Mixed-race Iranians face taunting precisely because they visibly defy dominant representations.
Evidence
Zal, unlike the majority of his Iranian American peers, personally encountered both anti-Iranian and antiblack racism and was keenly aware of when either or both of his parentages were negatively racialized. It is telling that Zal, who has a Persian first and last name, is mixed race and possesses a physical appearance that does not fit easily into dominant Iranian representations, yet he was the camper who described the most direct mocking from peers about the sexualized and racialized appearance of King Xerxes. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 441
Related
- Iranian Americans’ everyday experiences of exclusion are rarely analyzed through a race lens. (similarity 0.80)
- Iranian Americans are legally white but are routinely racialized as non-white in schools (similarity 0.80)
- Iranians are legally white yet visibly raced in daily life (similarity 0.79)
- Ethnicity, nationality, and religion cannot fully explain anti-Iranian bias (similarity 0.79)
- Iranianness can function as a master status overriding other identities in violent racialized targeting. (similarity 0.78)