Morning Session: Kenji Yoshino

Over the past few years, I have found myself interrogating this notion of cleanly dividing the “professional self” and the “personal self”.  The implication is that the personal must be left at home, and when we are in our workplaces, a common code of conduct prevails.   These rules are largely unspoken and unwritten, but our familiarity with, and our proximity to accessing these rules often differ, usually along various lines of cultural identity.

Kenji Yoshino, the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at the NYU School of Law helped push my thinking further today.  Using constitutional law as his theoretical framework, he invited us to think about civil rights in an age where discrimination still exists, but has taken subtler forms since most, but importantly, not all, discriminatory legislation has been rendered illegal by our courts.

He spoke of the costs of assimilation and living as inauthentic selves, as demonstrated by concepts he coined as “conversion”, “passing”, and “covering”.  Yoshino wove his own personal narrative as a gay Asian American and his journey regarding race and sexuality, in order to illustrate the demands and pressures he felt to not be who he is, or maybe just not “as much”.

Kenji Yoshino

Yoshino’s Book

He revealed a comment a fellow colleague made to him, giving him the advice that he would be better off as a “homosexual who is a professional, rather than a professional homosexual.” In other words, Yoshino’s career would be more secure, or he would rise to greater heights if he was a traditional constitutional law scholar, and was simply gay “as an extra curricular activity”.  In other words, to become a scholar who actively addresses discrimination aimed at the LGBT community and other communities, would forever make inseparable the personal and the professional, and this could have consequences.

He spoke of a recent New York Times article describing African American job seekers as “scrubbing their resumes” in an attempt to appear more White.  Names of African origin are dropped from headers.  Associations with HBCUs are kept under wraps, all in an attempt to keep “covering”, to keep authenticity squarely in the personal realm, and to conform, and to deny.

I think about the students who might deny themselves, or might be denied the opportunities to be fully authentic at school.  How and where are those lessons taught and learned?  What do some of our students feel is necessary to hide in order to get along in our schools’ cultures, and to cover?

How can we shift the burden of responsibility onto teachers and other adults?  What teaching practices may we employ?  What systems of support are in place?  What are the goals and how will we know we are achieving them?

How can we expect all our students to feel safe being authentically themselves until we plainly tell them or demonstrate to them that it will be OK?  We mean what we say, we will stand with them,we will also risk, and we will make the first move because, after all, we are the adults.

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