1. Personal Reflection: End-of-Semester Letter
60 points
DUE: Submitted to turnitin on Cougar Courses on the due date
(no paper version needed)
The purpose of this assignment is to help you apply
communication concepts learned throughout the semester to
your own experiences of communication. This assignment asks
you to thoughtfully consider your experience in this course, and
to reflect upon what you have learned. By exploring the
readings, reflecting on team interactions, and discussing your
perceptions of the course as a whole, you can gain insight into
the complexities of group interaction and the relationships
between human communication theory and practice.
This assignment therefore helps fill the following student
learning outcomes for this class:
Communication Department Student Learning Objectives for
COMM 100 (Mass Media and Communication):
➢ Analyze forms and contexts of communication from a variety
of intellectual perspectives (philosophical, historical,
theoretical, and practical). (ANALYSIS).
Dr. Rivera’s Student Learning Outcomes for COMM 100:
1. Identify, name, and describe key communication concepts
and vocabulary appropriately in context through quizzes, exams,
and Personal Reflection writing assignments (KNOWLEDGE
EXPANSION)
2. Apply communication theories to solving “real world”
problems through course exercises, assignments, and teamwork
(APPLICATION).
FORMAT:
2 pages total
APA formatting: 12 pt. font, double-spaced, 1 inch margins

2. · APA Reference page IF NEEDED (should have at least the
text book on it). See Cougar
Courses for APA Tips or look online at
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/.
DIRECTIONS:Write a letter! Consider this an opportunity to
share what you’ve learned in this class
with someone outside of the class.
You may want to take this chance to tell someone about the
impact they had on
your communication development (positive or negative or
otherwise).
You might want to make this an opportunity to try to help
someone else change
or improve their communication habits
You can draw on ANY topic covered this semester, including
those covered in
Team Assignments!
• You can and should use informal, first person language.
Guidelines: This is a letter, but it’s also an assignment. You’ll
balance your informal language with a discussion of at least two
(2) concepts from the class somewhere in your
letter.
You will list and define the concept (be sure to cite the text
book or other
reading!)
You will then discuss the concept and how it applies to the
audience for your
letter
The purpose is to demonstrate your understanding of the course
concept!
Rivera, COMM 100, Fall 2019
Audience: You might consider writing to one of the following
people (these are IDEAS, but you don’t have to write to one of

3. these people):
o Yourparent(s)
o Your siblings or cousins
o Your kids, hypothetical children, or nieces and
nephews/cousins you help raise o Your boss or former boss
o Your teacher (including me!☺)
o Your co-worker
o Your significant other (partner)
o Yourteacher/professor(fromelementaryschoolonup!)
o Yourpastororspiritualleader
o Your team-mate(s) from this class
o Members of your fraternity/sorority or other student
organization
o Someone who is different from you, that you learned more
about this semester
Course Concepts: You will need to address at least two (2)
course concepts in your letter. This could be from any chapter
covered this semester, or be any concept discussed in the Team
Building Block Assignments.
Here’s some EXAMPLES (you are not required to use one of
these):
▪ Discuss organizational communication and emotional labor in
a letter to
your boss
· ▪ Discuss interpersonal communication and uncertainty
reduction theory in a
letter to your girlfriend
· ▪ Discuss new media technology and social network theory in
a letter to your
friends
· ▪ Discuss intercultural communication and culture shock in a
letter to your
host family

4. · ▪ Discuss rhetoric and the importance of ethos, pathos, and
logos in a letter to
your local politician
· ▪ Discuss small group communication and servant leadership
in a letter to the
chair of your student organization
· ▪ The options are limitless!!
You can consider these questions as a PROMPT for what
concepts to write about, but you do not have to answer these
questions if you don’t want to (and you certainly wouldn’t have
space to answer them all anyway!)
▪ What are the most important things you learned?
· ▪ What was the most surprising thing you learned?
· ▪ Was there anything you disagreed with in what we
discussed? If yes, why
did you disagree?
· ▪ Has your communication changed? If so, how?
· ▪ Has your media consumption changed? If so, how?
· ▪ Has your interaction with other cultures or identities
changed? If so, how?
· ▪ What was the most difficult thing you encountered this
semester? Why was
it so challenging?
· ▪ What would you recommend to someone else about their
communication?
Have Fun with Your Final Assignment!

5. Rivera, COMM 100, Fall 2019
_____/5
_____/15 _____/15
_____/15
_____/10
COMM 100- End-of-Semester Reflection Letter
60 Points (TOTAL) Evaluative Rubric
Format: Follows a letter format (either formal OR informal).
Uses APA guidelines for in-text citations as needed. Is free
from grammatical and spelling errors. Meets length
requirements.
Course Concepts Defined: Concepts from the course are clear
and defined (use the language of the text book, quotations if
needed). At least two concepts discussed. Course Concepts
Discussed: Concepts from the course are discussed and
demonstrate understanding of their meaning. Concepts are used
appropriate for context and audience.
Personal Reflection: Includes reflection on how student (author
of letter) has experienced this class and/or the concepts learned
in this class. Explores overall learning with specific
assignment/reading/topic addressed and/or tips presented for the
future.
Creativity and Style: Overall presentation, audience, and
concepts are both original and cohesive. Letter reflects
creativity and personal style of the author.
TOTAL ____/60
The Pressure to Cover
ф nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/the-pressure-to-cover.html
By KENJI YOSHINO

6. When I began teaching at Yale Law School in 1998, a friend
spoke to me frankly. "You'll have
a better chance at tenure," he said, "if you're a homosexual
professional than if you're a
professional homosexual." Out of the closet for six years at the
time, I knew what he meant. To
be a "homosexual professional" was to be a professor of
constitutional law who "happened" to
be gay. To be a "professional homosexual" was to be a gay
professor who made gay rights his
work. Others echoed the sentiment in less elegant formulations.
Be gay, my world seemed to
say. Be openly gay, if you want. But don't flaunt.
I didn't experience the advice as antigay. The law school is a
vigorously tolerant place,
embedded in a university famous for its gay student population.
(As the undergraduate jingle
goes: "One in four, maybe more/One in three, maybe me/One in
two, maybe you.") I took my
colleague's words as generic counsel to leave my personal life
at home. I could see that
research related to one's identity -- referred to in the academy
as "mesearch" -- could raise
legitimate questions about scholarly objectivity.
I also saw others playing down their outsider identities to blend
into the mainstream. Female
colleagues confided that they would avoid references to their
children at work, lest they be
seen as mothers first and scholars second. Conservative students
asked for advice about how
open they could be about their politics without suffering
repercussions at some imagined future
confirmation hearing. A religious student said he feared coming

