“The Limits of Whiteness?” A Q&A with Dr. Neda Maghbouleh on Iranian American Identity
Q: Can you give us a quick summary of the book and what you set out to do with this project?
Dr. Maghbouleh: The book is about how Iranian Americans live a racial paradox. They are counted as white by the Federal Government. And they also sometimes experience everyday interactions that are closer to those experienced by communities of color.
One intervention of my book is to suggest that this paradox has a way longer history than we usually acknowledge. This started decades before any Iranians had even immigrated to the United States. Another intervention is to bring together literature on the sociology of race with the sociology of immigration to make better sense of the in-between status of Iranians and other groups from the MENA region.
Q: Your research really unpacks the social and historical forces that shape Iranian American identity. I’m wondering what you think this case tells us about immigrant immigration processes more broadly?
Dr. Maghbouleh: In scholarship about ethnicity and race as experienced by immigrant generations—or specifically an immigrant group that’s been thought to be assimilating on a kind of straight-line or an upward path—I think some second generation kids are either being misread in the literature or ignored in some frames.
What’s interesting about the case of Iranian Americans relative to the work on ethnicity and race across immigrant generations is you have a first generation who arrive to the U.S. being really quite sure of their racial ID as white. And this goes back into the history of Iran, which I write about in Chapter 3 of my book.
It’s a very complicated relationship that Iran has had with foreign powers like Britain, Russia, and the United States. I draw here from historian Reza Zia-Ebrahimi who has outlined how the “Aryan Myth” as it circulates in Iran—a myth that bolsters a supposedly ancient, glorious, pre-Islamic Iran claim to cultural and racial superiority– is actually a nationalist narrative developed in much more recent Iranian history.
So, in my book, I take up what happens when this myth is ported over into diaspora by Iranian immigrants. Some, not all, but some first generation parents coming to the U.S. bring with them a sense of racial identity that then gets really complicated or even contradicted by the experiences that their families have. And it’s the second generation kids who speak up or speak back or, in some cases, don’t to this myth in diaspora. The second-generation kids are actually the first in their families to be fully socialized into American racial logics and hierarchies. This kind of conflict gets staged in the household, and I think is something that can stand to be analyzed even further in the literature on immigrant incorporation.
Q: In thinking about this current political moment where Trump has moved to decertify the Iran Nuclear Deal, the series of travel bans, what do you think that all of these sorts of moments are saying about the shape of Iranian identity and Middle Eastern identity more broadly for the years to come? Can you weigh in on the current political moment?
Dr. Maghbouleh: Yes, absolutely. Given that the Iranian Revolution in 1979 launched the first major wave of permanent Iranian migration to the U.S., the community from its very inception has had to navigate a highly stigmatized identity. Since 1979, Iran and Iranians have been constructed and misrepresented in many ways as a kind of polar opposite or binary to who Americans are, or what the United States is.
When I was doing my research with young people from about 2009 through 2013 when I pulled out of the field and began to write the book, these young Iranian Americans were very aware of this binary. They were navigating and sometimes felt trapped by this binary, they were very attuned to it. They were picking up on all these signals that were perhaps more subtle in a pre-Trump era. They were born into a historical moment from 1979 forward where the United States and Iran have had no diplomatic relationship. These kids can’t even travel to Iran directly from the United States; they need a third party country that they first fly to. So Obama’s Iran Deal in 2015 was this signal that there could potentially be—for the first time in their lives– a normalization of relations between the United States and Iran, of this bifurcated relationship.
But now you look at 2017 and the decertification of the Iran Nuclear Deal, this deal that the young people in my book were so enthusiastic about. Now we have of course, the multiple travel or “Muslim” bans, which are elaborations on the exact processes I write about in the book. These were stakes that young Iranian Americans had been aware of, they felt them in their bones. They spoke about them with great passion before Trump. But these issues were often less perceptible to non-Iranians at that time. But now the stakes are very legible to a broader audience.
Q: In a related question, I wonder about your thoughts on this census move to add the Middle Eastern and North African “MENA” category to the census in 2020. A lot of critics say it’s a little bit of a double-edged sword, where on the one hand this sort of invisible group gains visibility for the first time and by extension some political power. But then on the flip side, perhaps they become more of a target. So I wonder, based on your research, if you could weigh in on how you see that playing out and sort of reshaping the political landscape?
Dr. Maghbouleh: Absolutely…It’s interesting to point out that in 2015 with the most recent MENA tests that the Census Bureau has accomplished, they have evidence now that when MENA individuals – MENA meaning Middle Eastern and North African – when MENA individuals are offered a “racial or ethnic box” choice, they overwhelmingly choose to self-identify as MENA over white.
This is true across all of the subgroups. So even anecdotally in sociology, sometimes people who in the subfield will say to me, “Well, you know, this makes sense from a racialization perspective. But from the self-ID of individuals within these groups, I have a hard time seeing that Iranians would choose the same category as Yemenis, as Moroccans.” And so on.
