White adults’ families pressed Iranian American children on geopolitics despite knowing their ties.

Evidence

As Farzaneh remembered, this geopolitically infused scrutiny followed her from the playground to outside school hours and into her social life at white peers’ homes: Going to my sefid [white] friends’ houses, the things their parents said to me, it’s shocking. “Do they really hate us?” or “Are the women slaves to men [in Iran]?” or “Aren’t you glad you were born here and not there?” … And they know that I have family in the Middle East and Iran, but they feel no fear or problem with saying this to me. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 266

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘aren’t you glad you were born here’ question parallels the gratitude-expectation dynamic documented for other immigrant and minority groups.

Related

• Iranian family racial talk repeatedly centers the Aryan myth and Persian exceptionalism (similarity 0.81)
• Parents selectively use American experiences to confirm white self-identification, leaving family secrets unspoken. (similarity 0.80)
• Schools are the first institution to tell Iranian youth they are not really white (similarity 0.79)
• Iranian Americans are legally white but are routinely racialized as non-white in schools (similarity 0.79)
• Parents erase Iranian identity to explain away children’s imperfect Persian (similarity 0.79)
• First-generation Iranian parents teach their children that Iranians are Aryan whites (similarity 0.79)
• Across intermarried and non-intermarried families only elders construct whiteness (similarity 0.79)