“What Kind of Migrant Are You?”—Iranian Migrants in the West, Racial Complexity and Myths of Belonging

Abstract

In this article, I analyse the complexity of the status of “migrant” in relation to myths of belonging and what we call “home”. I look at status labels that Iranian border-crossers embrace after migrating to the Global North and the ways in which they practice adaptability in accordance with the systemic and structural meanings associated with their migration status and their racial complexity. Ethnic and Racial labels adopted by Iranian migrants can include “Persian”, “Iranian”, “Middle Eastern”, “White”, or “Aryan”, and migration status labels range from “migrant” to “refugees and asylum seekers”, “exiles”, “expats” etc. Using a mixed approach of digital ethnographies, autoethnography and textual analysis, together with an intersectional and decolonial lens, I investigate the ways in which migration status such as skilled categories are associated with not only “fitting” into the neoliberal and capitalist systems of border crossing but also “blending” into racial hierarchies and maintaining class status post migration within White contexts. This article takes an empathetic approach to the lived experiences of minority and racially complex migrants and emphasises the epistemic value of their narratives and the ways in which these stories can inform us about the covert systemic structural and racially loaded bias that exists within migration economies of the Global North.

“In the World through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself”.

Frantz Fanon—Black Skin, White Masks.

1. Introduction

The idea of writing this paper came to me as part of my nightly browsing of social media as an ironically “citizen of the world” academic who is trying to disengage from reality. Having researched racial identities, migration and life writing narratives, I developed an obsession with short or long tweet threads (I still refuse to call it X) that were written by Iranian background migrants about their experience of migration and settlement in a new country. The most interesting part of every tweet was the comment section, where people engage in a debate, and I found the debates that involved race the most informative. I had had many of those debates myself as a “fresh of the boat” migrant—what I was called upon my arrival in Australia—with my new colleagues and friends. I had landed in academia, which positioned the conversations differently to the very normative stereotypes that already existed about Muslim/Middle Eastern background women. People knew where Iran was, they knew things about culture and religion, and they would excitedly tell you all about it, almost in a mini-lecture about who you are and what your background is. For instance, I was told that I was an atheist because I did not look like a typical Muslim woman or I was rich and privileged because how else could you be doing a PhD as an Iranian woman with no male guardian? I was also shown so many copies of Rumi that people had to show their command of the culture and literature as well. I started recognising that the atheist Rumi-reading academic intellectual version of me had nothing to do with the reality of my existence, but it was the “safe” version of me that was accepted in the white psyche. I was only allowed to be those things because that was safe for everyone around, and the cultural bonus would be a point for small talk. I realised if I were Muslim (that I was), I had to explain terrorism, child marriage in Islam, Sharia law, Islamic philosophy of justice, women’s rights, human rights, and so many more things. If I was just a normal Iranian woman who did not like Rumi or was not rich and privileged, I had to explain the Islamic Republic’s politics, Uranium and atomic bombs, Iran’s relations with Hamas and Hezbollah and Assad, compulsory Hijab and so on and so forth. These were the two options available, the two boxes for me to fit in and if I did not aspire to either, I had to create my own space or leave. I ended up writing a thesis on the lived experience of adaptability and strategic playfulness that border-crossing women practise to survive all these labels and boxes. And until today, I have still been navigating all these spaces.

In my previous research on border crossing identities, I looked at experiences of migration written as life-writing narratives and auto-fiction. I focused on the memoir boom post 9/11 and the political space in which, all of a sudden, there was so much interest in Muslim women’s “misery narratives”. I argued that despite all the hegemonic politicisation of these misery narratives and the agenda behind their production and publication, we still need to engage with them empathetically, as they are telling us about the structures and systems—in other words, the big picture of the global South in relation to the Global North. In this paper, however, I see the need to shift from published memoirs to social media platforms for a few reasons: Firstly, since covid, people’s daily engagement with social media has gone beyond just entertainment1. I have noticed a rise in documentation of daily life, diary writing, memoirs, and autofiction on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, which is a lot more than what used to be common. There has been so much community-building happening on social media due to lockdowns, and a lot of migrants, more specifically, have started sharing their stories on these platforms. Secondly, social media platforms are cheaper for attracting an audience than writing and publishing a full memoir. The neo-liberalisation of publishing houses has resulted in an expensive publishing process, and people’s affordability has decreased since covid due to the cost of living crisis. Thirdly, despite all the controversial views on hierarchies of social media participation, these platforms are still more “democratic” than the elitist engagement with published books. Since I am interested in “microhistories” and Lived experience narratives of migration, I have started this pilot study of social media accounts through hashtags and keyword searches. Digital Humanities (Fuchs 2021, pp. 1–440) is a fast-growing methodology that has assisted me in collecting and analysing data from social media.

