The Limits of Whiteness

Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race

Neda Maghbouleh

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781503603370, 9780804792585
• eBook ISBN: 9781503603431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

When Roya, an Iranian American high school student, is asked to identify her race, she feels anxiety and doubt. According to the federal government, she and others from the Middle East are white. Indeed, a historical myth circulates even in immigrant families like Roya's, proclaiming Iranians to be the "original" white race. But based on the treatment Roya and her family receive in American schools, airports, workplaces, and neighborhoods—interactions characterized by intolerance or hate—Roya is increasingly certain that she is not white. In The Limits of Whiteness, Neda Maghbouleh offers a groundbreaking, timely look at how Iranians and other Middle Eastern Americans move across the color line.

By shadowing Roya and more than 80 other young people, Maghbouleh documents Iranian Americans' shifting racial status. Drawing on never-before-analyzed historical and legal evidence, she captures the unique experience of an immigrant group trapped between legal racial invisibility and everyday racial hyper-visibility. Her findings are essential for understanding the unprecedented challenge Middle Easterners now face under "extreme vetting" and potential reclassification out of the "white" box. Maghbouleh tells for the first time the compelling, often heartbreaking story of how a white American immigrant group can become brown and what such a transformation says about race in America.

CHAPTER 1

BEING WHITE

FOR ANY AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT with aims of going to a four-year university, there exists a window of repeated ethnic and racial self-identification. For Iranian American youth like Roya, from her first standardized college admissions test through her final campus housing questionnaire, she is profiled, guided, sorted, and coded into the following ethno-racial definition: “White/Caucasian: a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.” The politics around checking the right box are vexing to Roya:

White teachers and counselors have tried to correct me when I claim an “other” racial identity. They say, “If you’re Iranian, then you’re white.” And it’s like, okay, can you pronounce my last name correctly, please? Tell me what other “white” countries are sanctioned, exploited, and vilified the way Iran is right now? And am I “white” like you when I’m at the airport? No. I’m not white.

. . .

If you drive west for thirty minutes from Houston, Texas, you’ll arrive at Nonmacher’s Bar-B-Que, an eight hundred–square-foot restaurant open since 1978. The walls are lined with mementos collected over time by owner John Nonmacher. There are faded rodeo ribbons, smoke-singed trucker hats, studio portraits of John Wayne, and a framed pencil drawing of Nonmacher himself. There is also an eleven- by seventeen-inch, sepia-toned poster of nineteen rifle-wielding men in ten-gallon hats mugging for the camera. Behind them are three objects hanging off an old oak tree: the flag of the United States, the state flag of Texas, and a bearded, turbaned man with a noose around his neck. His mouth is slack, and his arms hang heavy. Under the staged photograph, a caption in Old Western typeface cheerfully suggests to Nonmacher’s patrons, “Let’s Play Cowboys and IRANIANS!”

Nonmacher first pinned the poster to his restaurant wall in 1979, and it hangs there still today. Before his death in 2013 at age sixty-eight, Nonmacher was asked if the poster was racist. “I laughed and I’m still laughing,” he said, referring to a locally organized protest of the restaurant in 2011. “I won’t take it down.”¹ And why would he? Business at Nonmacher’s had been good, and thanks to the attention drawn by his poster and the protest over it, getting better. An enthusiastic counterprotest had packed the house with paying customers from open to close, as patient would-be eaters brandishing American flags stretched out into a line past the parking lot and down the block. Nonmacher marveled at how long customers were willing to wait for a table: “Yesterday was one of the best days we’ve ever had. . . . I mean, I knew we had fans and friends, but this is just golly God!”² One of the organizers of the 2011 protest of Nonmacher’s poster, a second-generation Iranian American from Houston, remarked, “A poster like that doesn’t unite people. There’s no reason why there should be racism around.”³ But, if anything, the poster had seemed to unite people—in defense of racism, or something like it.

. . .

It is not particularly remarkable that Roya would describe frustration over her assigned demographic box or that Nonmacher would express pleasure at the controversy over his poster. What is remarkable, however, is that these everyday stories involving Iranian Americans are rarely understood as matters of race. Scholars, policy makers, and even Iranian Americans themselves typically reconcile such problems as expressions of “anything but race”: ethnic and cultural difference, religious intolerance, or anti-immigrant nativism. These explanations are powerful, up to a point, but they ignore the everyday politics that provoke racial claims to an “other” identity among legally white Iranian Americans like Roya. And in the case of Nonmacher’s restaurant, they neutralize, or risk misunderstanding, the symbolic racial fantasy of how exactly American cowboys could “play” with the Iranians in their midst and why they might do so decades before today’s anxieties around “nuclear Iran,” Islam, and the War on Terror.

