"'Don't think so hard,' Kenji Yoshino's mother once said to him in Japanese. 'Life is not that simple.'"

That's the first line of a book review I wrote for Sunday's NYT Book Review.

But Yoshino has spent his life thinking very hard, as if the problems of sexual orientation and racial identity that have troubled him so much really were amenable to answers.

The book is "Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights." Read the whole review. Read the book too. It's good!

MORE: The NYT also has a nice, long excerpt from the book. An excerpt from the excerpt:

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 over time.

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.

(For an explanation of what "covering" is, see the review.)