But the Census Bureau’s job has been to empirically test this. Their 2015 reports show that proportionally across all of these different ethno-national subdivisions, the majority of folks in all sub-groups are choosing MENA over white. I think that’s an absolutely crucial phenomenon that we now have data on, that we can put into mainstream public and sociological discourse.
Nonetheless, you raise an important issue about how collecting ethno-racial classification data on MENA folks could be used for more nefarious reasons to further surveil a group that’s already very vulnerable. So would the MENA category just make it that much easier for the government to use that data to damage or undermine the goals of the community?
I would say that we have enough evidence that this was already happening despite the fact that MENA groups have been—from an equity and resource allocation perspective– absorbed or made invisible in the white category. I think that the costs have already been bared. For example, the New York Police Department (NYPD) had a so-called “Demographics Unit.” This was immediately after 9/11, when they were actually able to drill down and get data from federal reporting groups to be able to identify by zip code where people with names that were coded as Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern—from the region more broadly—and where they lived.
So they had zip code level data on everyone. This is despite the fact that this ethno-racially heterogonous group, subgroups like Arabs and Iranians, are subsumed in the white category. Then, when the NYPD was call out on this, they said things like, “Well, you know, we’re not using this for nefarious reasons. This is about making sure we have, for example, Arabic language signs in airports like La Guardia or JFK. We just want to know where these speakers live so we can better support them with communications material or signage.
I think most people, when they hear that, are very skeptical that that’s actually the reason. I think we have evidence that MENA people want this category and we also have evidence that despite the lack of the category, these individuals and groups have been able to become legible for surveillance reasons and policing reasons.
Q: Is there one big takeaway that you want your readers to draw from your book?
Dr. Maghbouleh: In my book, even in the archival and historical sections, I really center the stories of teenagers. I think teenagers are a complex and fascinating group to do sociological research with. They’re going through so many changes in their own identity development. They are being forced to question the messages that they’re getting, both in the family and in their schools, among peers.
Because my book takes very seriously that identity is constantly in flux, I think that something really gratifying for me to do in the book (and in the research leading up to the book), was to really follow young people as they tried to forge a sense of identity for themselves in different stages of life.
But sometimes in sociology, we keep these areas quite separate, and often for good reason: We have sociology of the family. We have sociology of education. We have transnationalism. But in my book, these all coalesce through the narratives of young people growing up. I’m with them in their homes, looking at how they interact with their families, how they decorate their bedrooms. I follow them through high school, and in some cases, into college. I’m looking at who their roommates are, what organizations they are joining, who they are facing bullying from. And is it always peers? Because I think when we hear “bullying” we think about peer to peer oppression. But in fact, one of the findings from the school chapter of my book is that often it’s authority figures like administrators and teachers that are not only complicit in allowing bullying to happen, but they themselves set the tone and are actually the bullies themselves.
I follow some of the young people, the ones we can think of as “casual” travelers versus truly transnational subjects, when they go back to Iran in visits with their families, and describe the displacement that they sense there, where they feel too American in Iran, but they’re too Iranian in America. As I mentioned earlier, their transnational flights are infused by a more general, Islamophobic and racist way in which all international travel is now organized. I make the case that young Iranian American men in particular are facing a certain kind of racialization as they move through international airports. Then, for young Iranian American women, the expectation of keeping hijab once they arrive in Iran adds another layer. For both boys and girls, these trips to Iran fundamentally require a change in one’s bodily comportment and this activates a slightly different sense of ethno-racial identity.
Then finally, I travel with some of the young people in my study to a progressive summer camp that some of them attended as campers or as counselors. That’s a really unique place where there is an explicitly anti-racist, progressive agenda where second generation Iranian American kids forge alliances directly with communities of color or other MENA-adjacent groups from whom they’ve been told to stay away; like Arabs or Afghans. That’s a whole complicated other story, but this summer camp does this a fascinating job of creating an almost-utopian space where Iranian American raciality is dealt with, warts and all.
So that would be my biggest takeaway. If you’re into the history of race and immigration in the United States, I have some of that for you in the book. If you’re curious about where Iranians and other Middle Eastern immigrants fit in the American racial landscape, this book provides some answers. And if you’re more generally intrigued by how to use the stories of young people as a vehicle to observe a multitude of social institutions we typically study separate from one another, my book offers one possible path.
About the interviewee
Neda Maghbouleh is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and author of The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (2017, Stanford University Press). Born in New York City and raised in Portland, Oregon, she holds an MA/PhD in Sociology from UC Santa Barbara and a BA from Smith College. Through two new research projects on the go, she is extending her work on racialization, inclusion/exclusion, and the relationship between them. The first (with UofT colleagues Melissa Milkie and Ito Peng, funded by Canada’s SSHRC and Ministry of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship) examines integration and discrimination challenges faced by Syrian refugee parents and children in Toronto. The second project, with Ariela Schachter and René Flores, uses experimental survey design to uncover the current ”rules” of everyday racial classification in the U.S.