7. out as a believer, as he
thought his intellect would be placed on a 25 percent discount.
Many of us, it seemed, had to
work our identities as well as our jobs.
It wasn't long before I found myself resisting the demand to
conform. What bothered me was
not that I had to engage in straight-acting behavior, much of
which felt natural to me. What
bothered me was the felt need to mute my passion for gay
subjects, people, culture. At a time
when the law was transforming gay rights, it seemed ludicrous
not to suit up and get in the
game.
"Mesearch" being what it is, I soon turned my scholarly
attention to the pressure to conform.
What puzzled me was that I felt that pressure so long after my
emergence from the closet.
When I stopped passing, I exulted that I could stop thinking
about my sexuality. This proved
naïve. Long after I came out, I still experienced the need to
assimilate to straight norms. But I
didn't have a word for this demand to tone down my known
gayness.
Then I found my word, in the sociologist Erving Goffman's
book "Stigma." Written in 1963, the
book describes how various groups -- including the disabled,
the elderly and the obese --
manage their "spoiled" identities. After discussing passing,
Goffman observes that "persons
who are ready to admit possession of a stigma. . .may
nonetheless make a great effort to keep
1/10

8. the stigma from looming large." He calls this behavior covering.
He distinguishes passing from
covering by noting that passing pertains to the visibility of a
characteristic, while covering
pertains to its obtrusiveness. He relates how F.D.R. stationed
himself behind a desk before his
advisers came in for meetings. Roosevelt was not passing, since
everyone knew he used a
wheelchair. He was covering, playing down his disability so
people would focus on his more
conventionally presidential qualities.
As is often the case when you learn a new idea, I began to
perceive covering everywhere.
Leafing through a magazine, I read that Helen Keller replaced
her natural eyes (one of which
protruded) with brilliant blue glass ones. On the radio, I heard
that Margaret Thatcher went to a
voice coach to lower the pitch of her voice. Friends began to
send me e-mail. Did I know that
Martin Sheen was Ramon Estevez on his birth certificate, that
Ben Kingsley was Krishna
Bhanji, that Kirk Douglas was Issur Danielovitch Demsky and
that Jon Stewart was Jonathan
Leibowitz?
In those days, spotting instances of covering felt like a parlor
game. It's hard to get worked up
about how celebrities and politicians have to manage their
public images. Jon Stewart joked
that he changed his name because Leibowitz was "too
Hollywood," and that seemed to get it
exactly right. My own experience with covering was also not

9. particularly difficult -- once I had
the courage to write from my passions, I was immediately
embraced.
It was only when I looked for instances of covering in the law
that I saw how lucky I had been.
Civil rights case law is peopled with plaintiffs who were
severely punished for daring to be
openly different. Workers were fired for lapsing into Spanish in
English-only workplaces,
women were fired for behaving in stereotypically "feminine"
ways and gay parents lost custody
of their children for engaging in displays of same-sex affection.
These cases revealed that far
from being a parlor game, covering was the civil rights issue of
our time.
The New Discrimination
In recent decades, discrimination in America has undergone a
generational shift.
Discrimination was once aimed at entire groups, resulting in the
exclusion of all racial
minorities, women, gays, religious minorities and people with
disabilities. A battery of civil
rights laws -- like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 --
sought to combat these forms of discrimination. The triumph of
American civil rights is that
such categorical exclusions by the state or employers are now
relatively rare.
Now a subtler form of discrimination has risen to take its place.
This discrimination does not
aim at groups as a whole. Rather, it aims at the subset of the
group that refuses to cover, that

10. is, to assimilate to dominant norms. And for the most part,
existing civil rights laws do not
protect individuals against such covering demands. The question
of our time is whether we
should understand this new discrimination to be a harm and, if
so, whether the remedy is legal
or social in nature.
Consider the following cases:
2/10
Renee Rogers, an African-American employee at American
Airlines, wore cornrows to work.
American had a grooming policy that prevented employees from
wearing an all-braided
hairstyle. When American sought to enforce this policy against
Rogers, she filed suit, alleging
race discrimination. In 1981, a federal district court rejected her
argument. It first observed that
cornrows were not distinctively associated with African-
Americans, noting that Rogers had
only adopted the hairstyle after it "had been popularized by a
white actress in the film '10.' " As
if recognizing the unpersuasiveness of what we might call the
Bo Derek defense, the court
further alleged that because hairstyle, unlike skin color, was a
mutable characteristic,
discrimination on the basis of grooming was not discrimination
on the basis of race. Renee
Rogers lost her case.
Lydia Mikus and Ismael Gonzalez were called for jury service
in a case involving a defendant

11. who was Latino. When the prosecutor asked them whether they
could speak Spanish, they
answered in the affirmative. The prosecutor struck them, and
the defense attorney then
brought suit on their behalf, claiming national-origin
discrimination. The prosecutor responded
that he had not removed the potential jurors for their ethnicity
but for their ability to speak
Spanish. His stated concern was that they would not defer to the
court translator in listening to
Spanish-language testimony. In 1991, the Supreme Court
credited this argument. Lydia Mikus
and Ismael Gonzalez lost their case.
Diana Piantanida had a child and took a maternity leave from
her job at the Wyman Center, a
charitable organization in Missouri. During her leave, she was
demoted, supposedly for
previously having handed in work late. The man who was then
the Wyman Center's executive
director, however, justified her demotion by saying the new
position would be easier "for a new
mom to handle." As it turned out, the new position had less
responsibility and half the pay of
the original one. But when Piantanida turned this position down,
her successor was paid
Piantanida's old salary. Piantanida brought suit, claiming she
had been discharged as a "new
mom." In 1997, a federal appellate court refused to analyze her
claim as a sex-discrimination
case, which would have led to comparing the treatment she
received to the treatment of "new
dads." Instead, it found that Piantanida's (admittedly vague)
pleadings raised claims only under
the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which it correctly interpreted
to protect women only while

12. they are pregnant. Diana Piantanida lost her case.
Robin Shahar was a lesbian attorney who received a job offer
from the Georgia Department of
Law, where she had worked as a law student. The summer
before she started her new job,
Shahar had a religious same-sex commitment ceremony with her
partner. She asked a
supervisor for a late starting date because she was getting
married and wanted to go on a
celebratory trip to Greece. Believing Shahar was marrying a
man, the supervisor offered his
congratulations. Senior officials in the office soon learned,
however, that Shahar's partner was
a woman. This news caused a stir, reports of which reached
Michael Bowers, the attorney
general of Georgia who had successfully defended his state's
prohibition of sodomy before the
United States Supreme Court. After deliberating with his
lawyers, Bowers rescinded her job
offer. The staff member who informed her read from a script,
concluding, "Thanks again for
coming in, and have a nice day." Shahar brought suit, claiming
discrimination on the basis of
3/10
sexual orientation. In court, Bowers testified that he knew
Shahar was gay when he hired her,
and would never have terminated her for that reason. In 1997, a
federal appellate court
accepted that defense, maintaining that Bowers had terminated
Shahar on the basis of her
conduct, not her status. Robin Shahar lost her case.

