Kenji Yoshino
Appearances
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 outed myself to the entire community, I thought.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
At that time, the only people who would be caught, you know, taking a class called sexual orientation in the law were members of the LGBTQIA plus community and then maybe some woman, some righteous straight woman. But a straight man would not be caught, you know, touching a class like this with a 10-foot pole.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
This was 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 verboten at this time for me.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 a extracurricular activity.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
than you will if you are the gay rights professor who teaches gay rights subjects and writes on gay rights issues and works on gay rights cases. Unfortunately, of course, it was the latter that I wanted to do. This was now 1996, the time when the ice was finally breaking up. on the LGBTQIA+, you know, landscape. The Romer versus Evans case had just been decided.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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. 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
So Irving Goffman is a very eminent sociologist, and one of the things that he was smartest about was the presentation of the self.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 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 coverings.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
The reason that this was so transformative for me was that I understood to my very bones 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Because that colleague was not saying don't be gay or don't say that you're gay. He was saying it's fine for you to be gay and say that you're gay, but don't flaunt it. And covering was what he was asking me to do. So I knew that I would forevermore be attuned to these covering demands as a kind of assimilation I would be asked to engage in on the other side of the closet door.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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,
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
you're gonna 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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. 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Or I will cover by going to voice coaching to scrub my working class accent. Or I will cover by changing my name so that people don't have immediate associations about what roles I might be appropriate for and pigeonhole me in a very narrow area of the theater world. These are all acts of covering, and they testify to how universal this is.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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?
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 coverings.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
But the fact that she engaged in this cosmetic adjustment to appear more kind of normal and mainstream testifies to the fact that none of us ever evolve away from the force of these covering demands. I also want to make really clear that in all these instances, I'm not victim blaming. I'm not saying that, oh, FDR or Margaret Thatcher or Ben Kingsley or Helen Keller did
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
And that to me shows how much further we have to go in achieving full equality alongside these stigmatized traits.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
I always answer that by saying, yes, there are all forms of covering, but not all forms of covering are problematic. So if I came to work alongside you and I was rabidly 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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, you know, of course.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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. You know, 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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, you know, in the United States.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 Shondaku? 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?
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Until the kind of penny dropped and I realized that she was talking about Joan of Arc and the transliteration of Joan of Arc as Shondaku.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
I think about this all the time as a parent now where, you know, I have a... 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
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
a kid in your, I think it 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 gonna get hate mail, you're gonna get death threats, you're gonna get this or that, I was just like, well, that's kind of my business. I'm fully able to take care of myself.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 are coming from, where in some ways there's nothing more painful than thinking, oh my gosh, my child could...
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
So as a parent, I have made sure to reconnect with them on this particular point to say, you know, I really deeply appreciated that sentiment and probably was not able to hear it at the time because I was only seeing it through the lens of a child rather than the lens of a parent sort of desperate with worry about their child.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
So if you think about this era after World War II, the anti-Japanese sentiment must have been enormous. So I do sometimes think that they thought, well, we suffered through all of this because we had to, but we thought that you were going to grow up in a kinder, gentler America with regard to race, and so you would be able to kind of write your own ticket.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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, you know, I'm going to be 100% American in America and 100% Japanese in Japan.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
And so he was deeply, you know, assimilated and went from being a young immigrant to this country to ending his life as a you know chaired professor at harvard and 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
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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, right?
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 plus rights were just in a different place than they were in the United States. But the two stories are intricated with each other, right?
