Essay Draft 1

Throughout this assignment I have read about Yoshino “Covering” and how he is able to defend the people who are choosing to cover up their true self. He talks about civil rights for individuals and groups and explains that, “ The aspiration of civil rights has always been to permit people to pursue their human flourishing without limitations based on bias focusing on laws that prevents us from seeing the revolution threats of that aspiration as law has limited civil rights to particular groups.” Limitations in the article are holding our society back from being themselves. The laws are limiting our growth on becoming ourselves and who we really are. If we have these limitations that makes us feel the need to cover our true identity, we will never have room to flourish to our fullest potential and we could even lose part of that identity. In our society today there are many aspects that can define who someone is and most people will define us by groups. Yoshino’s defines that our civil rights should protect every aspect that we are as individuals and a group. Group rights are rights held by a group and individual rights are rights held by individual people. In this article the writer talks a lot of about individual and group rights and how we are categorized as groups with our identities. Yoshinos talks about the Liberty Paradigm of Civil Rights v. Equality Paradigm of Civil Rights. He claims that “ its much more sympathetuc to “liberty” claims about freedoms we all hold than to “equality” claims asserted by a subset of the population. It is easy to see why. Equality claims- such as group-based accomodation claims- inevitable involve the court in picking favorites among groups. In an increasingly pluralistic society, the court understandbly wishes to steer clear of that enterprise. Liberty claims on the other hand, emphasize what all americans(or more precisley, all persons within the jurdiction of the United States) have in common.” He wants individual rights so people don’t have to continue covering their identities. Yoshinos is a strong adivicate for having a informal conversation about how the Liberty Paradigm of Civil Rights and Equality Paradigm of Civil Rights for people that cover. Covering is something we do to shield us from hateful comments but we should have rights that say this isn’t okay. To cover is to tone down your identity in order to be able to fit into the mainstream of today’s society. Covering is used to hide a true self which is an identity that showcases your authenticity. In this article covering is explained as something that goes against our civil rights. In Yoshino’s view of covering people will cover their true identities because they feel that they need to fit into the mainstream of today’s society and to meet everyone’s expectation of what a real person should be like and act like. Some examples of covering is pretending to be a different race, sex or hiding your sexuality. Other examples of covering can vary from not saying hi to someone you know but other people don’t like or not showing your true personality. Everything that defines us is what authenticity is and the writer wants us to realize that it times to build a  new civil rights paradigm which can bring us closer together than driving us further away. Covering is something we do to shield us from hateful comments but we should have rights that say this isn’t okay.