If Nonmacher’s poster and the snaking line of eager customers it attracted were not inspired by race and racism, it doesn’t show from the actual image captured on the poster itself. To derace Nonmacher’s poster is to ignore its central reference to white vigilantism and the lynching of African Americans. To derace Nonmacher’s poster is also to omit the poster’s caption, which appropriates the cowboys-and-Indians trope to amalgamate indigeneity and Iranianness in the service of shorthand for a racial battle between the “civilized” and the “barbaric.”⁴ To explain a poster of a fantasized American lynching as ethnic bigotry, religious intolerance, or nativist hatred is to tell twenty-eight-year-old Husein Hadi, the Iranian American organizer who said, “There’s no reason why there should be racism around,” that at Nonmacher’s Bar-B-Que there is in fact no racism around.

Likewise, it is hard to reconcile an anything-but-race explanation for teachers and guidance counselors advising seventeen-year-old Roya to check a box declaring her racial whiteness or her frustrated response as she resists. In fact, it might surprise Nonmacher and his customers to hear from one of Roya’s guidance counselors that the limp, lifeless Iranian at the center of the poster is, according to US federal classification, as white as the cowboys surrounding him. And it might surprise Roya’s guidance counselor to know that there is a controversial “Aryan myth” of cultural and racial superiority that circulates within Roya’s own multigenerational Iranian American family and community. Yet these sorts of “rank-and-file” discrepancies over the racial classifications and self-understandings of Iranian Americans should not be confused for an absence of race—they are evidence of the prevailing presence of race.⁵

Caught in the chasm between formal ethno-racial invisibility and informal hypervisibility, Iranian Americans work, love, and live through a core social paradox: Their everyday experiences of racialization coexist with their legal, and in some cases, internal “whitewashing.”⁶ This paradox helps explain the frustration in Roya’s voice as she is folded into a unifying white racial category beside the same white counterparts from whom she, and other minorities in the United States, most often face social exclusion and prejudice. At the time, however, Roya did not actually press the point with the authority figures at her massive California public high school. Although she disagreed with them, she understood that they were probably just following the rules of official categorization. Some of Roya’s high school classmates, on the other hand, understood the rules of race in America differently, or perhaps they played by different rules altogether:

[They] were like, “You’re brown, little chola girl; come sit with us.”⁷ And you know, because my last name was different, I’m hairy, I’m Persian, my neighborhood, I was almost ashamed of my identity. But Mexican people accepted me. They saved me from hating me.

To understand Iranian American lives only through the lens of ethnicity, religion, or nationality risks mistaking or ignoring what Roya says when she describes exactly who it was that saved her and how and why they saved her. To treat Roya’s experiences as being indicative of anything but race is to reify and naturalize Iranian whiteness and to ignore the many everyday moments in which Iranian Americans are imagined—and imagine themselves—outside its limits.

Racial Hinges, Racial Loopholes

The terms “white” and “non-white” are used in this book when describing the racial status of Iranian Americans across different contexts and situations. It draws on the political, moral, and epistemological meaning of the terms as described by Charles Mills in The Racial Contract.⁸ According to Mills, the ongoing and shifting classification of people as “white”/“non-white” rests on in-group/out-group dynamics with massive social, political, and economic consequences, reproduced through cognitive, moral, and cultural frames. His political-philosophical definition of race as marked by full versus subordinate personhood is central to this book’s presentation and interpretation of data about Iranian Americans. Therefore, the goal of this book is not to make prescriptive claims about how Iranian Americans should be correctly racially classified. Instead, the goal is to interrogate how Iranian Americans came to be categorized as white de jure, to explore if they are socially incorporated as white de facto, and to assess what this case tells us about how whiteness operates on the ground today.⁹

To date, studies of American whiteness have centered on European or Anglo contexts and diasporas and consistently tell a unidirectional story of how groups become white.¹⁰ Thus, sociologists and historians have shown, for example, how the Irish were paid in “wages of whiteness,” how Italians were made “white on arrival,” and how “Jews became white folks.”¹¹ Barring a few exceptions, there has been little orientation toward examining two areas: whiteness and its related logics of exclusion for non-Western groups, and how whiteness can be intermittently granted and revoked, or mismatched in the law and on the ground.¹²

In light of how the Iranian American case complicates our understandings of race and whiteness, I offer two new concepts. The first, “racial hinges,” captures how the geographic, political, and pseudoscientific specter of a racially liminal group, like Iranians, can be marshaled by a variety of legal and extralegal actors into a symbolic hinge that opens or closes the door to whiteness as necessary. The second, “racial loopholes,” describes 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. In addition to complicating our understanding of whiteness by focusing on its flexibility at the outermost limits, the case of Iranian Americans also deepens our understanding of the interplay between top-down and bottom-up racialization processes, as well as troubling long-standing assumptions about assimilation by immigrant groups into mainstream American society.

