Early twentieth-century courts positioned Iran as a borderland for whiteness

Evidence

Syrians and Armenians juxtaposed themselves against the non-whiteness of dark-skinned Muslim and Zoroastrian Persians through which they made claims to whiteness, while in the same era, Parsi claimants used their light skin, Zoroastrian faith, and Aryan roots from Iran to prove their whiteness, notwithstanding a millennium in India. Though Iranians were cast on different sides of the color line dependent on the background of the claimant, across these court rulings Iranians fell into a consistently inconsistent pattern: they were sometimes white and sometimes not white. Throughout their evocation in early twentieth-century US racial prerequisite cases, Iranians were right at the limits of whiteness. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 75

Categorization

• XREF: The borderland/liminal framing tracks with legal whiteness scholarship and the reader’s other work on liminal statuses and categorical boundaries. — connects to: Iran functioned as a racial hinge deciding Asian whiteness in US courts — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 70

Related

• Iran has functioned as a racial fencepost determining whiteness’s boundaries (similarity 0.88)
• Iranians functioned as a racial hinge anchoring others’ claims to whiteness (similarity 0.88)
• Iran functioned as a racial hinge deciding Asian whiteness in US courts (similarity 0.87)
• Early US courts defined Middle Eastern whiteness by reference to Iranians. (similarity 0.87)
• Early twentieth-century courts used Persians as a hinge to define Middle Easterners’ race (similarity 0.86)
• Iran functioned as a racial hinge in US citizenship law (similarity 0.84)
• Iranians functioned as a racial hinge in early naturalization cases. (similarity 0.84)
• Earlier immigrants argued their own whiteness by distancing from Iranians (similarity 0.84)
• Iranian experience reveals what official whiteness can and cannot protect. (similarity 0.82)
• Iranian Americans arrived with legal whiteness and Aryan nationalist ideologies (similarity 0.82)
• Social whiteness on the ground remains elusive for Iranian Americans (similarity 0.81)
• Iranians have been positioned across the American color line for over a century. (similarity 0.81)
• Iranian Americans have been flexibly positioned inside and outside whiteness (similarity 0.80)
• Census whiteness contradicts the everyday social exclusion of Iranian Americans (similarity 0.80)
• Middle Easterners are too white for legal redress yet too non-white to escape racism (similarity 0.80)