Dropping the Mask

Shankar opens with the 1971 hijacking attributed to “Dan Cooper,” later popularly called D.B. Cooper. Cooper bought a one-way Northwest Orient ticket from Portland to Seattle, showed a flight attendant what looked like a bomb, and demanded $200,000 and four parachutes in exchange for the passengers’ safety. After landing, he released the passengers but kept the crew, ordered the aircraft refueled, and made it take off again toward Mexico City. With the cockpit crew isolated and the curtains closed, he opened the rear exit and parachuted into the moonless night, never to be identified. The story introduces the episode’s question: what happens when people disguise who they are to fit in or be taken seriously?

Kenji Yoshino explains that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s polio left him with a motor disability, but FDR carefully kept it in the background of public life. Photographs generally showed him from the waist up, often seated behind a desk before cabinet members entered so no one would see him laboriously sit down or stand. He also had a car modified so he could operate the accelerator and brakes with his hands, then made a point of being photographed driving it. Yoshino stresses that FDR was not fooling people: Americans knew he had polio. He was managing the impression that the disability did not make him less capable of being president.

Yoshino compares FDR’s presentation strategy with Margaret Thatcher’s effort to alter her speaking voice. When Thatcher was preparing to become prime minister, advisers told the grocer’s daughter that her working-class accent needed to be “poshed up.” Voice coaching lowered and deepened her voice, giving it a more patrician, resonant quality that later became associated with authority and the “Iron Lady.” Thatcher’s background was not secret, just as FDR’s disability was not secret; the issue was that she understood an outsider trait might be judged negatively in a position of power. Yoshino calls this impression management: not conversion or deception, but softening an identity so others will accept the person more readily.

The episode then turns to actor Ben Kingsley, who described looking in a mirror after being made up as Gandhi and hearing director Richard Attenborough finally say, “Ben, I want you to do it.” Yoshino notes that Kingsley was born Krishna Banji and changed his name because he believed his given name would limit the roles he could obtain. The irony was that “Ben Kingsley” eventually played Gandhi, creating what Yoshino calls a Russian-doll layering of identities: a man altered his name to fit the culture, then portrayed another man whose identity was itself being recreated for an audience. Stage names, Yoshino says, often move toward familiar, memorable names in a culture’s “semantic stock.”

Yoshino says he recognized that he was gay young but hoped the identity would disappear. In boarding school during the mid-1980s, he had a girlfriend, a choice he now regrets because she was involved in a relationship with someone who was not being fully authentic. At college, he poured himself into academic achievement, a pattern he has seen among LGBT people and other overachievers who compensate in one area for a perceived lack in another. Poetry gave him a middle ground: more public than private thoughts but less exposing than prose. During a dark period as a Rhodes Scholar in England, he prayed in a college chapel for conversion to heterosexuality, imagining that an openly gay life with marriage and children was impossible.

A psychiatrist in England asked Yoshino to describe whom he found attractive. Yoshino refused, calling his desire perverted, but the psychiatrist replied, “It is not perverted, it is thwarted.” That shift—from viewing his sexuality as deserving stigma to viewing it as something blocked by social forces—helped him accept being gay. Yet when he returned to the United States for law school, he moved into a new stage: he no longer tried to convert, but he passed by remaining closeted. He wanted to take a class on sexual orientation and the law, but feared that signing the publicly posted class list would out him. After coming out and beginning a relationship with Paul, he still avoided holding hands or displaying affection in public, leaving Paul feeling hidden and ashamed.

A senior colleague later told Yoshino he would have “a lot smoother ride to getting tenure” as “a homosexual professional rather than a professional homosexual.” The advice meant that Yoshino could be gay privately, but should teach mainstream constitutional subjects rather than gay-rights law, write on gay-rights issues, or make that identity central to his work. Yoshino connected this experience to Irving Goffman’s Stigma, which gave him the term “covering.” Conversion means trying to change the underlying identity; passing means concealing membership in a group so others do not know it; covering means people know the identity but pressure someone to mute, edit, or downplay its behavioral expression. Unlike conversion or passing, covering is available—and demanded—of everyone with an outsider identity.