Iranian American Racialization or Assimilation?

There has been a recent call in mainstream sociology to expand research on “racialization.”¹³ Of the major sociological approaches that draw on racialization, including Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s racialized social system and color-blind racism and Joe Feagin’s systemic racism, research on Middle Eastern Americans tends to draw on racial formation theory as articulated by Michael Omi and Howard Winant.¹⁴ Racial formation theory argues that race is inextricably connected to the state and in constant and dynamic tension with hegemonic practice from above and political struggle from below. Scholars have elaborated on the top-down half of racial formation theory with great zeal. For example, an interdisciplinary body of scholarship, critical race studies, offers major insight into the legal logic and illogic of racial categories, most often at the macro- and meso-levels.¹⁵ Racialization research does not treat race as an unchanging reflection of biology and culture or a reflection of amalgamations of differently situated indicators like socioeconomic status and intermarriage; rather, race is a master status tied to group oppression and domination.

This book is part of an emerging movement to more completely integrate the study of immigration with the study of race and, by extension, assimilation and racialization. Research in this stream recognizes immigration as a site of racial struggle and accounts for US nativism as a battleground where “in-between” groups are browned.¹⁶ In so doing, work that integrates the sociology of immigration with the sociology of race has pushed back against the Black/white binary that continues to motivate theoretical concerns in studies of assimilation and racialization and reengages both the top-down and bottom-up processes described by racial formation theory.

An analysis of Iranian American life demonstrates the broader conceptual and explanatory purchase of an integrated approach to the study of race and immigration through racial formation. For example, from a racial formation perspective, Roya’s guidance counselor was not mistaken when she told Roya to check the “white” box. According to the top-down half of racial formation theory, and through the lens of legal and social policy around race and immigration, Iranian Americans are indeed white by law. Yet, at the same time, political constructions of Iran as a deviant, illogical, or criminal state are suffused with non-white racialization observable across each level of American society. In this way, everyday objects like the lynching poster at Nonmacher’s are forms of bottom-up racial knowledge that “rearticulate” Iranianness as racially marked and incompatible with whiteness.¹⁷ The interplay between top-down and bottom-up processes, and particularly the points of friction at which they meet, tell us not only about Iranian Americans but more generally about how white racism continually reorganizes itself to exclude those whom the legal category “white” nominally includes.

Nonetheless, when it comes to research on the immigrant second generation, racialization frameworks are secondary to theories of assimilation, which remain the default framework through which the incorporation and well-being of ethnic and racial minorities is assessed.¹⁸ Segmented assimilation rests fundamentally on the notion that upward trends in education, income, and wealth lead to political and social incorporation into an American mainstream that is implicitly and sometimes explicitly described as white.¹⁹ Rates of intermarriage and spatial integration, which are often used as proxies for political and social incorporation, are then extended into conclusions about the “whitening” of some immigrants or the “honorary white” status of others.²⁰ This literature would predict the easy positioning of Iranian Americans, perhaps more than any other recent immigrant group, into whiteness.

First, since their earliest mass arrival as university students in the 1950s, Iranians have disproportionately entered with training and experience in specialty occupations like engineering and medicine and possess higher rates of educational attainment and income than other legally white Americans. Given this socioeconomic profile, earlier research on Iranian Americans has drawn on theories of assimilation and ethnic incorporation to make sense of middle- and upper-class Iranian American lives. This literature notes a weakening of ethnic language, customs, and identities among the second generation, particularly via intermarriage and spatial integration.²¹ Research in this stream on youth like American-born Roya—who are, as a cohort, now entering higher education and the workforce en masse—draws from segmented assimilation theory to make sense of data showing that high levels of spatial integration and educational attainment observed in the first generation have held steady thus far for their children.²² Second, by the time of their next wave of mass migration to the United States starting in 1979, Iranian Americans and others from the Middle East were legally classified as white by all levels of government. Third, Iranians bring to the United States a wide range of secular and religious cultural practices, including a deeply held belief among some that Iranians are no less than the world’s original white people.

In short, a highly educated, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• 1. Being White
• 2. In the Past
• 3. At Home
• 4. In School
• 5. To the Homeland
• 6. At Summer Camp
• 7. Being Brown
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A: Reflections on the Research
• Appendix B: Iranian American Demographics and the “Race Question”
• Notes
• References
• Index