Iranian internalized racism positions Iranians as Aryan and superior to Arabs, expunging India

Evidence

The Indian subcontinent and its peoples are conveniently and entirely expunged from the version of the Aryan myth circulated among Iranians. As blisteringly put by Hamid Dabashi, “Orientalists have instructed [Iranians] that they are ‘Aryan’ and as such of the same superior stock as Europeans; only by some unfortunate accident of geography do they find themselves somewhere between the Arab lands and India. The Orientalists’ tales—about Cyrus the Great, Darius the First and Xerxes the Conqueror—continue to haunt them, generation after generation. The racism of Iranians runs viciously deep; they have a horror of being taken for Arab (though they would be delighted to be taken for Italian).” — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 680

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the internalized hierarchy themes in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and the identity-aspiration dynamics in The Namesake. — connects to: Iranians’ inherited Aryan myth erases India and is inseparable from anti-Arab racism — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 1461; First-generation parents urge their children to claim Aryan whiteness against school bullying — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 74
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense, paradigm-shifting observation about how a colonial racial science (Gobineau’s Aryan myth) becomes internalized and weaponized by the colonized themselves, producing a hierarchy where ‘Italian’ beats ‘Arab’.
• SEED: Angles: how the Aryan myth of Gobineau (a French white supremacist) was absorbed by Iranians and now shapes diaspora identity politics — a case of colonized people adopting the colonizer’s racism.

Related

• Iranians’ inherited Aryan myth erases India and is inseparable from anti-Arab racism (similarity 0.93)
• The Aryan-Iran etymology is a recent invented racial fiction (similarity 0.84)
• Iranian family racial talk repeatedly centers the Aryan myth and Persian exceptionalism (similarity 0.83)
• The first generation inherited Aryan whiteness from Iranian state socialization (similarity 0.83)
• Iranian Americans hold internal racial narratives including antiblack discourse and family-superiority beliefs (similarity 0.82)
• The Iranian Aryan myth survives despite scientific refutation and political regime change (similarity 0.82)
• The Iran-Aryan etymological linkage is a recent racial invention. (similarity 0.81)
• Ethnicity, nationality, and religion cannot fully explain anti-Iranian bias (similarity 0.80)
• The Indo-European language tree gave Iran a scientific excuse to disavow Arab kinship (similarity 0.80)
• Iranians functioned as a racial hinge anchoring others’ claims to whiteness (similarity 0.80)
• South Asian claimants used Iranian ‘Aryan’ origin to argue their whiteness (similarity 0.79)
• Iranians are legally white yet visibly raced in daily life (similarity 0.79)
• Some Iranians arrive believing in an inherited racial whiteness (similarity 0.78)
• First-generation parents urge their children to claim Aryan whiteness against school bullying (similarity 0.78)