Kenji Yoshino: Diversity Does Not Mean Having to Choose Between Identity and Inclusion | Big Think

Kenji Yoshino: Diversity Does Not Mean Having to Choose Between Identity and Inclusion

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Author and academic Kenji Yoshino describes the difference between passing and covering, and how companies will sometimes employ a myopic form of diversity inclusion that necessitates the abandonment of personal identity.

Yoshino is the co-author of a new paper titled "Uncovering Talent: A New Model of Inclusion."

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KENJI YOSHINO:

Kenji Yoshino is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at the NYU School of Law. Prior to moving to NYU, he was the inaugural Guido Calabresi Professor of Law and Deputy Dean of Intellectual Life at Yale Law School, where he taught from 1998 to 2008. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College, took a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, and earned his law degree at Yale Law School. A specialist in constitutional law, antidiscrimination law, and law and literature, Yoshino has published in major academic journals such as the Columbia Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. He has also written extensively in other popular venues, such as The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. He has appeared on The O'Reilly Factor, Washington Journal, and The Tavis Smiley Show.

He is the author of Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (2006) and A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare's Plays Teach Us About Justice (2011).

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TRANSCRIPT:

Kenji Yoshino: Diversity inclusion is something that has been around in companies for decades now and generally people think of it as diversity and inclusion. But I would actually challenge that given that I think that historically we’ve seen diversity or inclusion rather than diversity and inclusion. And what I mean by that is that companies really want inclusion but they often predicate that inclusion on the surrender of various forms of diversity that people bring to the table. So the idea is that if you modulate your outsider identity to adopt mainstream behaviors then you’ll be included. And so it puts people to this tragic choice between their identity and inclusion. And that’s where I think that companies have missed the mark or need to update their practices.

So I look at the notion of authenticity through Erving Goffman’s term covering. So Erving Goffman is a sociologist who wrote back in the 1960s, and his notion of covering was the way in which we all modulate our identities in order to be accepted by the mainstream. So when I first came across this term my immediate response was how does covering differ from passing. And one of the great things about Goffman is that he’s such a good writer that when you’re reading him you almost feel like you’re talking to him. So the next paragraph was, you know, the astute reader may be asking himself how covering differs from passing. And he gives the example of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And Roosevelt used to always make sure that he was seated behind a table before his cabinet entered. So he wasn’t passing because everybody knew that he had a motor function disability and was confined to a wheelchair.

But he was covering, making sure his more conventional presidential qualities – I am white, I am a man, were in the foreground. And his last conventional presidential quality, I’m a person with a disability was in the background of the interaction. And whether it’s on the basis of race or gender or sexual orientation or religion or disability, all of us engage in these practices where we downplay the things that push us outside of the mainstream. And that, as our study again shows, comes at a significant cost to people’s sense of self. So, you know, I’m a rubber hits the road kind of guy so even if we find a high incidence of this practice of covering which we found that 61 percent of individuals reported covering, I kind of thought well, I don’t care about this unless people report that it’s harmful to them. If people say I do it but it’s not a big deal then I don’t care. But 60 to 73 percent of individuals depending on the particular axis of covering that we looked at said that this was somewhat to extremely detrimental to their sense of self. So that’s something that we really need to be attentive to if we want people to really flourish in whatever organization they inhabit.....

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