13. Simcha Goldman, an Air Force officer who was also an
ordained rabbi, wore a yarmulke at all
times. Wearing a yarmulke is part of the Orthodox tradition of
covering one's head out of
deference to an omnipresent god. Goldman's religious
observance ran afoul of an Air Force
regulation that prohibited wearing headgear while indoors.
When he refused his commanding
officer's order to remove his yarmulke, Goldman was threatened
with a court martial. Fie
brought a First Amendment claim, alleging discrimination on
the basis of religion. In 1986, the
Supreme Court rejected his claim. It stated that the Air Force
had drawn a reasonable line
between "religious apparel that is visible and that which is not."
Simcha Goldman lost his case.
These five cases represent only a fraction of those in which
courts have refused to protect
plaintiffs from covering demands. In such cases, the courts
routinely distinguish between
immutable and mutable traits, between being a member of a
legally protected group and
behavior associated with that group. Under this rule, African-
Americans cannot be fired for
their skin color, but they could be fired for wearing cornrows.
Potential jurors cannot be struck
for their ethnicity but can be struck for speaking (or even for
admitting proficiency in) a foreign
language. Women cannot be discharged for having two X
chromosomes but can be penalized
(in some jurisdictions) for becoming mothers. Although the
weaker protections for sexual
orientation mean gays can sometimes be fired for their status
alone, they will be much more

14. vulnerable if they are perceived to "flaunt" their sexuality. Jews
cannot be separated from the
military for being Jewish but can be discharged for wearing
yarmulkes.
This distinction between being and doing reflects a bias toward
assimilation. Courts will protect
traits like skin color or chromosomes because such traits cannot
be changed. In contrast, the
courts will not protect mutable traits, because individuals can
alter them to fade into the
mainstream, thereby escaping discrimination. If individuals
choose not to engage in that form
of self-help, they must suffer the consequences.
The judicial bias toward assimilation will seem correct and just
to many Americans.
Assimilation, after all, is a precondition of civilization --
wearing clothes, having manners and
obeying the law are all acts of assimilation. Moreover, the tie
between assimilation and
American civilization may be particularly strong. At least since
Flector St. John de Crèvecoeur's
1782 "Letters from an American Farmer," this country has
promoted assimilation as the way
Americans of different backgrounds would be "melted into a
new race of men." By the time
Israel Zangwill's play "The Melting Pot" made its debut in
1908, the term had acquired the
burnish of an American ideal. Theodore Roosevelt, who
believed hyphenations like "Polish-
American" were a "moral treason," is reputed to have yelled,
"That's a great play!" from his box
when it was performed in Washington. (Fie was wrong -- it's no
accident the title has had a
longer run than the play.) And notwithstanding challenges

15. beginning in the 1960's to move
"beyond the melting pot" and to "celebrate diversity,"
assimilation has never lost its grip on the
American imagination.
4/10
If anything, recent years have seen a revival of the melting-pot
ideal. We are currently
experiencing a pluralism explosion in the United States.
Patterns of immigration since the late
1960's have made the United States the most religiously various
country in the history of the
world. Even when the demographics of a group -- like the
number of individuals with disabilities
-- are presumably constant, the number of individuals claiming
membership in that group may
grow exponentially. In 1970, there were 9 disability-related
associations listed in the
Encyclopedia of Associations; in 1980, there were 16; in 1990,
there were 211; and in 2000,
there were 799. The boom in identity politics has led many
thoughtful commentators to worry
that we are losing our common culture as Americans. Fearful
that we are breaking apart into
balkanized fiefs, even liberal lions like Arthur Schlesinger have
called for a recommitment to
the ethic of assimilation.
Beyond keeping pace with the culture, the judiciary has
institutional reasons for encouraging
assimilation. In the yarmulke case, the government argued that
ruling in favor of the rabbi's
yarmulke would immediately invite suits concerning the Sikh's

16. turban, the yogi's saffron robes
and the Rastafarian's dreadlocks. Because the courts must
articulate principled grounds for
their decisions, they are particularly ill equipped to protect
some groups but not others in an
increasingly diverse society. Seeking to avoid judgments about
the relative worth of groups,
the judiciary has decided instead to rely on the relatively
uncontroversial principle of protecting
immutable traits.
Viewed in this light, the judiciary's failure to protect
individuals against covering demands
seems eminently reasonable. Unfortunately, it also represents an
abdication of its
responsibility to protect civil rights.
The Case Against Assimilation
The flaw in the judiciary's analysis is that it casts assimilation
as an unadulterated good.
Assimilation is implicitly characterized as the way in which
groups can evade discrimination by
fading into the mainstream -- after all, the logic goes, if a bigot
cannot discriminate between
two individuals, he cannot discriminate against one of them. But
sometimes assimilation is not
an escape from discrimination, but precisely its effect. When a
Jew is forced to convert to
Protestantism, for instance, we do not celebrate that as an
evasion of anti-Semitism. We
should not blind ourselves to the dark underbelly of the
American melting pot.
Take the cornrows case. Initially, this case appears to be an
easy one for the employer, as

17. hairstyle seems like such a trivial thing. But if hair is so trivial,
we might ask why American
Airlines made it a condition of Renee Rogers's employment.
What's frustrating about the
employment discrimination jurisprudence is that courts often
don't force employers to answer
the critical question of why they are requiring employees to
cover. If we look to other sources,
the answers can be troubling.
John T. Molloy's perennially popular self-help manual "New
Dress for Success" also tells racial
minorities to cover. Molloy advises African-Americans to avoid
"Afro hairstyles" and to wear
"conservative pinstripe suits, preferably with vests,
accompanied by all the establishment
5/10
symbols, including the Ivy League tie." He urges Latinos to
"avoid pencil-line mustaches," "any
hair tonic that tends to give a greasy or shiny look to the hair,"
"any articles of clothing that
have Hispanic associations" and "anything that is very sharp or
precise."
Molloy is equally frank about why covering is required. The
"model of success," he says, is
"white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant." Those who do not possess
these traits "will elicit a
negative response to some degree, regardless of whether that
response is conscious or
subconscious." Indeed, Molloy says racial minorities must go
"somewhat overboard" to

18. compensate for immutable differences from the white
mainstream. After conducting research
on African-American corporate grooming, Molloy reports that
"blacks had not only to dress
more conservatively but also more expensively than their white
counterparts if they wanted to
have an equal impact."
Molloy's basic point is supported by social-science research.
The economists Marianne
Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan recently conducted a study
in which they sent out resumés
that were essentially identical except for the names at the top.
They discovered that resumés
with white-sounding names like Emily Walsh or Greg Baker
drew 50 percent more callbacks
than those with African-American-sounding names like Lakisha
Washington or Jamal Jones.
So it seems that even when Americans have collectively set our
faces against racism, we still
react negatively to cultural traits -- like hairstyles, clothes or
names -- that we associate with
historically disfavored races.
We can see a similar dynamic in the termination of Robin
Shahar. Michael Bowers, the state
attorney general, disavowed engaging in first-generation
discrimination when he said he had
no problem with gay employees. This raises the question of why
he fired Shahar for having a
religious same-sex commitment ceremony. Unlike American
Airlines, Bowers provided some
answers. He argued that retaining Shahar would compromise the
department's ability to deny
same-sex couples marriage licenses and to enforce sodomy
statutes.

