White-classified Iranian Americans reject the white label for themselves.

Evidence

Middle Eastern is considered white, which always annoys me. So if there’s a space to write in, I would always write “Iranian” or “Middle Eastern,” and I always, always if someone asks me where I’m from, I say “I’m Iranian.” I was born and raised here [in the United States], but I would never say “white” or “American.” That’s not what people are looking for when they ask where I’m from, and it’s not what I feel that I am. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 329

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does self-classification rejection interact with formal legal whiteness in other demographic contexts?
• XREF: Parallels Jamila’s self-identification in that other library book Home Boy about being marked as non-belonging regardless of birthright.

Related

• Second-generation Iranians refuse official white classification on forms (similarity 0.86)
• Iranian Americans equate being American with being white (similarity 0.84)
• Iranians have been positioned across the American color line for over a century. (similarity 0.83)
• Offering a MENA option shifts Iranian Americans’ racial self-identification away from white (similarity 0.82)
• Iranian Americans arrived with legal whiteness and Aryan nationalist ideologies (similarity 0.81)
• Iranians are legally white yet visibly raced in daily life (similarity 0.81)
• Iranian Americans are legally white but are routinely racialized as non-white in schools (similarity 0.81)
• Census whiteness contradicts the everyday social exclusion of Iranian Americans (similarity 0.81)
• Iranians are legally white yet socially non-white in America (similarity 0.80)
• Minority groups differ in whether they equate American identity with whiteness (similarity 0.80)
• Iranian identity is not fixed as white but shifts across everyday sites. (similarity 0.80)
• Census officials forcibly recoded written-in Iranian identities as white (similarity 0.80)
• Middle Easterners are too white for legal redress yet too non-white to escape racism (similarity 0.80)
• Social whiteness on the ground remains elusive for Iranian Americans (similarity 0.79)
• Ethnicity, nationality, and religion cannot fully explain anti-Iranian bias (similarity 0.79)