Second-generation privilege feels contingent on kin’s lack of luck

Evidence

In this passage, participants drew from the poem to grapple with the privileges associated with their birthright as American citizens. They acknowledged the different life chances and opportunities that Iranian Americans possess by virtue of their citizenship status in the United States. At the same time, participants expressed a collective moment of longing and loss for that on which it is predicated: the US dissolution of relations with Iran and the breaking apart of their families. For secondgeneration youth, it sometimes felt as though their “luck” was based in no small part on the lack of luck for their kin in Iran. And this luck itself was bittersweet, given youth’s own liminal and sometimes painful experiences in the homeland as “not Iranian enough.” — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 489

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A nuanced account of inherited privilege as inseparable from familial loss — the ‘bittersweet luck’ mechanism is precisely rendered.
• XREF: Echoes the ‘liminality and not-enough’ identity dynamics central to Parable of the Sower and The Reluctant Fundamentalist.