Iranians have been positioned across the American color line for over a century.

Evidence

By taking up the sociological challenge to connect formal top-down and everyday bottom-up processes of racial group making, this book uncovers the historical and legal presence of Iranians in the United States far earlier than research that precedes it. By harnessing a variety of ethnographic, legal, and historical data, I show that Iranians have been pitched across a white/non-white American color line for over a century. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 64

The racial misrecognition described by Leyla, Nora, and Kambiz is tied up with the ambiguous, largely unwritten racial history of Iranians in the United States. How can Kambiz, an Iranian American senior citizen who identifies as white, be socially cast as non-white at the same time that Leyla, an Iranian American teenager who identifies as non-white, be socially cast as white? This seeming paradox is not new: over the last one hundred years, Iranians, as individuals and as a group, have traveled back and forth across the American color line. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 115

Categorization

• XREF: Positions Iranian American racial history as the empirical thread connecting this book to the reader’s strategic-essentialism research question. — connects to: Iranian Americans have been flexibly positioned inside and outside whiteness — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 1256; Iranians are legally white yet socially non-white in America — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 90; Third-world immigrants have dismantled the twentieth-century American color line — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 654 (+2 more)
• QUESTION: Directly serves the reader’s core question: individual Iranian Americans can hold a self-identity that society reverses (white-feeling man cast non-white; non-white-feeling teen cast white).
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 64; Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 115

Broader Connections

• Iranian Americans have been flexibly positioned inside and outside whiteness #expands (0.92) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 1256
• Iranians are legally white yet socially non-white in America #expands (0.85) — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 90
• Iranian Americans are legally white but are routinely racialized as non-white in schools #exemplifies (0.75) — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 255
• Third-world immigrants have dismantled the twentieth-century American color line #complicates (0.72) — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 654
• Iranians functioned as a racial hinge anchoring others’ claims to whiteness #qualifies (0.72) — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 117