Neda Maghbouleh

The Limits of Whiteness

Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Neda Maghbouleh is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 248
• Erscheinungstermin: 5. September 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 213mm x 136mm x 17mm
• Gewicht: 295g
• ISBN-13: 9781503603370
• ISBN-10: 1503603377
• Artikelnr.: 47775832

Autorenporträt

Neda Maghbouleh is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1Being White
chapter abstract
Chapter 1 describes how race and racism organize Iranian American lives and
shows that for liminal racial groups, whiteness is fickle and volatile. The
chapter introduces the concepts "racial hinges" and "racial loopholes" to
make sense of the contradictory racial experiences of Iranian Americans.
Through the narratives of Roya, a second-generation youth, and the
controversy over an anti-Iranian poster, this chapter offers the "limits of
whiteness" as an analytic to understand racial problems that, when
typically extended to Iranians, are integrated as expressions of "anything
but race": that is, ethnic and cultural difference, religious intolerance,
or anti-immigrant nativism.
2In the Past
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 takes the reader inside the conflicting racial logics of early
twentieth-century court cases and the six-month window in the late 1970s
when Iranian Americans were made at once legally white and perhaps
irrevocably socially brown during and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In
the twenty-first century, Iranian Americans are trapped in racial loopholes
in which they are unable to seek legal recourse for on-the-ground racism in
workplaces and street-level hate crimes due to their legal whiteness. With
American racism in the twenty-first century increasingly drawing on
"color-blind" logic, even the most socioeconomically successful Iranian
Americans are sanctioned from full inclusion through subtle means, such as
residential architecture and design codes in Los Angeles, California.
3At Home
chapter abstract
First- and second-generation Iranian Americans tend to disagree about one
key question: Are Iranians white or not? A little-known feature of the
Iranian American community is that first-generation immigrants grew up in
an Iranian state in which they were formally taught that Iranians are not
only white but also the world's original and most racially pure white
people. In the American context, first-generation parents' insistence to
their American-born children that Iranians are in fact whiter than the
European American white peers who racially harass and bully them at school
offers little recourse for second-generation youth. From their perspective,
the "Aryan myth" of Iranian whiteness and other expressions of "Persian"
pride (which are often anti-Arab) is a distressing expression of
ethno-racial elitism that fundamentally misunderstands Iranian Americans'
actual position in the racial hierarchy in the United States.
4In School
chapter abstract
It is through youth's physical proximity to whiteness that they are
convinced that Iranians are not white. Faced with racial harassment and
sometimes physical violence, second-generation youth repeatedly learn that
their brand of white is not white enough to escape racial harassment. This
is reflected in the political and social alliances they form with other
racialized peers, in their racialized interactions in classrooms, and in
their retreat to "inherited nostalgia" for Iran in co-ethnic safe spaces on
college campuses. In support of this characterization, Iranian American and
other youth from the Middle East and North Africa have successfully
petitioned the University of California System for a new non-white racial
classification: "SWANA."
5To the Homeland
chapter abstract
Chapter 5 focuses on racial profiling and the visceral experience of
traveling that is required of Iranian American youth to visit ancestral
homelands. Common concerns about not being "Iranian" enough for one's
parents and extended family in Iran are counterpoised against the lived
experiences of being "too Iranian" for customs agents and TSA personnel. A
collective consciousness about the transformative process of international
travel becomes part of Iranian American youth culture, as boys and girls
share stories of excitement and disappointment after coming face-to-face
with their shifting racialization and inherited nostalgia for the home
country. These transnational crossings and direct encounters with their own
inherited nostalgia form the raw material for a specific second-generation
consciousness that celebrates Iranian heritage, while also forging
nonbiological kin networks across diaspora and with other liminal non-white
groups.
6At Summer Camp
chapter abstract
As second-generation Iranian American youth grow up scattered across the
United States and with their extended biological families often dispersed
across the world, how do these youth foster and develop a positive
collective identity? Camp Ayandeh, a summer camp by and for
second-generation Iranian American youth, is one such site in which teenage
Iranian Americans create community. Camp Ayandeh provides a powerful
corrective against the racialized bullying faced by youth, and rather than
run from their de jure non-white identities in the United States, through
camp youth learn to embrace it, themselves, and each other.
7Being Brown
chapter abstract
Chapter 7 draws on the author's own biography and her surprising connection
to a seminal racial prerequisite case (United States v. Cartozian, 1925) to
show how a group can be repeatedly ushered into and shoved out of
whiteness, depending on the prevailing winds of the time. As Iranians and
other Middle Easterners have served as racial hinges in the project of
American whiteness for more than one hundred years, the stark contradiction
between their legal racial status and on-the-ground experience is not
surprising. Yet what this means in the twenty-first century is that Iranian
Americans fall into racial loopholes in which they cannot seek legal
recourse for the racial discrimination they face. The experiences of
Iranian Americans expose the shifting borderlands of inclusion in the white
racial category and the limits of the protections that legal whiteness can
afford socially non-white migrants and their children.