19. Neither argument survives scrutiny. At no point did Shahar seek
to marry her partner legally,
nor did she agitate for the legalization of same-sex marriage.
The Georgia citizenry could not
fairly have assumed that Shahar's religious ceremony would
entitle the couple to a civil
license. Bowers's claim that Shahar's wedding would
compromise her ability to enforce
sodomy statutes is also off the mark. Georgia's sodomy statute
(which has since been struck
down) punished cross-sex as well as same-sex sodomy, meaning
that any heterosexual in the
department who had ever had oral sex was as compromised as
Shahar.
Stripped of these rationales, Bowers's termination of Shahar
looks more sinister. When she
told a supervisor she was getting married, he congratulated her.
When he discovered she was
marrying a woman, it wasn't long before she no longer had a
job. Shahar's religious ceremony
was not in itself indiscreet; cross-sex couples engage in such
ceremonies all the time. If
Shahar was flaunting anything, it was her belief in her own
equality: her belief that she, and
not the state, should determine what personal bonds are worthy
of celebration.
6/10
The demand to cover is anything but trivial. It is the symbolic
heartland of inequality -- what
reassures one group of its superiority to another. When

20. dominant groups ask subordinated
groups to cover, they are asking them to be small in the world,
to forgo prerogatives that the
dominant group has and therefore to forgo equality. If courts
make critical goods like
employment dependent on covering, they are legitimizing
second-class citizenship for the
subordinated group. In doing so, they are failing to vindicate
the promise of civil rights.
So the covering demand presents a conundrum. The courts are
right to be leery of intervening
in too brusque a manner here, as they cannot risk playing
favorites among groups. Yet they
also cannot ignore the fact that the covering demand is where
many forms of inequality
continue to have life. We need a paradigm that gives both these
concerns their due, adapting
the aspirations of the civil rights movement to an increasingly
pluralistic society.
The New Civil Rights
The new civil rights begins with the observation that everyone
covers. When I lecture on
covering, I often encounter what I think of as the "angry
straight white man" reaction. A
member of the audience, almost invariably a white man, almost
invariably angry, denies that
covering is a civil rights issue. Why shouldn't racial minorities
or women or gays have to cover?
These groups should receive legal protection against
discrimination for things they cannot
help. But why should they receive protection for behaviors
within their control -- wearing
cornrows, acting "feminine" or flaunting their sexuality? After

21. all, the questioner says, I have to
cover all the time. I have to mute my depression, or my obesity,
or my alcoholism, or my
shyness, or my working-class background or my nameless
anomie. I, too, am one of the mass
of men leading lives of quiet desperation. Why should legally
protected groups have a right to
self-expression I do not? Why should my struggle for an
authentic self matter less?
I surprise these individuals when I agree. Contemporary civil
rights has erred in focusing solely
on traditional civil rights groups -- racial minorities, women,
gays, religious minorities and
people with disabilities. This assumes those in the so-called
mainstream -- those straight white
men -- do not also cover. They are understood only as obstacles,
as people who prevent
others from expressing themselves, rather than as individuals
who are themselves struggling
for self-definition. No wonder they often respond to civil rights
advocates with hostility. They
experience us as asking for an entitlement they themselves have
been refused -- an
expression of their full humanity.
Civil rights must rise into a new, more inclusive register. That
ascent makes use of the
recognition that the mainstream is a myth. With respect to any
particular identity, the word
"mainstream" makes sense, as in the statement that straights are
more mainstream than gays.
Used generically, however, the word loses meaning. Because
human beings hold many
identities, the mainstream is a shifting coalition, and none of us
are entirely within it. It is not

22. normal to be completely normal.
7/10
This does not mean discrimination against racial minorities is
the same as discrimination
against poets. American civil rights law has correctly directed
its concern toward certain groups
and not others. But the aspiration of civil rights -- the aspiration
that we be free to develop our
human capacities without the impediment ofwitless conformity -
- is an aspiration that extends
beyond traditional civil rights groups.
To fulfill that aspiration, we must think differently both within
the law and outside it. With
respect to legal remedies, we must shift away from claims that
demand equality for particular
groups toward claims that demand liberty for us all. This is not
an exhortation that we strip
protections from currently recognized groups. Rather, it is a
prediction that future courts will be
unable to sustain a group-based vision of civil rights when
faced with the broad and irreversible
trend toward demographic pluralism. In an increasingly diverse
society, the courts must look to
what draws us together as citizens rather than to what drives us
apart.
As if in recognition of that fact, the Supreme Court has moved
in recent years away from
extending protections on the basis of group membership and
toward doing so on the basis of
liberties we all possess. In 2003, the court struck down a Texas

23. statute that prohibited same-
sex sodomy. It did not, however, frame the case as one
concerning the equality rights of gays.
Instead, it cast the case as one concerning the interest we all --
straight, gay or otherwise --
have in controlling our intimate lives. Similarly, in 2004, the
court held that a state could be
required by a Congressional statute to make its courthouses
wheelchair accessible. Again, the
court ruled in favor of the minority group without framing its
analysis in group-based equality
rhetoric. Rather, it held that all people -- disabled or otherwise -
- have a "right of access to the
courts," which had been denied in that instance.
In these cases, the court implicitly acknowledged the national
exhaustion with group-based
identity politics and quieted the anxiety about pluralism that is
driving us back toward the
assimilative ideal. By emphasizing the interest all individuals
have in our own liberty, the court
focused on what unites us rather than on what divides us. While
preserving the distinction
between being and doing, the court decided to protect doing in
its own right.
If the Supreme Court protects individuals against covering
demands in the future, I believe it
will do so by invoking the universal rights of people. I predict
that if the court ever recognizes
the right to speak a native language, it will protect that right as
a liberty to which we are all
entitled, rather than as a remedial concession granted to a
particular national-origin group. If
the court recognizes rights to grooming, like the right to wear
cornrows, I believe it will do so

24. under something akin to the German Constitution's right to
personality rather than as a right
attached to racial minorities. And I hope that if the court
protects the right of gays to marry, it
will do so by framing it as the right we all have to marry the
person we love, rather than
defending "gay marriage" as if it were a separate institution.
A liberty-based approach to civil rights, of course, brings its
own complications, beginning with
the question of where my liberty ends and yours begins. But the
ability of liberty analysis to
illuminate our common humanity should not be underestimated.
This virtue persuaded both
8/10
Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X to argue for the
transition from civil rights to human
rights at the ends of their lives. It is time for American law to
follow suit.
While I have great hopes for this new legal paradigm, I also
believe law will play a relatively
small part in the new civil rights. A doctor friend told me that
in his first year of medical school,
his dean described how doctors were powerless to cure the vast
majority of human ills. People
would get better, or they would not, but it would not be doctors
who would cure them. Part of
becoming a doctor, the dean said, was to surrender a layperson's
awe for medical authority. I
wished then that someone would give an analogous lecture to
law students and to Americans

