I had always thought my confusion about my own racial identity had more to do with the light skin and blue eyes I inherited from my white mother than with the fact that my accented, olive-skinned, and “Middle Eastern”-looking father told me that Iranians are considered white. I never believed or internalized the whiteness of Iranians, given the crude circulating images of Iranians and the reactions my own Iranianness elicited from white Americans. Reading Neda Maghbouleh’s The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race, I see that the promise of whiteness has long been held over Iranian Americans who came to desire what they were never allowed to fully inhabit. However, as Maghbouleh documents, a new generation of Iranian Americans, coming of age after 2001, are increasingly rejecting the false call of whiteness to identify with other marginalized communities and forge a new vision of Iranian American identity and politics.
Over the course of The Limits of Whiteness, Maghbouleh beautifully unravels the intertwining factors that have contributed to deep ambivalence about racial identity among many Iranian Americans. These include (1) historical and official contemporary racial discourses in the United States and in Iran that have (inconsistently) constructed Iranians as white; (2) geopolitical shifts, including the 1979 Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis, and this century’s US-led war on terror, which emboldened conceptions of Iranians as vastly Other; and (3) generational differences among Iranian Americans rooted in these divergent ideologies of race and experiences of racialization. Hence the dynamics Maghbouleh highlights are historical and geopolitical, social and quotidian, and internal to Iranian families and communities.
Even before the first major wave of Iranians arrived in the United States in the 1950s, Maghbouleh shows that Iranians were positioned on the precipice of whiteness, pushed and pulled across the boundary. This ambiguity was evident in cases, as early as 1909, in which West and South Asian immigrants sought to establish their whiteness, a legal prerequisite to US citizenship. Maghbouleh argues that in these cases, Iranians functioned as “racial hinges” where their liminal racial status is “marshaled by a variety of legal and extralegal actors into a symbolic hinge that opens or closes the door to whiteness as necessary” (5). Even as the claimants were not Iranian, Persians were referenced as contrast point, or corollary, to establish the white racial status of the claimant. Maghbouleh’s reading of these contradictory cases demonstrates not only Iranians’ racial ambiguity, but also the incoherence of racial categorizations. While in one case it was a linguistic theory of race that made Iranians, along with the Syrian claimant, white, in another, narratives of religious civilizational conflict cast Iranians as racial others to Armenians, designated as white. Judges did not share a common understanding of the foundation of race—whether ancestral, cultural, or otherwise—and in many cases “common sense” became an acceptable legal basis for racial categories.
While in 1909, a Parsi man was successful in establishing his whiteness through an ancestral connection to Iran, similar reasoning failed in the 1923 case, United States v. Thind. As Maghbouleh describes, Thind, who was from Northern India, claimed to be more white than the Euro-American judges, drawing on logics of racial lineage and purity: “Combining the Aryan myth from Iran with the logic of the caste system in India, Thind built the case that high-caste Indians…were a pure racial group unto themselves within India who maintained strict intermarriage boundaries to ensure that they, as pure, dislocated whites from Persia, never mixed with ‘the dark races of India’” (22). When the judges ruled that Thind was a “brown Hindu” with no racial kinship to the “blond Scandinavian,” they referenced neither ancestral nor linguistic theories, but rather the knowledge of “the average man.”
These cases foreshadow the complexities of Iranian American racialization in the late twentieth century. Maghbouleh offers the concept of “racial loopholes” to describe “the everyday contradictions and conflicts that emerge when a group’s legal racial categorization is inconsistent with its on-the-ground experience of racialization or deracialization” (5). While Iranians were officially designated as “white” in 1978 (as they still are), the period since the 1979 Iranian Revolution produced the enduring “browning” of Iranian Americans, who despite educational and economic privileges, are regularly cast as outside acceptable bounds. Although deemed too white to be a legally protected racial group (with material consequences for those seeking redress for discrimination), they are not white enough to avoid discrimination, violence, and policing, speaking to their “ethno-racial invisibility and informal hypervisibility” (3). Despite these contradictions, some Iranian Americans hold onto narratives of Persian exceptionalism, even of Aryan descent, as a source of pride, producing a stark contrast between internal narratives of Iranian racial identity and everyday reality.
While Maghbouleh recognizes the role of state- and media-initiated discourses and practices in the racialization process, the heart of The Limits of Whiteness are quotidian and ground-up processes of race-making. Four central chapters examine conflicting racial narratives and experiences that Iranian American young people encounter at homes, in school, in international travel, and at an Iranian American summer camp. Rich with narrative accounts that draw the reader through the conflicting messages that young people receive, these chapters also highlight how second-generation Iranian Americans make sense of these contradictions to produce a new understanding of Iranian racial identity. One element Maghbouleh might have explored more (if space were not a consideration) is how Iranian Americans have responded to the post-9/11 racialization of Islam in the United States, including in relation to those who do not identify with Islam. I expect the response has been complex and multifaceted, especially given Iran’s own fraught history with the politicization of religion.
Perhaps the starkest contrast Maghbouleh highlights for these young people is between the messages they receive at home and their everyday experiences at school. Parents seeking to create a buffer against anti-Iranian sentiment often resort to ideas of Persian exceptionalism and racial superiority, popularized by the modernizing shahs in the mid-twentieth century to separate Persians from their neighbors. While the young people receiving these messages felt unequipped to challenge their veracity (Maghbouleh however does analyze their problematic origins), many recoiled at ideas of superiority. These ideas were also unhelpful to addressing how Iranian Americans were viewed or treated by white Americans, including the harassment they regularly encountered by peers and authority figures in schools.
In one striking account, Maghbouleh tells of a young man, Shahram, entering his senior year at a new high school, sitting with a couple of friends. He found himself surrounded by twenty or so white athletes verbally assaulting him with racial epithets, including a variation on the n-word. After the crowd was dispersed, Shahram sought to make a complaint, but the Assistant Principal gave him a detention, saying he should be sensitive to how his identity triggers anger in classmates whose family members were serving in the military in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. While the example may seem extreme in its explicitness, it speaks to not only the common conflation of Iran with Iraq, but also the twisted racial logic by which a young person is made responsible for global geopolitics, even as the United States is the aggressor.
Maghbouleh also examines spaces of international travel where US, Iranian, and other state officials regulate passage based not only on nationality, but also race and gender. She offers a nuanced reading of how young Iranian American men and women must differently manage their bodily comportment to pass through both American and Iranian checkpoints. In response to these and many other distinct experiences, Maghbouleh shows young Iranian Americans seeking other ways of understanding and responding to their identities and racial status in the United States. A final chapter on a summer camp for Iranian Americans offers a new vision of Iranian American identity. It describes an identity that is grounded in the actual lived experiences of second-generation Iranian Americans, aligns with multiracial politics, and sees Iranian Americans’ fate as wrapped up with the fates of other racialized communities.
The Limits of Whiteness uses the case of Iranian Americans to analyze the contours of whiteness, the constructedness and flexibility of race, and its power to shape lives and delimit horizons. The book challenges a notion that the trajectory of racialized immigrants is toward assimilation into whiteness. While making an important contribution to scholarship on race and racialization, the book also speaks to multiple audiences. Through vivid narratives and illustrative examples readers are brought into a cultural and political milieu, and into the lives of the young Iranian Americans. Accessible for undergraduates and lay audiences, and of particular value to Iranian Americans, the book beautifully weaves together analysis and narrative to demonstrate the complex dynamics of race-making, and how it is encountered individually and collectively with the potential of producing a transformative politics.
University of California Press