I am prefacing this paper by acknowledging and arguing that the point of this paper is not to analyse and conclude anything about social media identities but it is to learn more about the structures of migration, border crossing, home tactics and gendered navigation of these systems. I am not assuming that these narratives are pure facts; I am treating them as “autofiction” (Smith and Watson 2010) and stories that people tell us about their lives. A section will be dedicated to the importance of reading these stories as what they are.

This paper engages with a few questions that are not limited to the Iranian diaspora per se but can engage us in a conversation about “in-betweenness”:

Are Iranian migrants white or not? How do they navigate existing on the brink of whiteness, and what do they tell each other about these experiences on social media? How do migrants get classed through the schemes they use when they enter Western countries? How does whiteness create classes of migrants? How does that intersect with cultural capital? To assimilate into the new culture and society, what games do migrants play? Which game is a strategic one, and which one is selling out?

I start this paper with some theoretical background on the concept of lived experience, the ways in which I read and analyse the experience and why I find it a useful concept and a teaching tool to understand the systems and structures that create identity categories, label and box migrants of colour and arguably enforce certain habitus (Bourdieu 1994) on them. I will explain this further in the next section. The analytical section of the paper will be dedicated to the experiences of Iranian migrants on Twitter who write both in Farsi and English. I have translated their tweets and comments to the best of my ability.

2. Conceptual Framework

I approach experience in this paper from a Realist Post-positivist perspective and explain below what that means and how that helps us analyse stories2. Satya Mohanty (1993, pp. 41–80) starts by critiquing the essentialist view of identity (I may call it traditionalist epistemologists’ view), which assigns the same identity to different members of a social group, considers it unchanging and based on shared experiences (ibid., p. 42). The problem with this view, according to Mohanty, is that “it ignores the historical changes and glosses over the internal differences within a group by privileging only the experiences that are common to everyone” (ibid., p. 42). Mohanty also critiques the postmodernists’ view that identities are all constructed and fabricated and, therefore, cannot bear any objective knowledge (ibid., p. 42). He defined experience as “the variety of ways humans process information” (ibid., p. 45). He proposes a naturalist-realist account of experience, which, if properly interpreted, can source objective knowledge with epistemic value. He proposes:

[I]nstead of conceiving identities as self-evidently based on the authentic experiences of members of a cultural or social group (the view that underlies identity politics) or alternatively conceiving identities as all equally unreal to the extent that they lay any claim to the real experiences of real people because experience is a radically mystifying term (this is the postmodernist alternative), we need to explore the possibility of a theoretical understanding of social and cultural identity in terms of objective social location. To do this, we need a conception of experience that is cognitivist, as I have been suggesting, a conception that will allow for both legitimate and illegitimate experience, enabling us to see experience as the source of both real knowledge and social mystification… Identities are theoretical constructions that enable us to read the world in specific ways. It is in this sense that they are valuable, and it suggests why we need to take their epistemic status very seriously. For it is in them, and through them, that we learn to define and reshape our values and our commitments, that we give texture and form to our collective futures.

(Mohanty 1993, pp. 54–55)

The best advantage of this approach for my paper is the fact that this realist reading of lived experience allows for both legitimate and illegitimate experiences. It acknowledges contradictory emotions, feelings and experiences as natural to human nature and does not try to impose pure logical interpretations of identities. Emotions in this approach are interpreted as something between “conscious reasoning” and “reflex-like instinctual responses to stimuli” (ibid., p. 49). Emotions have epistemic salience because they “fill the gaps between our instinctually driven desires on the one hand, and our fully developed reasoning faculties on the other” (ibid., p. 49). This is what we might experience every day in our judgements of the world, the people around us, the political decisions we have to make, and the phenomenological observations we make. Our decisions, experiences and definitions of identity are based on both logical interpretations of the world and our emotions. To wipe emotions off judgements does not make them objective. Our emotions have roots in our experience of the world and our embodied existence, and they affect our understanding of our social location and our relationalities. We need new definitions for the concept of objectivity to be able to explain this. We also need a decolonial approach to the concept of objectivity in order to address the universal lenses that we have embraced and based on, which have interpreted different phenomena so far. “Shifting the geographies of reason”, in Mignolo’s words, or “unveiling and enacting geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge” (Mignolo 2009, pp. 159–81) and embracing alternative Indigenous forms of knowing are important tools to rethink and revise and unlearn our previous self-knowledge and “objective” knowledge.