25. at large. My education in law has been in no small part an
education in its limitations.
As an initial matter, many covering demands are made by actors
the law does not -- and in my
view should not -- hold accountable, like friends, family,
neighbors, the "culture" or individuals
themselves. When I think of the covering demands I have
experienced, I can trace many of
them only to my own censorious consciousness. And while I am
often tempted to sue myself, I
recognize this is not my healthiest impulse.
Law is also an incomplete solution to coerced assimilation
because it has yet to recognize the
myriad groups that are subjected to covering demands even
though these groups cannot be
defined by traditional classifications like race, sex, orientation,
religion and disability. Whenever
I speak about covering, I receive new instances of identities that
can be covered. The law may
someday move to protect some of these identities. But it will
never protect them all.
For these and other reasons, I am troubled that Americans seem
increasingly inclined to turn
toward the law to do the work of civil rights precisely when
they should be turning away from it.
The primary solution lies in all of us as citizens, not in the tiny
subset of us who are lawyers.
People confronted with demands to cover should feel
emboldened to seek a reason for that
demand, even if the law does not reach the actors making the
demand or recognize the group
burdened by it. These reason-forcing conversations should
happen outside courtrooms -- in

26. public squares and prayer circles, in workplaces and on
playgrounds. They should occur
informally and intimately, in the everyday places where
tolerance is made and unmade.
What will constitute a good-enough reason to justify
assimilation will obviously be
controversial. We have come to some consensus that certain
reasons are illegitimate -- like
racism, sexism or religious intolerance. Beyond that, we should
expect conversations rather
than foreordained results -- what reasons count, and for what
purposes, will be for us all to
decide by facing one another as citizens. My personal
inclination is always to privilege the
claims of the individual against countervailing interests like
"neatness" or "workplace
harmony." But we should have that conversation.
Such conversations are the best -- and perhaps the only -- way
to give both assimilation and
authenticity their due. They will help us alleviate conservative
alarmists' fears of a balkanized
America and radical multiculturalists' fears of a monocultural
America. The aspiration of civil
rights has always been to permit people to pursue their human
flourishing without limitations
based on bias. Focusing on law prevents us from seeing the
revolutionary breadth ofthat
9/10
aspiration. It is only when we leave the law that civil rights
suddenly stops being about

27. particular agents of oppression and particular victimized groups
and starts to become a project
of human flourishing in which we all have a stake.
I don't teach classes on gay rights any more. I suspect many of
my students now experience
me as a homosexual professional rather than as a professional
homosexual, if they think of me
in such terms at all. But I don't experience myself as covering.
I've just moved on to other
interests, in the way scholars do. So the same behavior -- not
teaching gay rights -- has
changed in meaning overtime.
This just brings home to me that the only right I have wanted
with any consistency is the
freedom to be who I am. I'll be the first to admit that I owe
much of that freedom to group-
based equality movements, like the gay rights movement. But it
is now time for us as a nation
to shift the emphasis away from equality and toward liberty in
our debates about identity
politics. Only through such freedom can we live our lives as
works in progress, which is to say,
as the complex, changeful and contradictory creatures that we
are.
Kenji Yoshino is a professor at Yale Law School. This article is
adapted from his
book,"Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights,"
which will be published by Random
House later this month.
10/10

28. Poor teeth
□ aeon.co/essays/there-is-no-shame-worse-than-poor-teeth-in-a-
rich-world
I am bone of the bone of them that live in trailer homes. I grew
up next to Tiffany 'Pennsatucky' Doggett, the
hostile former drug addict from the prison TV drama Orange Is
the New Black. I know her by her teeth.
Pennsatucky - a scrappy slip of a woman menacing, beating and
proselytising to fellow inmates - stole the
show during the first season of the Netflix prison series. But
amid an ensemble cast of similarly riveting,
dangerous characters, it was her grey, jagged teeth that shocked
viewers into repulsed fixation. She was the
villain among villains, a monster that fans loved to hate;
'Pennsatucky teeth' became a pejorative in social
media.
Actress Taryn Manning's gnarly, prosthetic teeth startled
viewers because, by and large, poor characters in
TV and film are played by actors whose whitened, straightened,
veneered smiles aren't covered up. It's hard
to think of characters besides Pennsatucky through whom
heinous teeth convey rather than lampoon the
physicality of the poor. The first that comes to mind is the
derelict serial killer in a movie actually called
Monster (2003); as with Manning, Charlize Theron's Oscar-
winning transformation generated astonishment
with fake teeth.
In my life, Pennsatucky and her teeth are entirely familiar. She's
the slurring aunt who passed out in our
farm's swimming pool while babysitting me, and later stole my

29. mom's wedding band to buy the drugs that
dug grooves in her cheeks. She's the step-parent whose brain,
organs and teeth corroded over the years and
now lives in a mobile-home park with my construction-worker
dad.
But Pennsatucky's teeth aren't just 'meth teeth.' They are the
teeth of poor folk, of the young grandma who
helped to raise me and for decades worked from diner to factory
line to a desk job as a probation officer for
the county court system in Wichita, Kansas. She was just 35
when I was born, so I knew her as a radiant
thing; at the downtown courthouse, where I tagged along -
babysitters are expensive - attorneys turned
flirtatious near her green eyes, long limbs and shiny, natural-
blonde bob. Then at night, in her farmhouse or
the tiny brick house we fixed up in a rough Wichita
neighbourhood, I watched her take out her teeth, scrub
them with a rough brush, and drop them into a cup of water with
a fizzy tablet.
'Brush your teeth and don't eat too much candy,' she'd tell me.
'You don't want to end up like Grandma.' She'd
widen her eyes and pop her dentures forward so that they bulged
from her lips, sending me giggling. In the
early 1970s, a dentist had pried every one of her teeth, too far
gone or too expensive to save, from her 20-
something skull. She's 69 now and has worn false teeth for more
than 40 years.
'I had bad teeth all my life. They were straight and looked OK,
but I always had toothaches,' she tells me when
I ask how she ended up with dentures. As I was growing up, the
story fluctuated - she was in a car accident,
her natural teeth just fell out, and so on. 'I was excited to have
them, knowing I would never have another

30. toothache. Now I think it was pretty stupid, but at the time it
was really painful, and I thought I was doing the
right thing.'
More than 126 million people in the US - nearly half the
population - had no dental coverage in 2012,
according to the US National Association of Dental Plans. In
2007, the New York State Dental Journal reported
that while only one-tenth of general physician costs were paid
out of pocket, nearly half of all dental costs
were settled directly by patients. This reflects spending by the
uninsured but also those sharing costs with
coverage providers; most plans cover routine cleanings but
leave patients to pay for 20 to 50 per cent of
fillings, crowns and other big-ticket visits. For those who can't
afford to pay that difference, treatment is
1/6
delayed and teeth continue to degrade.
But expense isn't the only barrier to dental care. Those on
Medicaid find that few dentists participate in the
programme due to its low payout. And more than 45 million
people in the US live in areas, often rural or
impoverished, with dentist shortages, according to the US
Department of Health and Human Services.
Medicare, as a general rule, doesn't include dental.
In the past year, the Affordable Care Act, or 'ObamaCare', has
changed many lives for the better - mine
included. But its omission of dental coverage, a result of
political compromise, is a dangerous, absurd
compartmentalisation of health care, as though teeth are apart

