Iranians are legally white yet visibly raced in daily life

Evidence

In fact, it might surprise Nonmacher and his customers to hear from one of Roya’s guidance counselors that the limp, lifeless Iranian at the center of the poster is, according to US federal classification, as white as the cowboys surrounding him. And it might surprise Roya’s guidance counselor to know that there is a controversial “Aryan myth” of cultural and racial superiority that circulates within Roya’s own multigenerational Iranian American family and community. Yet these sorts of “rank-and-file” discrepancies over the racial classifications and self-understandings of Iranian Americans should not be confused for an absence of race—they are evidence of the prevailing presence of race. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 13

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The core paradox of the whole book in one paragraph: federal classification versus lived experience, internalized ‘Aryan myth,’ and the insight that contradiction is evidence of race’s presence, not absence.
• XREF: connects to: Iranian Americans have been flexibly positioned inside and outside whiteness — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 1256; Legally white Iranian Americans are simultaneously hypervisible in everyday racialization — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 37; Some Iranians arrive believing in an inherited racial whiteness — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 62 (+3 more)

Related

• Legally white Iranian Americans are simultaneously hypervisible in everyday racialization (similarity 0.90)
• Iranian experience reveals what official whiteness can and cannot protect. (similarity 0.87)
• Iranian Americans are legally white but are routinely racialized as non-white in schools (similarity 0.87)
• Iranian identity is not fixed as white but shifts across everyday sites. (similarity 0.87)
• Some Iranians arrive believing in an inherited racial whiteness (similarity 0.86)
• Iranian Americans face discrimination legally invisible because they are white by law. (similarity 0.86)
• Iranians are legally white yet socially non-white in America (similarity 0.85)
• Iranian Americans arrived with legal whiteness and Aryan nationalist ideologies (similarity 0.85)
• Iranians have been positioned across the American color line for over a century. (similarity 0.85)
• Census whiteness contradicts the everyday social exclusion of Iranian Americans (similarity 0.85)
• Proximity to whiteness increases rather than reduces Iranian American racialization (similarity 0.84)
• Iranian Americans have been flexibly positioned inside and outside whiteness (similarity 0.84)
• Social whiteness on the ground remains elusive for Iranian Americans (similarity 0.84)
• Assimilation markers give Iranian Americans little protection from racist portrayal (similarity 0.84)
• Iranians were legally whitened and immediately targeted with racial hostility (similarity 0.84)