without any due process or criminal charges. And I said, I can't be honored with the name of an individual who is so dishonored by 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, late on me, I'm all yours. And he said, we want to offer you the chief justice or a war on 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 attacking the words chief justice to the front of it and flipping it back to me as if this were a new chair.

So essentially, how stupid do you think I am? Like what's going on here? And he said, please hear me out. In the days since our last conversation, I've read a biography of Earl Warren.

And he said, as chief justice of the United States Supreme Court who wrote canonical opinions like Brown v. Board of Education or Loving v. Virginia, which legalized interracial marriage in the United States, that the thing he most regretted about his career was the internment of the Japanese. So he said, you know, given your commitment to civil rights and given your commitments to diversity and inclusion, I take your life work to be taking people along this journey or maturity curve of understanding how many different valid ways there are to be a human being.

And he said, given that Earl Warren was able to travel so far along that path in a single lifetime, we actually think that it would be a wonderful emblem of the power of your work to hold his name, but to hold the title that he held when he was completing rather than beginning that journey. So I said, Ricky, that chair I can take. And so I am speaking today as the chief justice or Warren professor of constitutional law. 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 Vedanta. Where's my shoe? Real life is a lot. Clean cup meals means eating well doesn't need to.

I'm Connor. And I'm E-Hole. We make clean cup meals for people who want to eat well. Without making a whole thing of it.

Chef designed breakfast, lunch and dinner options. High protein, balanced and delicious. Ready for real life. Clean cup meals, fuel for real life in super value and centra.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Legal scholar Kenji Yoshino has spent decades thinking about how people mask their identities in order to conform to both real and imagined pressures from those around them. He's also thought a lot about how we can be more of ourselves more of the time. Kenji, you sometimes hear from people who disagree with you.

They say, you know, you may be a gay man and feel the need to hide, but I'm straight and I feel the need to hide too. Maybe it's because I'm overweight or elderly or drink too much. Maybe I have a mental illness that stigmatized. Maybe I'm just shy.

Tell me about these encounters, Kenji. This is one of the most remarkable findings of the Deloitte study, which is that we found that 45% of straight white man were raised in the world. 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 man 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 man reported covering were things like age, socioeconomic status or background, mental or physical illness or disability, religion and veteran status.

And the thing that's so important about the fact that a plurality of the ostensibly most empowered group in society is covering is that it shows that this is truly a universal phenomenon. I go back to what I said earlier, which is to say, if you're outside of the mainstream in any way, you are going to be asked to cover and oftentimes you're going to experience that as a harm. So no matter how many dominant characteristics we hold, we're going to hold some non-dominant ones. And once you see that, then this really becomes a project not about us versus them or marginalized groups versus non-marginalized groups, but really a universal project of authenticity and thinking about what the world might look like, what our individual communities might look like.

If we were all empowered to be a little bit more ourselves. 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. I am so glad that you said that because oftentimes people say, well, that's a kind of false equivalent.

So your shyness is not the same as my race. And by no means I'm saying that they're the same. There's a kind of sedimented history subordination in the case of race that there isn't in the case of introversion. But all that said, if we look at introversion, one of my favorite books of all time is Susan Cain's Quiet.

The subtitle is a powered introvert in a world that can't stop talking. And she talks about how people who are introverts are about one third, according to our definition of American society, and are constantly being asked to torque themselves to lie down on the procrastion bed of extroversion. So we have this extrovert ideal in American society that says that a true leader is kind of backslapping, glad-handing, charismatic person, and that the introvert really needs to adapt to that modality if they want to get anywhere in life. And she makes a really compelling kind of moral and policy-based case for why this shouldn't be the case saying that people are just naturally introverted or extroverted.

And even in our own history, if you go back in time, our greatest leaders, like James Madison or Abraham Lincoln, were classic introverts. And 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, in a certain point of time, what about introversion or what about depression or mental health issues, that other people might say, well, those are kind of tangential or epiphenomenal identities. This is not about race or gender, and so therefore I'm going to ignore it.

Mine also should 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 abends that assumption. So there's nothing inconsistent with being a leader and being an introvert.

We should be celebrating leaders of great orders, but we should also celebrate leaders who are great listeners. Similarly with depression, I'm so delighted that we're finally having the mental health conversation nationally that we need to have. I realize we're still in early days, but I feel like we are talking about it in a way that we have not talked about it in my lifetime. So I do that to be a really positive development.

Here too, it might be like, oh, but here we want to change the underlying condition. We don't want you to be depressed, you know, so we want you to find help or you want to find medication. But that too to me seems like an argument about authenticity and candor because how are you going to help the person who is struggling with depression more? Are you going to help them by saying pretend not to be depressed?

Or are you going to say, we acknowledge that you are depressed? We do not think any less of you because you're depressed if you need help. This is where you can get help. We're here for you.

When I think about something like addiction, for example, or the ways in which addiction is touched so many lives in this country, it is touched the lives of people who are rich and poor and black and white and every socioeconomic group and every demographic group. But clearly there's 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. 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 policies. 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.

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. 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 Matt as human beings before we can go to the next level of needs so that at the very bottom is like food and water, obviously, and then there's shelter.

But then the one beyond that, which is quite surprising, is belonging that we really need to belong and feel like we belong to a community or society or we're just going to be unable to thrive. And my project of covering is really trying to make sure that people find a pathway to belonging that is based as I think it has to be on authenticity. So at the risk of sounding sentimental, I will again go back to my wonderful parents and to say that they constantly were saying to me as I was growing up, we love you. But I trusted the love, but I didn't trust the you because the you that I was presenting to them was not the real me.