31. from and less important than the rest of the
body.
it wasn't sugar that guided our dental fates. And it wasn't meth.
It was lack of insurance, lack of knowledge,
lack of good nutrition
About a decade ago, at the age of 50, my dad almost died when
infection from an abscessed tooth poisoned
his blood and nearly stopped his heart. He has never had dental
insurance and has seen a dentist only a
handful of times when some malady became unbearable. In
2009, according to the US Agency for Healthcare
Research and Quality, dental issues caused about 936,000
emergency-room visits and almost 13,000
inpatient hospital stays. Many of these patients had low incomes
and dental coverage that restricted care to
emergencies or wasn't accepted by accessible dentists.
'I notice people's teeth because mine are so bad,' Dad tells me
during a break from a side job renovating a
fraternity house. He has long been the handsome object of
crushes, but his teeth have become increasingly
askew with time, one of his eye teeth now ragged and long like
a rabbit's for lack of a carrot to file it down.
'Nutrition affects teeth, right?'
I point out that Gatorade, which he favours when he splurges on
a bottled beverage, is full of sugar. But it
wasn't sugar, heaps of which are sucked down daily by the
middle and upper classes, that guided his and my
grandma's dental fates. And it wasn't meth. It was lack of
insurance, lack of knowledge, lack of good nutrition
- poverties into which much of the country was born.
My family's distress over our teeth - what food might hurt or

32. save them, whether having them pulled was a
mistake - reveals the psychological hell of having poor teeth in
a rich, capitalist country: the underprivileged
are priced out of the dental-treatment system yet perversely held
responsible for their dental condition. It's a
familiar trick in the privatisation-happy US - like, say,
underfunding public education and then criticising the
institution for struggling. Often, bad teeth are blamed solely on
the habits and choices of their owners, and
for the poor therein lies an undue shaming.
'Don't get fooled by those mangled teeth she sports on camera!'
says the ABC News host introducing the
woman who plays Pennsatucky. 'Taryn Manning is one beautiful
and talented actress.' This suggestion that
bad teeth and talent, in particular, are mutually exclusive
betrays our broad, unexamined bigotry toward those
long known, tellingly, as 'white trash.' It's become less
acceptable in recent decades to make racist or sexist
statements, but blatant classism generally goes unchecked.
Seethe hugely successful blog People of
Walmart that, through submitted photographs, viciously
ridicules people who look like contemporary US
poverty: the elastic waistbands and jutting stomachs of diabetic
obesity, the wheelchairs and oxygen tanks
of gout and emphysema.
Upper-class supremacy is nothing new. A hundred years ago,
the US Eugenics Records Office not only
targeted racial minorities but 'sought to demonstrate
scientifically that large numbers of rural poor whites
were genetic defectives,' as the sociologist Matt Wray explains
in his book Not Quite White: White Trash and
the Boundaries of Whiteness (2006). The historian and civil
rights activist W E В du Bois, an African American,

33. 2/6
wrote in his autobiography Dusk of Dawn (1940) that, growing
up in Massachusetts in the 1870s, 'the racial
angle was more clearly defined against the Irish than against
me. It was a matter of income and ancestry
more than colour.' Martin Luther King, Jr made similar
observations and was organising a poor-people's
march on Washington at the time of his murder in 1968.
Such marginalisation can make you either demonise the system
that shuns you or spurn it as something you
never needed anyway. When I was a kid and no one in the
family had medical or dental insurance, Dad
pointed out that those industries were criminal - a sweeping
analysis that, whether accurate or not,
suggested we were too principled to support the racket rather
than too poor to afford it.
My baby teeth were straight and white, and I wasn't obese - an
epidemic among poor kids that hadn't yet
taken hold in the 1980s - but I had plenty of 'tells': crooked
bangs, trimmed at home with sewing shears; a
paper grocery sack carrying my supplies on the first day of
school while other kids wore unicorn backpacks; a
near-constant case of ringworm infection (I kept a jar of
ointment on my nightstand year-round); the smell of
cigarette smoke on my clothes, just as cigarettes were falling
out of favour with the middle and upper
classes; sometimes, ill-fitting clothes, as when the second-grade
teacher I revered looked at my older
cousin's shirt sagging off my shoulder and said: 'Tell your
mother to send you to school in clothes that fit
you.' In fifth grade, a girl noticed my generic, plastic-smelling,

34. too-pointy boots - a Kmart version of the black
leather lace-ups that were in fashion - and for weeks hounded
me before and after school, kicking dirt on my
shins and calling me Pippi Longstocking.
I had moments of cool clothes and good haircuts, too, and I was
a confident child who earned friends and
accolades. But I still think of the boy who handed me a dessert
cup from his lunch box every day when a mix-
up in the free-lunch programme left me without a meal card for
months.
He pulled from my skull the greyed tooth, cracked perfectly
down the middle
Common throughout those years was a pulsing throb in my
gums, a shock wave up a root when biting down,
a headache that agitated me in classrooms. While they looked
OK, my baby teeth were cavity-ridden. Maybe
it was the soy formula in my bottle when they were growing in,
or the sugary cereals to which my brain later
turned for dopamine production in a difficult home. Maybe it
was because our water supply, whether from a
rural well or the Wichita municipal system, wasn't fluoridated.
But richer teeth faced the same challenges.
The primary reason my mouth hurt was lack of money.
Once, around third grade, an upper molar that had menaced
beyond all - the worst toothache I ever had -
finally rotted so thoroughly that it cracked in half while still in
my jaw. Mom took me to the dentist, somehow.
The pain was tremendous, he explained, because the pulpy
nerve at the tooth's centre was exposed. He
pulled from my skull the greyed tooth, cracked perfectly down
the middle, and let me take it home. For years, I
kept the two pieces in a tiny jewellery box, sometimes taking

35. them out and joining them like interlocking
sides of the heart-shaped friendship necklaces I coveted.
Around that time, I had my jaw X-rayed for the first time. The
results were grim.
'You might as well start saving for braces right now,' my mom
recalls the dentist saying. We were at the
outset of a post-divorce period that would include much moving
and a slew of partial-coverage dental
insurance plans: employer-based, which would be cancelled
with Mom's regular job switches, and variations
on state-funded, poor-kid programmes in between. Each time
the policy changed, Mom had to find a new
dentist who would accept our coverage. Then we'd ride out a
waiting period before scheduling a cleaning or
filling. My dental records were often lost in this shuffle, as was
the case with my general health files in
doctors' offices and school districts - I got a new round of shots
just about every year for lack of
immunisation records on file.
3/6
There would, of course, be no saving for braces.
It took years to find out whether the X-raying dentist's
pessimistic prediction would come true. My baby teeth
were slow to fall out, their replacements slow to grow in. But at
some point came the unequivocal, surprising
verdict: my teeth grew in straight.
I don't just mean straight enough. I mean 99th-percentile
straight. I mean dentists call hygienists over to take

