The 2008 Summer Reading Program Book Selection Committee at UNC has selected Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights by Kenji Yoshino.
As part of its summer reading program, UNC asks all first-year and incoming transfer students to read a book over the summer and participate in small group discussions led by faculty and staff once they arrive on campus.
Yoshino, the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale University, specializes in constitutional law, law and literature and Japanese law and society.
In Covering, published in 2006, he uses his identity as Japanese-American and gay to illustrate sociologist Erving Goffman’s notion of “covering†– downplaying stigmatizing identities in order to assimilate to the cultural mainstream. Yoshino challenges ideas about minority rights and the sometimes-damaging effects of social integration.
A nine-member book-selection committee of students, faculty and staff began meeting last fall to consider books for this year’s program.
Committee chairman Peter A. Coclanis, associate provost for international affairs and Albert A. Newsome Professor of History, said the book would push students to rethink the definition of equality and how “covering†degrades everyone’s civil rights.
The committee chose Covering from more than 160 suggestions made by 224 students, alumni, faculty and community members.
— Staff Reports