Iranians are legally white yet socially non-white in America
Evidence
In 1991, the Hollywood feature film Not Without My Daughter promised the “true story” of “an American woman trapped in Islamic Iran by her brutish husband [who] must find a way to escape with her daughter.” Critics like Roger Ebert recommended the film (3 out of 4 stars) despite pointing out, “If a movie of such a vitriolic and spiteful nature were to be made in America about any other ethnic group, it would be denounced as racist and prejudiced.” It was an odd turn of phrase, and perhaps Ebert knew that in the United States Iranians had been racially classified as white for many years yet were not exactly socially white. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 90
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s earlier material on racial prerequisite cases and the legal/social split defining liminal whiteness. — connects to: Student advocacy achieved collective recategorization of Iranians from legal whites to non-white SWANA — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 773; Proximity to whiteness increases rather than reduces Iranian American racialization — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 1388; Iranian Americans have been flexibly positioned inside and outside whiteness — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 1256 (+7 more)
Related
- Iranians have been positioned across the American color line for over a century. (similarity 0.86)
- Iranians are legally white yet visibly raced in daily life (similarity 0.85)
- Iranian experience reveals what official whiteness can and cannot protect. (similarity 0.85)
- Iranian Americans are legally white but are routinely racialized as non-white in schools (similarity 0.84)
- Some Iranians arrive believing in an inherited racial whiteness (similarity 0.84)
- Iranians were legally whitened and immediately targeted with racial hostility (similarity 0.84)
- Social whiteness on the ground remains elusive for Iranian Americans (similarity 0.83)
- Iranian Americans arrived with legal whiteness and Aryan nationalist ideologies (similarity 0.83)
- Census whiteness contradicts the everyday social exclusion of Iranian Americans (similarity 0.83)
- Iranian identity is not fixed as white but shifts across everyday sites. (similarity 0.83)
- Iranian Americans have been flexibly positioned inside and outside whiteness (similarity 0.83)
- Legally white Iranian Americans are simultaneously hypervisible in everyday racialization (similarity 0.83)
- Iranians were legally white but socially browned after the hostage crisis (similarity 0.83)
- Iranian Americans face discrimination legally invisible because they are white by law. (similarity 0.83)
- Assimilation markers give Iranian Americans little protection from racist portrayal (similarity 0.83)