36. a look.
'Doesn't she have pretty teeth?' they say, my mouth under hot
lamps. 'Are you sure you didn't have braces?
But you whiten them, right?'
I shake my head no and in the dentist's chair tingle with the
bliss of gratitude. That my environment and
genes somehow conspired to shake out a bright, orderly smile is
a blessing I can't explain. But I can tell you
what preserved the blessing: me.
When a health teacher said brush your teeth twice a day, I
brushed my teeth twice a day. When a TV
commercial imparted that dentists recommend flossing daily, I
flossed daily. A college room-mate once
remarked on the fervour of my dental regimen. After boozy
nights, when other kids were passing out, I held
on, stumbled to the bathroom and squeezed paste onto a brush.
However tired, however drunk, I scrubbed
every side of every tooth, uncoiled a waxed string and threaded
it into sacred spaces.
Privileged America judges harshly the mouths that chew orange
Doritos, drink yellow Mountain Dew, breathe
with a sawdust rattle
Poor teeth, I knew, beget not just shame but more poorness:
people with bad teeth have a harder time getting
jobs and other opportunities. People without jobs are poor. Poor
people can't access dentistry - and so goes
the cycle.
If Pennsatucky ever gets out of poverty, it will be thanks in part
to a prison-yard fight in the season-one finale,
when the upper-class protagonist knocks out her nasty grill;

37. early in the second season, her rotten gums
nearly toothless, she blackmails the warden into a new set of
teeth. Upon incarceration, Pennsatucky traded
meth for 'born-again' religious fanaticism, but her new teeth are
a harbinger of a more substantive rebirth. If
the eyes are the soul's windows, its door is the mouth - the
fence across which pass food, drink, words, our
very breath.
Privileged America, ever striving for organic purity, judges
harshly the mouths that chew orange Doritos, drink
yellow Mountain Dew, breathe with a sawdust rattle, carry a
lower lip's worth of brown chaw, use dirty words
and bad grammar. When Pennsatucky gets out of prison, she'll
need respect, rehabilitation, employment. To
that end, for all her praying and testifying, Pennsatucky's pearly
gates might be her pearly, albeit prosthetic,
whites. She cries with joy in a prison van on the way to get
them, and later shows off with an over-the-top
smile during laundry duty.
'You're acting a little, like, retarded,' an envious inmate tells
her.
'I'm not retarded,' she says. 'I got new teeth!'
When I was a young adult, I learnt I'd been born without
wisdom teeth. The dentist told me I was
'evolutionarily advanced' since human beings, no longer in the
business of tearing raw flesh from mastodon
bones, don't need so many teeth now. So many TV shows, bad
jokes and bucktoothed hillbilly costumes in
Halloween aisles had suggested that my place of origin made me
'backwards', primitive and uncivilised, that
the dentist's comment struck me deeply, just as in fourth grade
when I read the word 'genius' in a school

38. psychologist's evaluation notes to my mother and wept on the
sidewalk.
4/6
Having straddled a class divide and been wrongly stereotyped
on both sides of it, throughout my life I've
found peace in the places and things that don't evaluate my
status: nature, animals, art, books. 'I sit with
Shakespeare,' wrote du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903),
'and he winces not.' Social disadvantage and
hazard engender what he called 'double consciousness', the
ever-present awareness of more than one self.
For du Bois, his most challenging two-ness in the wake of
slavery was to be educated and black - a tension
of socialisation still at work, to be sure, as President Barack
Obama's raw first memoir attests. Today, for me
and millions of people in the US living on one side of a historic
income gap, the defining double
consciousness is to be educated and poor.
The latter, for many of those who suffered losses after the
economic collapse of 2008, is a terrifying new
identity, its horror projected on to Pennsatucky's serrated mouth
and hard to reconcile with the Americans
they thought they were. But in my academic and professional
'climbing', I learnt early and often that one
doesn't leave a place, class or culture and enter another, but
rather holds the privilege and burden of many
narratives simultaneously.
Friends who know my background sometimes kid me when I'm
drunk and misconjugate a verb or slip into a
drawl, or when, thoroughly sober, I reveal a gross blind spot in

39. the realm of book-learning (if, say, the question
involves whatever one learns in sixth grade, most of which I
spent playing in red dirt outside a two-room
schoolhouse near the Oklahoma state line). They smile at the
pleasure I take in scoring solid furniture from
yard sales or, once, for expressing delight over a tiny cast-iron
skillet, a miniature version of the pan my
grandma once used to fight a drunken stepfather off her mother.
I enjoy the kidding and feel appreciated
when they recognise the true clichés that weave my story.
But here's the thing: wealthy people use cast-iron skillets and
bad grammar, too. It's just not their narrative
and thus passes without remark. I've observed fellow
journalists, the same ones who made trailer-park
tornado survivors famous for a loose grip on the past participle,
edit dumb-sounding quotes by city
commissioners to suit the speaker's stature. And while I took
the education I wasn't given through libraries,
encyclopedias and my former stepfather's New Yorker
subscription, plenty of members of the middle and
upper classes refuse or lack the ability to seize the opportunities
handed them. It can be useful to
acknowledge the cultural forces that carve us, or edifying to
indulge in the tropes of our assigned narratives,
but true distinctions of character, intelligence, talent and skill
exist at the level of the individual, not of the
class - or the ethnicity, the gender, the sexual orientation, the
religion and so on. To claim otherwise, as we've
discovered across time and countless persecutions of our own
doing, is at best an insult and at worst an
excuse for enslavement and genocide.
the liberal proponents of Occupy Wall Street are often the same
people who think Southerners are inbred and
Walmart shoppers slovenly miscreants

40. In Thomas Harris's best-selling crime-novel series, the FBI
consults the imprisoned serial killer and
mastermind psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter in its search for 'the
Tooth Fairy', a family-slayer who bites his
victims with dentures made from a mould of his grandmother's
distorted, razor-sharp teeth. Years after that
manhunt, the FBI again turns to Lecter for help; this time, the
refined sociopath - a former philharmonic
orchestra board member and mannerly purveyor of his victims'
flesh - finds it more interesting to analyse the
agent than the latest case.
'You know what you look like to me, with your good bag and
your cheap shoes?' he asks the young agent
Clarice Starling - who comes from the same place as
Pennsatucky but whose intellect, health, grit and
ambition, presumably, landed her on the right side of the prison
bars. 'You look like a rube. A well-scrubbed,
hustling rube with a little taste. Good nutrition's given you
some length of bone, but you're not more than one
generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling? And
that accent you've tried so desperately to
shed: pure West Virginia. What is your father, dear? Is he a coal
miner?'
5/6
Lecter's condescending soliloquy from a cell decorated with
sketches of the Duomo cathedral in Florence - a
place Starling surely hadn't heard of when she left her family
sheep farm for the FBI Academy at Quantico -
hits home but doesn't derail her. His most famous line - the
aggressive posturing about fava beans and good

41. Italian wine - happens when Starling sends a psychological
evaluation through the glass and tells him to look
at his damn self. We should do the same in the US, where the
liberal proponents of Occupy Wall Street are
often the same people who think Southerners are inbred and
Walmart shoppers slovenly miscreants with no
social awareness.
A century ago, du Bois wrote: 'The problem of the 20th century
is the problem of the colour line.' The problem
of the 21 st century is that of the class line. For the American
Dream to put its money where its mouth is, we
need not just laws ensuring, say, universal dental care, but
individual awareness of the judgments we pass on
people whose teeth - or clothes, waist lines, grocery carts, or
limps - represent our worst nightmares.
Sarah Smarsh
is a journalist covering class in America. Her book In the Red,
on the working poor and her upbringing in rural
Kansas, is forthcoming from Scribner.
Syndicate this Essay
aeon.co
23 October, 2014
6/6
Basic composition

