Diasporic identities get strategically muted even inside the homeland

Evidence

Javad remained vexed and upset by his father’s choice to portray his Iranian mom, who wasn’t there with them, as an American. After Javad relayed the story to me, I asked him what he meant about his father when he said, “It’s the social reasons for why he said that.” Javad said that he really didn’t know, that he just had a “feeling” that his father felt it would be more expedient or easy to explain Javad’s accent that way. This is a very valid possibility. Another might be that Javad’s father felt a degree of shame that Javad’s accent was noticeable; it had perhaps less to do with anything Javad did “wrong” but that his father felt that he had failed to protect Javad, his American-born son, from the critical and judgmental gaze of local Iranians. In both Asa and Javad’s experiences, Iranian American diasporic identities were strategically muted while in Iran. In Asa’s case, her black–Iranian American cousins were literally told to keep quiet, and in Javad’s, his Iranian mother was whitewashed into hegemonic Americanness to explain away his secondgeneration accent. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 404

Categorization

• SEED: Material for an essay on how parents police their children’s belonging across two nations, and identity erasure as an act of love or shame.

Related

• Parents erase Iranian identity to explain away children’s imperfect Persian (similarity 0.89)
• Parents strategically mask children’s ethnic identity while in Iran. (similarity 0.88)
• Parents selectively use American experiences to confirm white self-identification, leaving family secrets unspoken. (similarity 0.80)
• Iranian family racial talk repeatedly centers the Aryan myth and Persian exceptionalism (similarity 0.78)