Have you ever downplayed some aspect of your identity? Maybe you don’t hide it, but you don’t bring it up with certain people, either. It turns out that these subtle disguises can have powerful effects on how we view ourselves. This week, we talk with legal scholar Kenji Yoshino about what happens when we soften or edit our true selves.Do you have a follow-up question for Kenji Yoshino after listening to this episode? If you'd be comfortable sharing your question with the larger Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line "covering." Thanks!
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
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.
Chapter 2: Who is Kenji Yoshino and what does he study?
Who are we really and how much of our real selves can we show to the world? These are questions all of us wrestle with. Sometimes we decide to bear it all. 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.
Chapter 3: How did FDR and Margaret Thatcher manage their public personas?
So Franklin Delano Roosevelt was struck by polio and in the wake of that had a motor disability where he was in a wheelchair. And he made every effort to downplay this to the American public. And that included having photographs taken of him only from the waist up.
And he was able to minimize or edit his public persona so that his disability was in the background rather than the foreground of his interactions with others.
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?
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.
What's striking about the story, of course, is that people knew that the president had a disability, that he had polio. It wasn't a secret. But yet he went to these lengths in some ways to give the impression that he was OK.
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.
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Chapter 4: Why did Ben Kingsley change his name?
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.
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 Vedantam.
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 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
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 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.
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Chapter 5: How did Kenji Yoshino's personal experiences shape his views on identity?
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.
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.
Think about a hard-driving workplace. You're a new mom. Do you hesitate to put up pictures of your children on your desk? That's what Kenji would call covering. He cites studies that show that in such workplaces, women face a motherhood penalty.
There are social science studies that are quite depressing on this point. Oh, she's now a caregiver. She'll be less committed to work. There's a follow-on study by Beatrice Aranda and Peter Glick that says, is there anything that women can do to mitigate or eliminate the motherhood penalty?
As it turns out, there's nothing you can do to eliminate it, but you can mitigate the motherhood penalty if you engage in behavior that is work devotional, where you never ever talk about your children and you constantly talk about your infinite capacity to take on more work. That, in my terminology, is coverings.
I'm thinking about the famous writer and activist Helen Keller. She was blind, but she was uncomfortable about being photographed from angles that showed her protruding eye. At one point, she later had her eyes replaced with glass eyes. And in fact, sometimes, you know, journalists would comment on how beautiful her eyes were.
That was an incredibly painful irony. And one of the richnesses of that anecdote that you just told is that if you were to ask somebody who the most famous disability rights advocate was, they would probably say Helen Keller. So you would imagine that she would lean heavily into her disability and her identity as a person who was blind, among other things.
But the fact that she engaged in this cosmetic adjustment to appear more kind of normal and mainstream testifies to the fact that none of us ever evolve away from the force of these covering demands. I also want to make really clear that in all these instances, I'm not victim blaming. I'm not saying that, oh, FDR or Margaret Thatcher or Ben Kingsley or Helen Keller did
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.
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Chapter 6: What is 'covering' and how does it impact individuals?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I understand that you have conducted surveys in corporate environments that find that covering negatively impacts individual sense of self and diminishes their commitment to their organizations.
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.
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
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Chapter 7: How can covering affect people in professional settings?
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.
This is not about sort of race or gender, and so therefore I'm going to ignore it. My analysis would be quite different, which would be a kind of curiosity about those identities to say, please tell me more, right? And to ask, as we were discussing earlier, What possible justification could an individual have on the other side of asking people to change or cover the underlying identity?
So if I say you have to cover because leaders are just extroverts and so you should be ashamed or downplay your introverted identity, again, our history upends that assumption. So there's nothing inconsistent with being a leader and being an introvert. We should celebrate leaders who are great orators, 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 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.
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?
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 has touched so many lives in this country, you know, it has touched the lives of people who are rich and poor and black and white and, you know, every socioeconomic group and every demographic group.
But clearly there is a huge stigma about addiction today and there's a huge demand to cover up, you know, addictions in the workplace, but also in social life.
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.
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Chapter 8: What personal challenges did Kenji Yoshino face with his identity?
You also talk about something called diffused storytelling. What is diffused 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 the importance of storytelling to create a culture of uncovering talent,
I think people feel like they need to have like a set piece where 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.
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.
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.
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.
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, as you say, a set piece that's delivered from a podium.
100% right.
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.
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