42. Liuting Deng
Reagan Lothes
2019/12/02
Cover real self
In the past years, discrimination has been able to change from
generation to generation in
America. Earlier on the discrimination that used to take place
was that of different groups that
the society did not like or loathed for certain reasons. These
people usually are unwilling to
change themselves to fit in social mainstream. The issue of
discrimination of people with certain
types of people was actually one of the main issues in society.
Kenji Yoshino wrote an article
The Pressure to Cover to demonstrate that this new
discrimination creates a lot pressure for those
group of people to live under this kind of society. Yoshino, as a
professor in Yale law school, is
afraid to indicate that he is a gay in front of his student since
people may think he is a
homosexual professional rathehr than a professional
homosexual. He lists a lot of other examples

43. to express that some people cannot indicate the identity that is
not generally accepted by most
people in the society because they might be seen as strange and
their true ability might be
ignored. Yoshino suggest to fight for new civil rights for these
groups of people. Another author
-- Sarah Smarsh shows similar altitude in her article -Poor teeth
. She explains this problem
through a detailed example of poor teeth sustain discrimination
in the privatisation society. It is a
negative cycle for those who have poor teeth. It is hard for them
to find a job. They are poor
without job and they cannot afford dentistry and so goes the
cycle. Poor teeth gradually became a
symbol of poor people. People who have off mainstream traits
try to change in order to fit in the
main groups of society. However the traits that they are not able
to change, such as race,gender,
and age, became the immutable traits. If individuals are not
able to cover their off mainstream
traits they will never be a part of “the privatization - happy US”
which includes people own

44. privilege or chance to access to better resources or life.
In our current time, the discrimination is on a new level. People
are not being
discriminated according to the groups that they are in. This new
discrimination involves an
individual. Any individual in the groups like pregnant women,
disable, homosexual, or elder
people that refuses to take cover is highly discriminated. By
taking cover we mean denouncing
whatever it is that makes them different from the rest of the
people. And if they are not going to
denounce them, at least they should keep their heads low.
Yoshino indicates that “Courts will
protect traits like skin color or chromosomes because such traits
cannot be changed. In contrast,
the courts will not protect mutable traits, because individuals
can alter them to fade into the
mainstream, thereby escaping discrimination.” ( page 4) This
means that any person that refuses
to do that is highly discriminates and the worst part is that there
is no single law to protect people
from this kind of discrimination which is extremely unfair
because it leaves people with the
question of who is meant to fight for them.

45. The issue of poor teeth can be both mutable and immutable.
This depends on the various
circumstances that facilitate a person having poor teeth. There
are people who have poor teeth
because of not taking care of their teeth and there are those that
have poor teeth because of
various factors like their surrounds.
Poor teeth can be mutable. Poor teeth can definitely be changed
and be made better if
people have the capability. As Smarsh indicated that “It wasn’t
sugar that guided our dental
fates. And it wasn’t meth. It was lack of insurance, lack of
knowledge, lack of good nutrition.”
(Page 2). Konnikova here means that poor teeth is not because
of the way poor people living.
Even rich people may also have poor teeth. Teeth do not just
spoil overnight and therefore if you
can note early enough that your teeth are spoiling then you can
try and find the main reason as to
why and look for a solution before it is too late. Bad teeth for
people with an ability to take care

46. of themselves are something that happens because of ignorance.
Anyone that can access a good
meal, a balanced diet and nutritional food can be able to be in
control of their poor teeth. They
could also go to dentist to restore their teeth. The reason why
it is a mutable trait is explained in
Pressure to cover. The definition of mutable is defined by
Konnikova “The courts will not
protect mutable traits, because individuals can alter them to
fade into the mainstream, thereby
escaping discrimination.” (Page 4). This means that the traits
that could be changed by people
are mutable. According to this definition, poor teeth is mutable
traits since people are able to
alter it through their diet and dental health care.
Poor teeth are immutable. We have seen that some people's
living standards do not even
allow them to have good shelters live alone food on their table.
For this reason it becomes very
hard for a person like that to be able to have nutritious food and
therefore end up consuming a lot
of starch. The water that such a person gets too contributes to
bad teeth because in most cases the
water normally is not treated and therefore has a lot of minerals

47. that corrode the teeth and
damage the gums making them fall off and some get really rusty
colors. It is like a negative cycle
for those people with poor teeth and do not have the ability to
change this situation. “People
with bad teeth have a harder time getting jobs and other
opportunities. People without jobs are
poor. Poor people can't access dentistry - and so goes the
cycle.” (Smarsh, page 4)People like
this are in no position to change their situation and they cannot
even afford to see a dentist. For
this reason, poverty makes them accept their teeth’s condition
and make them live that way. By
explaining of immutable in the article of Konnikova “Courts
will protect traits like skin color or
chromosomes because such traits cannot be changed” (page 2)
we are easily understand that poor
teeth also considered as immutable traits since people who are
in poor condition does not have
the ability to change their situations.
People feel socially pressure if they are being left out of the
main groups, so people who

48. posses mutubal traits that differ from society’s standards try to
cover their original traits. There
are examples list in Pressure to cover, “Women cannot be
discharged for having two X
chromosomes but can be penalized (in some jurisdictions) for
becoming mothers.” (Page 4) By
saying this, the author means company will not discriminate
against people based on their race.
Women may be penalized because they are mothers. Women
will not be discriminated against if
they choose not to get pregnant. This situation is similar to the
example discussed in the
previous. It is like poor teeth, it is both mutable and immutable
for different groups of people.
All the people with bad teeth should be respected since not
every person has the chance to
change their consequences. Being a pregnant women is the same
that it could also be both
mutable and immutable. It is mutable because they could fight
for their jobs and forgive their
personal life. However, it is also immutable because pregnant is
the right and responsible for
women. If women give up their rights to cover this trait, it is
unfair for them. Just as it is unfair to

49. poor people, they are always considered in certain stereotypes,
such as low education
background. When people heated or bad grammar speakers by
someone, this people will be
considered as a poor by other people. “But here's the thing:
wealthy people use cast-iron skillets
and bad grammar, too. It's just not their narrative and thus
passes without remark. I've observed
fellow journalists, the same ones who made trailer-park tornado
survivors famous for a loose
grip on the past participle, edit dumb-sounding quotes by city
commissioners to suit the speaker's
stature.” (Page 5). When rich people did something wrong, no
one would be blamed on their
money. This is society. People are afraid that they will not be
accepted by privisation society
because these many rules and discrimination based on certain
useless terms.
Everyone in America is expected to have good teeth and if you
do not you are given
labels and people do not stop staring at you and making you feel
as if you do not deserve to live

50. while possessing poor teeth. For this reason, people with poor
teeth are forced to cover up. Take
for instance the actor that had poor teeth. All along she had not
been showing her teeth and when
she finally did people all over were talking about it. A lot is
demanded of people and they will
definitely discriminate against you because of something they
consider to be off. Most actresses
smile a lot and show off their white well-lined teeth but with
our subject, she is demanded to
have covering because it goes without saying that at the end of
the day people will judge and
discriminate her if they found out.