Iranian Americans are legally white yet can claim minority status in discrimination suits
Evidence
Thus, in order to consider Pourghoraishi’s racial minority status for the purposes of the suit, the judge applied the broadest interpretation of Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which prohibits racial discrimination, to include discrimination based on national ancestry. In summary judgment, the court therefore affirmed that Pourghoraishi met the first criterion of the discrimination claim based on his Iranian ancestry: though he was legally classified as white in the United States, for the purposes of his racial discrimination case, he could occupy a different category. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 98
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reading on the social construction of race and legal classification of whiteness; also to the Morris test discussion in legal scholarship on ‘whiteness as property’ (Harris). — connects to: Iranian Americans have been flexibly positioned inside and outside whiteness — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 1256
Related
- The Morris test requires proving minority status to claim discrimination (similarity 0.84)
- Middle Easterners are too white for legal redress yet too non-white to escape racism (similarity 0.82)
- Iranian Americans face discrimination legally invisible because they are white by law. (similarity 0.82)
- Legally-white Middle Easterners lack recourse since law can’t grasp white-on-white bias (similarity 0.81)
- Iranian Americans arrived with legal whiteness and Aryan nationalist ideologies (similarity 0.81)
- Iranian Americans have been flexibly positioned inside and outside whiteness (similarity 0.80)
- Early twentieth-century courts positioned Iran as a borderland for whiteness (similarity 0.80)
- Arabs and Iranians experience racism while being officially classified as white (similarity 0.80)
- Iranian Americans equate being American with being white (similarity 0.79)
- Iranians are legally white yet socially non-white in America (similarity 0.79)
- Iranians are legally white yet visibly raced in daily life (similarity 0.79)
- Iranians have been positioned across the American color line for over a century. (similarity 0.78)