So I thought if I come out to you as gay, I don't know if you will still love me. And it was only after I came out that I trusted them on that they said, as I continue to say, we love you. And so that idea, and you could frame it in less sentimental, more daily terms of if I say, shanker, I respect you, but there's something about yourself that you're not going to be able to do. And so if there's something about yourself that you're not fully disclosing to me, you might trust the respect, but you might not trust the you.

You might think, well, that respect attaches to some kind of fictional me that I'm presenting to the world rather than my real self. And it's only when I give you the conditions to be fully authentic that I can say I respect you and you can trust the respect and the you. So for me, this project is a project about saying, 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 passes a straight person and everyone says, oh, can she's a great guy? And so if you say, you know, I'm not going to trust that sense of belonging because a person you've included is not me. It's some facsimile of me that I've created in order to be included. So I've not given the community the chance to accept me for who I really am.

So I realize it can feel very scary and very risky, but this idea that I could actually say to my community, this is who I truly am, and then the community responds by saying, and you belong as you. That's when I can really trust that sense of belonging. 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, Kijijij? The story telling is kind of what I've been doing at multiple points in this wonderful exchange, Shankar, which is when I talk about story, like, oh, I was on the tenure track and I was told to downplay my sexual orientation if I wanted tenure or not writing topics if I wanted tenure, or, you know, when I was offered this chair and I had to debate whether or not to speak up. Like those moments where you are being asked to cover and you rejected the covering demand and you came out of it on the other side much stronger than you would have been if you had ducked your head and gone away. Those are what I'm calling distinct stories.

They are set pieces, they're stories, they're anecdotes that just illustrate to people the power of authenticity. 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 did it and here I am stuck with the title for the rest of my life. Whereas because I stuck up for myself in that moment and got that title change, it may seem like a very small thing, but I can tell you that every time I'm introduced as the Chief Justice or Warren Professorship of Constitutional Law, then I feel completely differently about it. I remember that that was a time in which I brought my authenticity to the table and the other side rose to the occasion of honoring that authenticity.

You also talk about something called Diffuse Storytelling. What is Diffuse Storytelling, Kenji? Yeah, we contrast Diffuse and by we, I mean, my colleagues at Deloitte and my wonderful colleagues here at NYU, Christina, Joseph and David Glasgow. We draw a distinction between Distinct Storytelling and Diffuse Storytelling because when we talk about Share Your Story and Importance of Storytelling to create a culture of uncovering talent, I think people feel like they need to have like a set piece where they're standing at a podium and they're telling a story about their own life.

And that can certainly be powerful. That's what I'm talking about when I talk about Distinct Storytelling. But Diffuse Storytelling sort of takes a bit of the pressure off, which is to say not everything needs to be, I'm standing on a stage and I'm giving a speech. It can really just be this diffuse, very off-handed comment.

Like it can be when I'm leaving to go to my kids' school play, which I did yesterday early from work. I say that's where I'm going. So if I say that, then that means that other colleagues of mine realize that if they need to go to some function that's important in their life, that's not work related. They too have the permission to do that because I modeled that for them.

So it can be as off-handed as saying, you know, this is the reason I'm leaving early today. It doesn't need to be this big, you know, dramatic piece that I'm delivering from the podium. It can just be something that I'm talking to somebody over coffee or something that I'm saying at the end of a Zoom call or what have you. 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 to us.

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. Yes, our research has mostly been on the side of if people expect you to cover what is the harm to you. So in our survey, like 53% of the people who 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 too extremely diminished their commitment to the workplace or their community there. So this is just evidence that covering demands are hurtful and that they're particularly hurtful when they come from leaders within the organization. I understand, can't you sometime ago you were in a supermarket and you had an exchange with a 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. This is a funny one, which is that we're never done with covering the supermarket story is where my husband has this kind of guilty pleasure where he's obsessed with the royal family. And so when I see kind of trashy, tabloid about the royal family, I will buy it for him. And it's kind of a running gag in our family.

And it's just a cute, I think cute thing that we do for each other as a couple. And I was getting rived by the cashier for buying this because the other things I was getting were somewhat more highbrow. So he was like, it's not often that we see somebody buying this book and then this tabloid at the same time. And then I thought, oh, I'm going to say, this isn't for me, this is for my husband.

And then I thought about it and I thought, well, I'm not going to say this. And then, and this is going to sound like I went through a giant loop, but this all took place in the course of two seconds, right? But I thought, like, I'm not going to throw my husband under the bus, so I'm not going to say this is for my husband. And I remember thinking, like, oh, am I doing this because I'm worried about saying my husband?

Like, am I covering my sexual orientation? And I was like, no, if I'm covering something, I'm covering his trashy taste in tabloids. And it's actually a very loving, protective thing that I'm doing for him rather than speaking from a place of shame. So I want to say that I think all of us as human beings make these lightning, fast decisions.

And I think all I'm asking is that we just drive those decisions a little bit more to the surface of our consciousness so that we make these decisions in a way that kind of lives out our values about who we are and who we want to be in the world and also who we want to let others be in the world as well. Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar at New York University. He's the author of covering the hidden assault on our civil rights. Along with David Glasgow, he is co-author of Say the Right Thing, How to Talk About Identity, Diversity and Justice.

Kenji, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. It was such a pleasure. Thank you. Do you have follow-up questions about covering an identity for Kenji Yoshino?

If you'll be willing to share your questions with a hidden brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line covering. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media.

Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Christian Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you love the ideas we explore on Hidden Brain, please consider signing up for our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus.

It's where you'll find bonus conversations you won't hear anywhere else. Plus, you'll be providing us with vital support to continue bringing you more episodes of the show. Please go to support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, go to apple.co.com.

I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.