Socioeconomic success and legal whiteness do not guarantee protection from racial browning

Evidence

This literature would predict the easy positioning of Iranian Americans, perhaps more than any other recent immigrant group, into whiteness. … In short, a highly educated, high-income population of legally white immigrants who arrive already believing in their own racial whiteness should predict a relatively straightforward, easy path into whiteness, according to theories of assimilation. For these reasons, a focus on Iranians within the larger pan-geographic “Middle Eastern” category makes a particularly good test case. But as the poster at Nonmacher’s makes clear, a group’s high socio-economic status, legal whiteness, and belief in its own whiteness do not always make it white enough to escape browning. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 28

Categorization

• XREF: Inverts the class-mobility-equals-whitening assumption in segmented assimilation theory, and parallels the recurring ‘Arabs as white-by-law but not-in-practice’ literature.

Related

• Assimilation theory fails to predict Iranian Americans’ exclusion from whiteness (similarity 0.86)
• Some Iranians arrive believing in an inherited racial whiteness (similarity 0.84)
• Middle Easterners are too white for legal redress yet too non-white to escape racism (similarity 0.83)
• Iranians were legally whitened and immediately targeted with racial hostility (similarity 0.83)
• Whiteness can be intermittently granted and revoked for non-Western groups (similarity 0.83)
• Social whiteness on the ground remains elusive for Iranian Americans (similarity 0.83)
• Assimilation theory frames whiteness as the default outcome of immigrant incorporation (similarity 0.83)
• Iranian Americans arrived with legal whiteness and Aryan nationalist ideologies (similarity 0.82)
• Iranian experience reveals what official whiteness can and cannot protect. (similarity 0.82)
• Second-generation Iranian American youth reject predicted assimilation because they see through their legal whiteness (similarity 0.82)
• Census whiteness contradicts the everyday social exclusion of Iranian Americans (similarity 0.82)
• Legal Whiteness once coexisted with social racial inferiority for European groups (similarity 0.82)
• Assimilation into whiteness fails where physical difference is perceived (similarity 0.81)
• Iranians are legally white yet socially non-white in America (similarity 0.81)
• Iranians have been positioned across the American color line for over a century. (similarity 0.81)