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Re-envisioning Inclusion: Understand the Concept of Covering with Kenji Yoshino, Professor, NYU School of Law; Author
The word covering comes from the sociologist Erving Goffman’s work. And one of the things that he was very concerned about was what he called the presentation of self in everyday life. And the term covering comes from that trench of research in which he says that covering is a practice that we engage in to downplay stigmatized identities even when those identities are known to other people. So the immediate question I had was how does this term covering differ from the word passing which I think is more familiar to us. And sure enough in the next paragraph he says the astute reader may be asking himself how covering differs from passing so let me sharpen this up with an example.
And he gives the example of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He used to always make sure he was seated behind a table before his cabinet entered. So Roosevelt wasn’t passing because everybody in his cabinet knew that he had a motor function disability and that he was confined to a wheelchair. But he was covering in that he was making sure that his more conventionally presidential qualities – I’m white, I am a man – were in the foreground of the interaction, and his less conventionally presidential quality – I am disabled, I am in a wheelchair – was in the background. And whether it’s based on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, all of us downplay or modulate the ways in which we are outsiders, right, in order to blend into the mainstream. And so what covering does is identifies a phenomenon that is simultaneously universal but also as our study shows often extremely costly both to the individual and the organization that the individual inhabits.
Prevalence of Covering
The prevalence of covering is something that we often get asked about and the distribution of which groups cover more and which groups cover less. And I have both an intuitive and a counterintuitive answer to that. So the intuitive answer is, you know, groups that are seen as struggling to make it into the mainstream have a much higher reported incidence of covering. So 83 percent of LGB respondents in our survey, lesbian, gay and bisexual, respondents in our survey reported covering; 79 percent of blacks both African American and non-nationals; 66 percent of women. So that array I think will strike many listeners as intuitive. On the other hand we also found that 45 percent of straight white men reported covering on at least one of the dimensions that we articulate in our paper. And that was obviously a really interesting statistic to us and so we dug in more deeply to think about well what are the ways in which straight white men who are traditionally seen as outside of the inclusion paradigm, what are the ways in which they cover.
And we discovered everything from I have to cover my religion to I have to cover my political affiliation. I have to cover my veteran status or my working class background or I have to cover the fact that I have a mental or a physical illness. And so we really ran the gamut. And the reason that that statistic was so important to us is that straight white men are often either lionized or demonized in these conversations. They’re either lofted up as a people who are supposed to come riding in to fix everything or at worse they’re seen as people who are, you know, supposed to clean up their own mess, the people who caused the problem, they’re demonized. So the notion is that straight white men cover and that this is a really, really important finding because it puts them inside of the inclusion paradigm. So when I presented these results to CEOs, to executive committees, to chief diversity officers, this is a statistic that everybody gloms onto because the straight white men in the room, as one CEO put it to me, say this is finally a paradigm of inclusion in which I can see myself. So I’m not outside looking in. I’m actually in this.
Creating Solidarity
When I was in early days in this research one response that I often got was I understand why people should not have to be discriminated against based on things that they can’t change about themselves. Like say their skin color or their chromosomes or if immutable their sexual orientation. But why shouldn’t you have to cover because I have to cover all the time. I call this the angry straight white guy question because angry straight white men used to always ask it of me. And one of them really sort of hit me in the face, not literally but sort of cognitively when he said “look, I just survived cancer – like I’m in remission from cancer. So no matter how much you struggled with any of these identities that you talk about, no matter how much other people struggle with regard to covering their disability or their sexual orientation or their gender, like I can’t talk about my cancer nor could I talk about it when I was going through it lest I be perceived as overly weak. So I didn’t pass. I did tell people but I didn’t emphasize it because I didn’t want people to think well he’s not going to be around or to write me off.”
So the minute that you say I acknowledge that and I acknowledge that you’re claim to authenticity, your claim to human flourishing, you know, the burden of secrecy is as great for you as it is for me, right. That’s a moment when you actually can create a bridge and that’s a moment at which all of that resentment which can often be hidden among straight white men because they get, again, pilloried if they talk about it, right, suddenly turns into solidarity. That’s when you get buy in and that’s when the organization moves forward.