Parents selectively use American experiences to confirm white self-identification, leaving family secrets unspoken.

Evidence

Rather, it is the suspicion that their parents are selective about which of their American racial experiences they draw on to confirm a white self-identification. Within the intergenerational immigrant family, contradictions of Iranian American whiteness in a racist, Islamophobic society are complex. The contradictions create an atmosphere in which uncomfortable family secrets are held; the motivations for behavior and beliefs go unexpressed and, further, are obscured by obvious inconsistencies. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 243

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the ‘spiral of silence’ in immigrant families and with studies of families hiding stigma to protect children — links to the silence-and-whiteness literature elsewhere in the reader’s library.

Related

• Parents erase Iranian identity to explain away children’s imperfect Persian (similarity 0.83)
• Across intermarried and non-intermarried families only elders construct whiteness (similarity 0.80)
• Diasporic identities get strategically muted even inside the homeland (similarity 0.80)
• White adults’ families pressed Iranian American children on geopolitics despite knowing their ties. (similarity 0.80)
• Parents strategically mask children’s ethnic identity while in Iran. (similarity 0.79)
• Iranian family racial talk repeatedly centers the Aryan myth and Persian exceptionalism (similarity 0.79)
• Iranian Americans hold internal racial narratives including antiblack discourse and family-superiority beliefs (similarity 0.79)
• Social experience, not family ideology, determines second-generation Iranian racial identification (similarity 0.78)