Parents erase Iranian identity to explain away children’s imperfect Persian

Evidence

And my dad, this has stayed with me, my dad, when he asks, “Why does he have an accent?,” he hastily goes, “Oh, um, his mother’s American.” And she’s not! But he said that! And the guy was like, “Okay,” and he accepted that, but my thoughts were like, ” … but she’s not. She’s Iranian and so am I.” And it’s not a life or death situation, you know? — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 401

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows the mechanism of ‘whitewashing’ identity as a defensive social strategy within the diaspora.
• XREF: connects to: Parents strategically mask children’s ethnic identity while in Iran. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 931

Related

• Parents strategically mask children’s ethnic identity while in Iran. (similarity 0.93)
• Diasporic identities get strategically muted even inside the homeland (similarity 0.89)
• Parents selectively use American experiences to confirm white self-identification, leaving family secrets unspoken. (similarity 0.83)
• First-generation Iranian parents teach their children that Iranians are Aryan whites (similarity 0.81)
• Iranian family racial talk repeatedly centers the Aryan myth and Persian exceptionalism (similarity 0.81)
• White adults’ families pressed Iranian American children on geopolitics despite knowing their ties. (similarity 0.79)
• Across intermarried and non-intermarried families only elders construct whiteness (similarity 0.78)
• Social experience, not family ideology, determines second-generation Iranian racial identification (similarity 0.78)