RPPT’s objectivity claim is not equal to neutrality. An objective analysis of experience, according to Mohanty (2001, pp. 803–33), is one that is open to subjective and theoretical biases, differences, interests and contradictions instead of treating those biases as counterproductive and limiting to interpretation and meaning-making processes, it takes them as “epistemically productive and useful” (ibid., p. 804). Therefore, objectivity in this context is not the same as the Foucauldian concept of objectivity, which is “ahistorical and impossible to attain” (ibid., p. 809). Our values are socially and historically embedded, so much so that they are open-ended and partial (ibid., p. 815). Mohanty’s post-positivist conception of “objectivity is a social achievement rather than an impossible dream of purity and transcendence; it is based on [his] evolving understanding of the sources and causes of various kinds of error” (Mohanty 1997, p. 147). Mohanty uses post-positivist objectivity to explain the value of cultural identities:

Cultural identities are good everyday instances of our deepest social biases; even when they are openly espoused, they are often based on submerged feelings and values, reflecting areas of both sensibility and judgment. They are neither to be dismissed as mere social constructions, and hence spurious, nor celebrated as our real unchanging essences in a heartless and changing world. We have the capacity to examine our social identities, considering them in light of our best understanding of other social facts and our other social relationships (Mohanty 1997, p. 201).

Thus, as Paula Moya also explains (Moya and Hames-Garcia 2000, p. 17), identities have epistemic significance and a good theory of identity does not push identities into a black-and-white binary, either dismissing or celebrating their value; however, it transcends beyond those biases and interests and through those contradictions, explains “where and why identities are problematic and where and why they are empowering” (ibid.).

The post-positivist approach to identity attempts to avoid the “overly homogenised notions of experience and assumptions of infallibility, problems that follow from unmediated approaches to knowledge” (Alcoff 2010, pp. 156–57). This approach does not argue for an absolute relation between identity and knowledge under any circumstance; however, it maintains the assumption that “identities might be relevant in any context but holds that the question of their relevance needs to be asked and evaluated in each context” (ibid., p. 157). This approach becomes plausible if identities are seen as “explanatory theories” rather than fundamental metaphysical posits (Mohanty 1993, p. 72) or along the lines of the concept of the hermeneutic horizon, which, according to Alcoff (2006), defies being imagined thorough mono-cultural hermeneutics and seeks to be imagined as “the heterogeneous amalgam of one’s affective relations to macro-historical events (such as slavery and genocide) along with cultural discourses both textual and visual, to which one has access, as well as one’s own individual and personal history and set of experiences” (Alcoff 2010, p. 159).

In her work, Linda Martin Alcoff (2010, pp. 156–57) also ties the post-positivist accounts of identity to experience, self-knowledge, social location, group identity and their epistemic salience. She argues:

Post-positivist approaches to the formulation of social identities are relatively new developments that were formed in reaction to the inadequacy of poststructuralist and postmodern deconstructions of identity, on the one hand, and the implausibility of Cartesian-based modernist accounts of the self, on the other (Moya and Hames-Garcia 2000). Neither the modernist nor the postmodernist theoretical traditions give sufficient scope for the role that an individual’s particular social identity plays in shaping their subjectivity, experience, or knowledge (Alcoff 2006; Siebers 2008). To remedy this, the metaphysics of post-positivist realism has been applied to the realm of identity theory in order to provide a mediated approach to experience and knowledge combined with a modified realism about identity (Mohanty 1997; Moya 2002; Alcoff 2010, pp. 144–62).

