Abstract
Conditional Belonging compares the experiences of the Iranian diaspora in Germany and the United States. It foregrounds the role of politics in shaping racial stigmatization within each context. With data collected from two waves of interviews, Iranians’ identities become politicized through discursive forces tied to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the hostage crisis, the election of Donald Trump, the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe and the 2017 Muslim travel ban. The book argues that the Iranian diaspora’s access to full membership in each country is compromised by the racialization of their identities. Although formal citizenship grants Iranian immigrants and their descendants social welfare benefits in Germany and upward mobility in the United States, they remain racialized as Ausländers (forever foreigners) in Germany or politicized “enemies” in the United States, making this group’s belonging “conditional” in their new homelands.
The chapters on the American context achieve the stated goal of showing how politics influences racialization, identity formation, and social belonging. The U.S. racial regime consists of the colorblind myth that it is a land of opportunity for all. In reality, membership is largely based on a color-coded hierarchy where proximity to whiteness is privileged. Iranians have maintained “honorary white status” by being legally classified in the U.S. census as White, but they experience its limits by being racialized as non-White (Maghbouleh 2017). Chapter 1 traces the moment of becoming non-White for the Iranian American community to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis. Sadeghi claims that American Iranians’ status changed “almost overnight” by being associated with the Iranian state, fundamentalism, Islamism, and terrorism. The ebbs and flows of Iranians’ experiences with racism and discrimination are further tied to politics as evidenced by the interlocutors’ experiences during the 2010 international sanctions against Iran, the Trump presidency, and the 2017 Muslim travel ban, outlined in Chapter 2. Iranian Americans have mitigated their experiences with marginality in the workplace and achieved upward mobility by becoming their own boss and setting up small businesses or private practices.
Sadeghi’s politics-centered approach requires nuance when applied to the German context. The book suggests that international events (e.g., Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis) shape local politics and, concomitantly, processes of racialization and belonging for Iranians in the United States. In Germany, however, these events had less salience for the racialization of Iranians. In fact, it was more feasible to migrate to Germany following the 1979 Iranian Revolution because Iranians were interpreted as refugees in need of political asylum, which aligned with Germany’s post-Nazi era definition of nationhood as a haven for refugees. This finding suggests that global politics had relatively less of an impact on Iranians’ belonging in Germany compared to the United States.
This unnuanced application of a politics-centered approach could be alleviated by theorizing about the way politics shapes belonging. While events like the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis had little salience in Germany, the 2015 refugee crisis affected Iranians’ belonging. Chapter 3 documents the persistence of antiforeigner sentiment in Germany by examining terms like Ausländer (foreigners), Schwarzkopf (racial slur for darker phenotypes), and plastic Deutsch (fake German). These sentiments increased in 2015 as interlocutors reported Germans being more openly racist. The absence of racialization for Iranians during the Iranian Revolution but its magnification during the refugee crisis reveals a missed opportunity to examine the conditions under which politics activates processes of racialization. Theorizing on the different pathways in which politics shapes belonging would have improved the explanatory power of a politics-centered approach.
Chapter 4 compares how the Iranian diaspora cope with their stigmatization. To manage being racialized as brown, Sadeghi argues that American Iranians approximate Whiteness. They performed “racial flexibility” by playing along with the assumptions that they were Italian or Greek. In Germany, racial flexibility was unfeasible, given that being considered “German” required German ancestry. Instead, German Iranians engaged in what Sadeghi calls “cultural flexibility” by highlighting their proximity to German norms and values. They married Germans; they valued secularism, democracy, and strong work ethic. While these are interpreted as “coping” mechanisms, they are also evident of the agency that Iranians have in the boundary-making process.
Iranians were actively involved in boundary-making, which is understated in the book. During the Muslim travel ban, some interlocutors were offended that they were grouped with other Muslims. These participants differentiated themselves from other immigrants by declaring they were “model minorities” that were “highly educated,” “contributed to society,” and were “successful” (pp. 70–71). During the refugee crisis, politics also activated Iranians’ participation in boundary work in Germany. Iranians distinguished themselves from “bad” foreigners who were “taking advantage of the German system” (p. 114). These findings theoretically nuance the intended contribution of the term “conditional belonging.”
Sadeghi’s conceptualization of “conditional belonging” implies that belonging is solely constructed between the dominant and negatively racialized group, where the latter’s belonging is determined by the former. But the empirical findings also illustrate that Iranians racialize other immigrants, who may be less privileged. Racialized minorities, then, exert agency in processes of belonging beyond coping strategies. They engage in boundary work where they claim superiority over Whites (Le Espiritu 2001). They police each other, creating complex systems of social membership (Lori 2022), and they have other aspects of their intersectional identities impact their belonging (Korteweg 2017). Conceptualizing these nuances would extend the very rich term “conditional belonging.”
Nevertheless, I will cite this term to refer to how racialization impacts belonging. It will particularly benefit German sociology. At a conference in Toronto in 2022 with leading German immigration scholars from Berlin, I was surprised by the absence of race in sociological analyses of immigrant experiences. I raised my hand, and asked, what about race? The leading expert did not have an answer, other than to suggest that race is missing in discussions about Germany’s immigration. Relatively, American sociology prioritizes race and racialization, and its useful to bring these insights across the border, including to Germany, Canada, and other immigrant-receiving nations established through empire.
