Second-generation Iranian American youth reject predicted assimilation because they see through their legal whiteness

Evidence

But precisely because of their position at the limits of whiteness, second-generation Iranian Americans do not behave in predicted assimilative ways and, even as young teenagers, are mostly wise to the racial loophole in which they find themselves. They understand that despite their legal whiteness and the claims of some first-generation parents, in the United States they are seen as ethno-racial outsiders and that American whiteness is not really for them. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 556

Categorization

• SEED: Seed for an article on how visible-but-legal membership in a dominant category produces sharper awareness of exclusion than straightforward exclusion does.
• QUESTION: Does this contradict or refine straight-line assimilation theory’s predictions about later generations becoming ‘white-ethnic’?
• XREF: connects to: Social experience, not family ideology, determines second-generation Iranian racial identification — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 356; Student advocacy achieved collective recategorization of Iranians from legal whites to non-white SWANA — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 773; Assimilation theory fails to predict Iranian Americans’ exclusion from whiteness — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 63

Related

• Social experience, not family ideology, determines second-generation Iranian racial identification (similarity 0.88)
• Census whiteness contradicts the everyday social exclusion of Iranian Americans (similarity 0.85)
• Assimilation theory fails to predict Iranian Americans’ exclusion from whiteness (similarity 0.85)
• Assimilation into whiteness fails where physical difference is perceived (similarity 0.84)
• Student advocacy achieved collective recategorization of Iranians from legal whites to non-white SWANA (similarity 0.82)
• Socioeconomic success and legal whiteness do not guarantee protection from racial browning (similarity 0.82)
• Some Iranians arrive believing in an inherited racial whiteness (similarity 0.81)
• Iranian Americans arrived with legal whiteness and Aryan nationalist ideologies (similarity 0.81)
• Iranian Americans are legally white but are routinely racialized as non-white in schools (similarity 0.80)
• Proximity to whiteness increases rather than reduces Iranian American racialization (similarity 0.80)
• Assimilation markers give Iranian Americans little protection from racist portrayal (similarity 0.80)
• Iranians have been positioned across the American color line for over a century. (similarity 0.80)
• Schools are the first institution to tell Iranian youth they are not really white (similarity 0.80)
• Social whiteness on the ground remains elusive for Iranian Americans (similarity 0.79)
• Assimilation theory frames whiteness as the default outcome of immigrant incorporation (similarity 0.79)