Arab and Iranian populations have long been connected across a porous national border

Evidence

Yousef seized on this moment of recognition: So, you hear how she’s going between Persian and Arabic, yeah? She’s code-switching. This indicates to us, when we are listening to it today, her Arab audience was comfortable moving between the languages. She doesn’t translate herself. Our people are transnational. They have been connected through time. The border between Iraq and Iran is porous; people and ideas have always moved through it and past it. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 462

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the camp’s deliberate deconstruction of ethnonational borders, echoing the book’s core thesis that these boundaries are constructed, not natural.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does the mid-century cultural memory of inter-Persian-Arab exchange compare with the post-1979 hardening of the Iran-Iraq border in diasporic identity?

Related

• Language difference between Persian and Arabic anchors Iranian claims to whiteness (similarity 0.82)
• Iran has functioned as a racial fencepost determining whiteness’s boundaries (similarity 0.80)