Language difference between Persian and Arabic anchors Iranian claims to whiteness

Evidence

How did it come to pass, then, that first-generation Iranian immigrants like Feri’s parents would feel so strongly about maintaining categorical distance from Arabs? And how does this presumed distance (social, geographic, cultural) from Arabs find expression in diaspora as an Iranian American racial claim to whiteness? Put another way, why are differences of culture and ethnicity between Arabs and Iranians somewhat meaningless for US-born youth like Feri while resonant in the broader, multigenerational Iranian diaspora? I explore how one key cultural difference—linguistic—between the primary languages spoken by Iranians (Persian, or Farsi) and Arabs (Arabic) has been marked by global and Iranian anti-Semitic, antiblack racial science. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 198

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Chapter 2’s discussion of the Aryan myth and reinforces the ADR/rejection-material pattern in this reader’s archive on racialized identity claims.
• QUESTION: Why would linguistic distance specifically—not religion or geography—become the load-bearing marker for Iranian whiteness? Worth comparing against other diaspora claims to racial proximity.

Related

• Iranian family racial talk repeatedly centers the Aryan myth and Persian exceptionalism (similarity 0.84)
• Iranians functioned as a racial hinge anchoring others’ claims to whiteness (similarity 0.83)
• The Aryan-Iran etymology is a recent invented racial fiction (similarity 0.83)
• Earlier immigrants argued their own whiteness by distancing from Iranians (similarity 0.82)
• Arab and Iranian populations have long been connected across a porous national border (similarity 0.82)
• The Iran-Aryan etymological linkage is a recent racial invention. (similarity 0.82)
• South Asian claimants used Iranian ‘Aryan’ origin to argue their whiteness (similarity 0.81)
• The Indo-European language tree gave Iran a scientific excuse to disavow Arab kinship (similarity 0.81)
• Iranians’ inherited Aryan myth erases India and is inseparable from anti-Arab racism (similarity 0.81)
• The first generation inherited Aryan whiteness from Iranian state socialization (similarity 0.81)
• Ethnicity, nationality, and religion cannot fully explain anti-Iranian bias (similarity 0.80)
• Iranian Americans arrived with legal whiteness and Aryan nationalist ideologies (similarity 0.80)
• Iran has functioned as a racial fencepost determining whiteness’s boundaries (similarity 0.79)
• First-generation Iranian parents teach their children that Iranians are Aryan whites (similarity 0.79)
• Iran functioned as a racial hinge deciding Asian whiteness in US courts (similarity 0.79)