Kenji Yoshino

"The Face and the Voice of the New Civil Rights."

Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights

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THE LATEST: Kenji Yoshino's new project, called 'Civil Rights, Inc.', is an in-depth look at the leadership role corporations are taking in the advancement of civil rights. Read more about it HERE.

Dubbed "the face and voice of the new civil rights" by Barbara Ehrenreich, Kenji Yoshino presents a new paradigm for civil rights, articulating the victories and limitations of the movement, while pointing a way forward. Yoshino's landmark book, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, fuses legal manifesto with autobiography, and marks a move from more traditional pleas for civil equality to a case for individual autonomy in identity politics. In it, he argues that each of us "covers" -- that, bending to societal pressure, we tone down an aspect of our personality to gain acceptance from the mainstream. A "common read" on many campuses, Covering was hailed by Publishers Weekly for its "tremendous potential as a touchstone in the struggle for universal human dignity." His recently released book, A Thousand Times More Fair, takes ten Shakespeare plays and ties them to a contemporary question of justice. This book has been praised by literary luminaries such as Harold Bloom and Stephen Greenblatt, as well as by major legal figures such as retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and Judge Richard Posner. Yoshino is currently working on a project titled "Civil Rights, Inc." about how corporations are the new engines of national and global diversity and inclusion.

Kenji Yoshino is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at the NYU School of Law. Educated at Harvard, Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar), and Yale Law School, he taught from 1998 to 2008 at Yale Law School, where he was the Deputy Dean and the inaugural Guido Calabresi Professor of Law. A specialist in constitutional law, civil rights law, and law and literature, he has written for major academic journals such as the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and Yale Law Journal. He also writes broadly in more popular forums, such as The New York Times, The L.A. Times, The Washington Post, and Slate, as well as appearing regularly on Charlie Rose and NPR. In 2011, he was elected an Overseer of Harvard University.

Kenji Yoshino Speech Topics

Diversity & Inclusion

Civil Rights, Inc.

Yoshino's current project looks at the leadership role corporations are taking in the advancement of civil rights. Corporations have traditionally been seen as the enemies of civil rights, usually pictured at the defendant’s table in lawsuits. Recent years, however, have seen a sea change in the relationship many corporations have to traditionally underrepresented groups. Corporations are now using the most innovative social science techniques to smoke out implicit racial bias, fashioning the smartest work-life policies to retain women, and playing a crucial role in the national and global struggle for LGBT equality. Along many dimensions, corporations have become the thought leaders in this era of civil rights.

The reason for this paradigm shift is clear -- corporations have come to understand the "business case for diversity." The changing demographics of the United States, as well globalization, mean that corporations must ensure that they have access to the broadest pool of talent and consumers. In his project, Yoshino explores the promises and the pitfalls of this new “market-based” civil rights paradigm, not just for corporations, but for the United States and the world.

Covering: The Hidden Assault on our Civil Rights

In a culture where racial minorities are pressed to "act white", women are told to "play like men", and gays are dissuaded from engaging in public displays of affection, it is difficult to believe that we are as "diverse" as we'd like to think. Drawing on his experience as a gay Asian American, Kenji Yoshino examines the prejudices embedded in both American life and in Civil Rights legislation -- prejudices that hinder our ability to be our authentic selves. Key to his talk is the phenomenon of "covering," where people downplay stigmatized traits in order to blend into the mainstream. Moving past conventional discussions of identity politics, Yoshino explains the dangers of a society that claims to support racial, gender, orientation, religious, and physical differences but still routinely denies equal treatment of these people when they refuse to downplay their differences. With a hopeful vision of the future, Yoshino, one of our best legal minds, proves how the ubiquity of "covering" provides an opportunity to redefine civil rights and lift this legislation into a higher, more universal register.

Law & Literature

A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare's Plays Teach Us About Justice

With a modern twist, Kenji Yoshino offers an inspired reading of ten Shakespearean plays, showing us how they provide parables of justice relevant to our times. With a great ear for Shakespeare and an eye trained steadily on current affairs, Yoshino considers how competing models of judging presented in Measure for Measure resurfaced around the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor; how the revenge cycle of Titus Andronicus illuminates the "war on terror" and our military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq; how the white handkerchief in Othello and the black glove in the O. J. Simpson trial reflect forms of proof that overwhelmed all other evidence. Thousand is an altogether original book about Shakespeare and the law, and an ideal starting point to explore the nature of a just society—and our own. This talk is appropriate not only for educational institutions that seek to remind students of the continuing relevance of the humanities, but also for law firms seeking to provide meaningful CLE (continuing legal education) programs.

VIDEOS

LINKS

Kenji Yoshino - Official Website

BOOKS

A Thousand Times More Fair

Covering

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GAYLE LEMMON at TEDxWOMEN

"If you're going to talk about jobs, then you have to talk about entrepreneurs," says Gayle Tzemach Lemmon. "And if you're talking about entrepreneurs in conflict and post-conflict settings, then you must talk about women." Lemmon is the author of the New York Times bestselling book The Dressmaker of Khair Khana and a Contributing Editor-at-Large for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. She has devoted her life to shedding light on the resiliency of female entrepreneurs, and their remarkable power to reshape local economies. By recognizing and investing in these female breadwinners, Lemmon says, we can help grow economies of all development levels around the world.