The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race by Neda Maghbouleh (review)

Mashriq & Mahjar 5, no. 2 (2018), 140–143 ISSN 2169-4435 NEDA MAGHBOULEH, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017). Pp. 248. $85.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. ISBN 9780804792585. REVIEWED BY STEPHANIE SADRE-ORAFAI, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Cincinnati, email: stephanie.sadre-orafai@uc.edu In The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race, sociologist Neda Maghbouleh explores how Iranian Americans, both as an ethno-racial category defined from without, and relatively recent, non-Western immigrant group defined from within, confound US racial classificatory systems and accepted scholarly narratives about immigrants, race, and whiteness. Assembling a diverse corpus of research materials—from early twentieth-century racial prerequisite cases and contemporary anti-Iranian hate crimes and discrimination complaints to interviews with more than fifty 1.5 and secondgeneration Iranian Americans—Maghbouleh traces how Iranians have been seen and see themselves as both white and non-white in America. Her book responds to the question of how “a highly educated, highincome population of legally white immigrants who arrive already believing in their own racial whiteness” becomes brown, and the discordant experience of feeling brown when legally classified as white (8). Through her textured analysis, she demonstrates the insufficiency of frames like “Islamophobia” and “assimilation” for explaining Iranian Americans’ lived experiences of (un)belonging in the United States, particularly among those coming of age in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Teasing apart the de facto and de jure experiences of Iranian Americans, her analytic innovation is centralizing race, not religion or culture, to render the contours of their betwixt-and-between group identity visible. She identifies home, school, the homeland, and summer camp as four key sites of ethnoracial socialization and identification, organizing her ethnographic Reviews 141 chapters accordingly, and traces how Iranian American youth navigate the limits of whiteness across these spaces. To do this she develops a pair of concepts that together explain both the flexibility of whiteness as a category and Iranian Americans’ experiences of it: racial hinges and racial loopholes. With racial hinges, Maghbouleh describes how the “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” (5). In chapter 2, she details this hinge-work, showing how even before Iranians immigrated to the United States, their purported racial identities as both white and non-white were used to define the whiteness of Syrian, Armenian, Indian, and Parsi/Parsee applicants in racial prerequisite cases through both negation and affinity. These early invocations drew on geographic, linguistic, and religious evidence, based in part on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century racial science, which was also deployed by Iranian elites for nationbuilding purposes, and passed down intergenerationally in diasporic homes. Drawing on interviews with Iranian American youth in chapters 3 and 4, she finds that these “powerful notions of Aryan cultural heritage, Caucasian geographic origin, Indo-European language, and concomitant white racial identity” often are diametrically opposed to their experiences of race in the United States (64). She teases out how parents’ and grandparents’ exclusionary maneuvers of “Persian exceptionalism,” meant to soothe children’s experiences of racism and anti-Iranian discrimination, shore up the pervasive “Aryan myth” in ways that are not only dissatisfying, but also distressing. This disjuncture relates to her second concept, racial loopholes, which she uses to analyze the “everyday contradictions and conflicts that emerge when a group’s legal racial categorization is inconsistent with its on-the-ground experience of racialization and deracialization” (5). Racial loopholes surface when Iranian Americans are victimized or discriminated against because of their group identity, but have no legal recourse to challenge it. While documenting the double bind of the racial loophole, Maghbouleh’s ethnography also shows its generative potential. She analyzes both failed legal challenges (chapter 2) and successful activist campaigns that have transformed how institutions “see” Iranian Americans and other Southwest Asian and North African students (chapter 4). This tension is woven throughout the book and provides examples of racialization from the top down and bottom up...