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 created the conditions of, you know, 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Robert Putnam also talks about the importance of bonding capital, and he says if we melt totally into the pot, you know, that's a problem too. And part of the capital that we need to offer to society is the kind of capital we build only internal to communities.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
So the LGBT community, for example, or the Asian American community, being a part of those communities actually enriches the whole rather than impoverishing it. 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 that the marginalized group is assimilating and conforming to the norms set by the dominant group.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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, you know, 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 you know what the incidence impact of covering is and so i of course said yes the survey came back to robustly support the hypothesis that people were covering at a very high rate we found 61 of people overall reported covering and of that 61 percent
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
60 to 73%, depending on the axis of covering, said that this was somewhat to extremely detrimental to their sense of self.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 Rivez, reached out to me and he said, we know you have a chair at Yale that's very dear to you, which is Guido Calabresi Professorship of Law.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
So I said, Ricky, like, 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
And as you may know, as Attorney General of California, Earl Warren superintended the internment of over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry without any due process or criminal charges.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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. You know, 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
You're now tacking the words Chief Justice to the front of it and flipping it back to me as if this were a new chair. So essentially, how stupid do you think I am? Like, what's going on here? And he said, please hear me out. in the days since our last conversation, I've read a biography of Earl Warren.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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,
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
So no matter how many dominant characteristics we hold, we're going to hold some non-dominant ones.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
And once you see that, then this really becomes a project not about us versus them or, you know, 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
I am so glad that you said that because oftentimes people say, well, you know, that's a kind of false equivalence of, you know, your shyness is not the same as my race. And I, by no means, I'm saying that they're the same. There's a kind of sedimented history of subordination in the case of race that there isn't in the case of introversion.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 one-third, according to her definition, of American society.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
and are constantly being asked to torque themselves to lie down on the Procrustean bed of extroversion so that we have this extrovert ideal in American society that says that a true leader is a kind of back-slapping, 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
She makes a really compelling moral and policy-based case for why this shouldn't be the case, saying that people are just naturally introverted or extroverted. Even in our own history, if you go back in time, Our greatest leaders, like James Madison or Abraham Lincoln, were classic introverts.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
So this idea that there's something inconsistent between being an introvert and being a leader is something that our own history completely belies.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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, in a certain point of time, oh, what about introversion or what about depression or mental health issues, You know, other people might say, well, those are kind of tangential or epiphenomenal identities.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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?
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 celebrate leaders who are great orators, but we should also celebrate leaders who are great listeners.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 were 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Here too, it might be like, oh, but here we want to change the underlying condition. We don't want you to be depressed. So we want you to find help or you want to find medication. But that too, to me, seems like an argument about authenticity and candor, because how are you going to help the person who is struggling with depression more?
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
we are gonna 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
I entirely believe that. That's exactly what I'm trying to say. I always think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where he talks about the needs that we need to get met as human beings before we can go to the next level of needs. So that the very bottom is like food and water, obviously, and then there's shelter.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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. 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
You might think, well, that respect attaches to some kind of fictional me that I'm presenting to the world rather than my real self. And it's only when I give you the conditions to be fully authentic that I can say I respect you and you can trust the respect and the you. So for me, this project is a project about saying, how do we actually achieve belonging?
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
And here I am stuck with this title for the rest of my life. Mm-hmm. 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 the importance of storytelling to create a culture of uncovering talent,
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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. Like it can be when I'm leaving to go to my kids' school school play which I did yesterday early from work, I say that's where I'm going.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 our 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 or something that I'm saying at the end of a Zoom call or what have you.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Yes, absolutely. And one of the things that, like 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. And what they were doing was saying to her, look, you speak with a working class accent, so you need to posh up your voice, you're a grocer's daughter.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 surveyed. said that their leaders expected them to cover.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Yeah, 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 a 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
And it's just a cute, I think, cute thing that we do for each other as a couple. Yeah. And, you know, I was getting ribbed 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Then I thought, oh, I'm going to say this isn't for me, this is for my husband. Then I thought about it and I thought, well, I'm not going to say this. It's going to sound like I went through a giant loop, but this all took place in the course of two seconds. 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Absolutely. And they tend to be sort of more popular names that are in the semantic stock. 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 of the country that they're performing in.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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...
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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. 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
There was one pivotal conversation that became a touchstone 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.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
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 was just a transformative shift in my own thinking.