Yoshino finds covering in FDR’s waist-up photographs, Thatcher’s voice coaching, and Helen Keller’s discomfort with photographs showing her protruding eye; Keller eventually had glass eyes fitted, and journalists sometimes praised their beauty. He also cites the “motherhood penalty”: women can mitigate it in some workplaces by never mentioning their children and constantly signaling devotion to work. Yoshino does not blame people who cover; he asks why full membership and dignity require such editing. Still, he says not every covering demand is unjust. A workplace can reasonably ask an obnoxious employee to stop disrupting colleagues because that norm applies to everyone and serves a defensible community value. By contrast, asking mothers—but not fathers—to hide their children lacks that justification.

When Yoshino was considering a 2008 move from Yale to NYU, Dean Ricky Reves offered to create a $5 million Earl Warren Professorship because no existing chair matched his Yale position. Yoshino had just written about covering and objected: Warren, as California attorney general, had overseen the internment of more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry without due process or criminal charges. Reves returned three days later with the “Chief Justice Earl Warren Professorship of Constitutional Law,” explaining that Warren later wrote Brown v. Board of Education and Loving v. Virginia and came to regret the internment. Yoshino accepted because the title honored Warren at the point when he had traveled further toward civil-rights understanding. He says rejecting the first offer preserved his authenticity and changed how he feels whenever he is introduced.

Yoshino’s parents supported him but worried that a New York Times profile identifying him as openly gay would expose him to hate mail and make his mother unable to return comfortably to Japan. She asked why he had to be a “jean daku,” her transliteration of Joan of Arc: being gay was acceptable, but why become a banner-carrying activist? Yoshino contrasts his father’s ideal—being 100% American in America and 100% Japanese in Japan—with his own desire not to code-switch or assimilate in either country. He still credits his father’s successful assimilation with creating the educational and emotional conditions that enabled his life. He prefers a balance between “bridging capital,” such as American identity, and “bonding capital” within LGBT or Asian American communities.

Yoshino describes Deloitte research conducted after colleagues told him that the concept needed empirical support. Sixty-one percent of respondents reported covering, and between 60% and 73% of those people said it was somewhat to extremely damaging to their sense of self, depending on the identity involved. In another survey of 3,129 Fortune 500 employees across eight sectors, 53% said leaders expected them to cover; half of that group said the expectation diminished their commitment to the workplace or community. Forty-five percent of straight white men also reported covering, commonly around age, socioeconomic background, mental or physical illness, religion, disability, or veteran status. Yoshino presents covering as a universal human-flourishing issue, not an “us versus them” contest.

Yoshino distinguishes “distinct storytelling,” in which someone tells a clear story about rejecting a covering demand, from “diffuse storytelling,” in which ordinary comments model permission to be more fully human. He uses his own chair negotiation as a distinct story: every introduction now reminds him that NYU honored his objection rather than forcing him to accept a title that conflicted with his history. Diffuse storytelling can be as casual as telling colleagues one is leaving early for a child’s school play, thereby signaling that nonwork commitments are legitimate. He warns against telling people they are secretly inauthentic; instead, leaders should create psychological safety through mutual respect and interpersonal trust, share their own experiences, and let others disclose when they feel safe.

Yoshino distinguishes covering from passing again: passing means others do not know one belongs to a stigmatized group, while covering means they know but ask for downplaying. He links covering to imposter syndrome, arguing that workplaces are healthier when people can admit vulnerability and discover that others feel similarly. For Claudia, who avoids discussing liberal politics with conservative friends, he increasingly favors finding ways to speak across political differences because suppressing a core identity can block recognition of shared humanity. For Louise, who adjusts her identity to reduce power differences, he says covering can be a compassionate choice when it serves another good, such as helping a child feel understood. His practical test is: am I covering, does it hurt, is there an overriding justification, and if not, how can I challenge the demand?

Responding to questions about lost heritage, sexual abuse, DEI backlash, accents, and helping others, Yoshino rejects the idea that everyone has a fixed authentic self waiting under a drape. Identity is fluid, narrative, and partly unknown even to the person living it, so he focuses less on judging performances than on identifying illegitimate covering demands. Allies can challenge stigmatizing comments about sexual abuse without forcing survivors to speak for themselves, “calling people in” rather than calling them out. He says the retreat from institutional DEI does not eliminate the right to support colleagues or contest covering demands. For Colombian immigrants, the problem is the drug-dealer stereotype, not the choice to learn unaccented English. Communities should create safety rather than demand that people reveal themselves.