Iranianness can function as a master status overriding other identities in violent racialized targeting.

Evidence

For example, the “Persian” ethno-racial label was at the center of a recent case of assault in the suburbs of Chicago. “Hey, Persian!” an eighth-grade boy yel ed before pummeling his Iranian American classmate to the ground, breaking his collarbones and, after a long hospitalization, curtailing his achievements as a nationally ranked junior swimmer. The victim, like many of the youth in this book, possessed distinctively Persian first and last names and also a mixed background; C H A P T E R T H R E E 76 in this case, his mother is fair skinned and Puerto Rican, and his father a darker-skinned first-generation immigrant from Iran. The victim himself possesses medium brown skin, a broad nose, and other features that differentiate him from normative whiteness. That the attacker, in this case, a fellow student of color, preceded his physical violence with the phrase “Hey, Persian” suggests that Persianness was somehow relevant to the attack. Regardless of the complexities of Iranian Latino identity, in this interaction, Persian was the master status that overrode other ascribed and achieved identities. It functioned here as an explanation for violence based on racialized difference. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 236

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Limits of Whiteness theme of racial liminality; also resonates with research on how ‘Muslim-looking’ or ‘terrorist’ master status overrides individual identity markers in anti-Arab bias literature. — connects to: The Persian label triggers violence, not just stigma avoidance — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 531
• SHARE: To someone studying hate crimes or the construction of ‘Persian’ as a racial epithet — that the attacker was himself a student of color complicates the simple white-perpetrator model of anti-Iranian violence.

Related

• The Persian label triggers violence, not just stigma avoidance (similarity 0.91)
• Iranian Americans are legally white but are routinely racialized as non-white in schools (similarity 0.80)
• Legal whiteness failed to shield Iranian Americans from racial stigma after September 11. (similarity 0.79)
• Ethnicity, nationality, and religion cannot fully explain anti-Iranian bias (similarity 0.79)
• Mixed-race Iranians face taunting precisely because they visibly defy dominant representations. (similarity 0.78)
• Language difference between Persian and Arabic anchors Iranian claims to whiteness (similarity 0.78)