Iran has functioned as a racial fencepost determining whiteness’s boundaries

Evidence

The specter of Iran was a racial hinge between white Europe and non-white Asia: a face, a body, a culture, and a concept that could open or close the door to whiteness as needed. Excavating Iranians out of the margins of these cases reveals how they have been rhetorically positioned both inside and outside white citizenship in the United States for over a century. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 34

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the ‘white spatial imaginary’ analytics from critical race geography and connects to the book’s central thesis about liminal whiteness. — connects to: Deracializing Iranian discrimination as ‘Islamophobia’ obscures its racial character — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 34; Proximity to whiteness increases rather than reduces Iranian American racialization — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 1388; The 1924 Asiatic Barred Zone placed nearly all Muslims outside admissible whiteness (+3 more)

Related

• Early twentieth-century courts positioned Iran as a borderland for whiteness (similarity 0.88)
• Iranian experience reveals what official whiteness can and cannot protect. (similarity 0.87)
• Iranians functioned as a racial hinge anchoring others’ claims to whiteness (similarity 0.87)
• Iran functioned as a racial hinge in US citizenship law (similarity 0.87)
• Iran functioned as a racial hinge deciding Asian whiteness in US courts (similarity 0.87)
• Ethnicity, nationality, and religion cannot fully explain anti-Iranian bias (similarity 0.85)
• Census whiteness contradicts the everyday social exclusion of Iranian Americans (similarity 0.85)
• Iranian Americans have been flexibly positioned inside and outside whiteness (similarity 0.85)
• Deracializing Iranian discrimination as ‘Islamophobia’ obscures its racial character (similarity 0.84)
• Iranians have been positioned across the American color line for over a century. (similarity 0.84)
• Iranian identity is not fixed as white but shifts across everyday sites. (similarity 0.84)
• Proximity to whiteness increases rather than reduces Iranian American racialization (similarity 0.84)
• Iranians are legally white yet visibly raced in daily life (similarity 0.83)
• Iran remains a geographically anchored stigma while Siberia is a detachable metaphor (similarity 0.83)
• Middle Easterners are too white for legal redress yet too non-white to escape racism (similarity 0.83)