Abstract
Contemporary social sciences pay little attention to the Iranian American experience; however, the Iranian American case presents a sociological paradox worthy of empirical study. While Iranians fall into the official “white” U.S. Census category, many experience race-based discrimination that contradicts this racial identity. Sociologist Neda Maghbouleh’s The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race examines this paradox through a nuanced study of the complexities of Iranian American identity—a group that moves between racial invisibility and hyper-visibility depending on the context.
Maghbouleh draws on historical, ethnographic, and legal data (including years of field work and 80 interviews with second-generation Iranian Americans) to demonstrate how Iranians straddle the white/non-white position across multiple racialized sites. Beyond the empirical contribution (arguably the most comprehensive second-generation Iranian American study to date), Maghbouleh’s concerted effort to integrate the sociology of immigration with the sociology of race is notable and timely; pushing beyond the black/white binary in theoretical development, she complicates assertions of assimilation and racialization in a way few scholars have done.
Maghbouleh’s book is divided by site, with chapters titled “At Home,” “In School,” and “At Summer Camp,” among others—a creative way to organize the data to demonstrate how location itself is a notable aspect of the experience for these individuals. Maghbouleh makes a number of compelling assertions about the Iranian American experience and introduces two theoretical concepts: racial hinges and racial loopholes. The concept of “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,” while the term “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” (p. 5). Through a series of diverse examples, Maghbouleh demonstrates how second-generation Iranian American youth are grappling with these contradictions and the various consequences of being pushed out of the limits of the white category.
In each chapter, Maghbouleh interweaves interviews with vivid descriptions of Persian tea and warm smells of pastries and Fesenjan in a way that allows the reader to feel immersed in the stories; these are not just quotes but fully formed narratives that provide compelling evidence to support the theoretical argument. In Chapter Two, “In the Past,” Maghbouleh provides transcripts from a testimony of an Iranian American man named Ahmmad who experienced blatant racialized discrimination but proceeds to explain that he is “Aryan” and no different than any other white person, forcing the judge to find in favor of the accused party. Ahmmad, like many first-generation Iranian immigrants, carries with him the myth of being part of the group of “original” whites, or Caucasians, who descended from the Caucasus mountains. This is one of so many frustratingly contradictory stories that exemplify the limits of whiteness and the murkiness of legal racial categorization and self-identification.
Another noteworthy example in a later chapter is of a teenager named Donya, who grapples with childhood bullying (being teased for having thick and dark eyebrows and accused of being related to Osama bin Laden) and the confusion of her parents telling her that “Iran” originates from the word “Aryan” and thus she is just as white as the European American children teasing her. Having grown up in the United States, Donya is aware of her parents’ flawed logic and understands that this argument would never work outside the home context, exemplifying the spatial aspect of Maghbouleh’s argument and the “loopholes” that exist in certain contexts but not others. Maghbouleh describes and analyzes multiple stories like this and asserts that the Iranian case contradicts theories of race and assimilation that claim that successive immigrant generations will claim greater attachment to whiteness as social identity. Instead, Maghbouleh argues that the Iranian case suggests the opposite: “first-generation Iranian parents . . . are raising a second generation increasingly certain that Iranians are in fact not white” (p. 53).
While Maghbouleh problematizes the use of the Aryan narrative in Ahmmad and Donya’s stories and explores the history of how this Aryan/Caucasian myth became so pervasive throughout Iran and the diaspora, there is a question that remains unanswered—how is it that Iranians are selectively linking to the Aryan narrative to elevate their racial status and separate themselves from stigmatized groups (i.e., Arabs) and yet negotiating this as separate from the racist white supremacist framing? Maghbouleh provides a compelling and comprehensive study, and future research could benefit from a deeper interrogation of how this Aryan claim upholds white supremacy and whether the use of this narrative will sustain itself through later generations.
In the final chapter, “Being Brown,” Maghbouleh concludes that the experiences of Iranian American youth expose the constantly shifting and unstable ground on which whiteness sits: “the power of whiteness in the United States comes not only through force and strength but also from its flexibility: its contractions and expansions, its ability to bend over time, and to define itself simply by defining what it is not” (p. 173). Maghbouleh’s contributions are not only theoretical and empirical; she has truly given a voice to the Iranian American community and created additional space for sociological research beyond the black/white paradigm. This book is well written and timely, and it should be of interest to scholars and students of racial and ethnic identity, immigrant integration, and diasporic communities across the social sciences.