Social experience, not family ideology, determines second-generation Iranian racial identification

Evidence

Contrary to what they hear from elders, however, second-generation youth are mostly skeptical and often critical of self-identifying as white. If they once believed it, their more incontrovertibly white peers have disabused them of the notion. Instead, Iranian American youth describe a profound conflict between the white identities asserted within their families and the stigmatized racialization they (and their families) actually experience in the world outside the home. In Donya’s case, the outside world included majority-white classmates who belittled her through visible markers of her physical appearance to draw a racialized ­boundary— citizen versus terrorist, human versus animal—between themselves and her. Given her failure to fit the normative appearance of whiteness in America, Donya understood that the internal racial logic her mother offered as consolation (“Tell them we are the original white people! We are Aryans, you know”) held little coherence beyond her front door. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 356

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the research question: shows the causal pathway by which externally imposed essentialism (white peers’ racialization) erodes the inherited essentialist claim of whiteness — the ‘reversal’ mechanism. — connects to: Offering a MENA option shifts Iranian Americans’ racial self-identification away from white — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 1404; The first generation inherited Aryan whiteness from Iranian state socialization — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 379; Second-generation Iranian American youth reject predicted assimilation because they see through their legal whiteness — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 556 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Second-generation Iranian American youth reject predicted assimilation because they see through their legal whiteness #exemplifies (0.90) — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 556
• Offering a MENA option shifts Iranian Americans’ racial self-identification away from white #expands (0.88) — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 1404
• Social whiteness on the ground remains elusive for Iranian Americans #corroborates (0.85) — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 550
• The first generation inherited Aryan whiteness from Iranian state socialization #complicates (0.82) — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 379