Iranian American youth are raced both too much and too little across borders
Evidence
Common concerns about not being “Iranian” enough for one’s parents and extended family in Iran are counterpoised against the lived experiences of being “too Iranian” with customs agents and security personnel. These experiences are highly gendered, with young men and women working to pass as differently raced at varied times and places in their international travels. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 41
Related
- Census whiteness contradicts the everyday social exclusion of Iranian Americans (similarity 0.81)
- Parents and grandparents mediate young Iranian Americans’ first experiences of Iran (similarity 0.80)
- Iranian American girls feel shame about being flagged as insufficiently Iranian (similarity 0.80)
- Diasporic youth fear failing to perform Iranianness more than adhering to hijab (similarity 0.79)
- Iranians are legally white yet visibly raced in daily life (similarity 0.79)
- Iranian identity is not fixed as white but shifts across everyday sites. (similarity 0.79)
- Passage spaces like airports expose in-between racial identity to contradiction (similarity 0.79)
- Iranian Americans’ everyday experiences of exclusion are rarely analyzed through a race lens. (similarity 0.79)
- Iranian family racial talk repeatedly centers the Aryan myth and Persian exceptionalism (similarity 0.78)
- Schools are the first institution to tell Iranian youth they are not really white (similarity 0.78)
- US-based Iranian travelers swap passports at layover airports to enter Iran (similarity 0.78)