In the historiography of self-knowledge, she discusses that for Descartes, self-knowledge is the most reliable and resistant to doubt knowledge claim (Alcoff 2010, p. 147), and the Cartesian self-knowledge is considered to have overturned “authoritarian epistemologies of all sorts” (ibid., p. 148). Kant is believed to have had an “imaginative reconstruction of the role of the self in knowledge”. For Kant, “experience is always the product of perceptual content together with extra-perceptual concepts, such as causation, that are more imposed on the world than they are derived from it. This account substantially increased the human contribution to knowledge and thus the role of the self in not only perceiving but also constituting the true” (ibid., p. 148). However, Hegel renders a more radical opinion of self-knowledge, arguing that it is a contextualised, historically and culturally embedded self that mediates and constitutes knowledge (ibid., p. 148). Therefore, for Hegel and Kant, self-knowledge is a prerequisite for knowledge. However, for Foucault, selves are constructed through discursive practices, which suggests self-knowledge is elusive and the pursuit of self-knowledge is historically and culturally contingent. Thus, not only is the individual knowledge context-based but those very contexts are also determined by power/knowledge relations (ibid., p. 149). Critiquing Foucault’s idea of self-knowledge and drawing on the experiences surrounding women’s movements and slaves’ narratives, Alcoff (2010, p. 150) argues that self-knowledge does play an autonomous epistemic role in achieving knowledge and it is not overall socially constructed but has a “reserve of autonomous experience” (ibid., p. 150).

Epistemic Credibility of Experience

Linda Martin Alcoff and some other feminist epistemologists, such as Loraine Code and Lynn Hankinson, have argued for the importance of testimonial knowledge in relation to social identity and whether social identity is relevant to the epistemic credibility of testimonial knowledge (Alcoff 2001, pp. 53–80). For her, social identity is those “social markers of identity” that cultures employ, namely, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, class and religion (ibid., p. 59). Alcoff argues:

[testimonial] knowledge raises different sorts of epistemological questions than direct perceptions, questions not about perceptual reliability or perceptual memory but about trust and the basis of interpersonal judgement, credibility and epistemic reliability. We cannot often directly assess the processes by which the other on whom we are relying has obtained their knowledge. We cannot know with certainty how they obtained their knowledge, nor do we necessarily have the expertise to know what a reliable procedure would be for obtaining certain kinds of knowledge. Therefore, we must assess the other person in a more general way before we can afford them authority in any epistemic matters. Thus, knowledge based on the testimony of others requires assessing the epistemic reliability of those offering the testimony.

(Alcoff 2001, p. 59)

One of the questions that is raised by Alcoff and other post-positivists is whether social identity is a legitimate feature to take into account when assessing epistemic credibility (ibid., p. 60). Alcoff argues that social identity markers such as race and sex are not under one’s control and, therefore, cannot make any reference to a person’s agency or subjectivity unless to their status as adults (ibid., p. 60). She also maintains that categorising people based on their social identity, putting people in ethnic and racial categories and assessing their claims of epistemic credibility based on those categories is a feature of discrimination, as we are assuming that people with ‘similar’ backgrounds, race, gender, ethnicity etc., have similar experience as well. Therefore, identity politics, for Alcoff, could function as a continuation of oppression and not as amelioration (ibid., p. 61).

On that note, Satya Mohanty states that “social locations facilitate or inhibit knowledge by predisposing us to register and interpret information in certain ways. Our relation to social power produces forms of blindness just as it enables degrees of lucidity”. This statement has been interpreted by Alcoff as follows:

Identity does not determine one’s interpretation of facts, nor does it constitute fully formed perspectives, but it yields more than mere questions… identities operate as horizons from which certain aspects or layers of reality can be made visible. In stratified societies, differently identified individuals do not always have the same access to points of view or perpetual planes of observation. Two individuals may participate in the same event, but they may have access to different aspects of that event. Social identity operates then as a rough and fallible but useful indicator of differences in perpetual access.

(Alcoff 2001, p. 69)

Therefore, identities benefit from a complex process of being formed in a way that they are mediated by an individual’s agency, and they are not just experienced or perceived. Identity, as Alcoff maintains, is “not merely given to an individual or a group, but is also a way of inhabiting, interpreting, and working through, both collectively and individually” (ibid., p. 62). Through a hermeneutic account, Alcoff defines identities as constituted by “a horizon of foreknowledge within which experience is made meaningful and from which we perceive the world and act within it. Identities are thus not supposed to incorporate individual agency (ibid., p. 63).

Taking into account all the discussions above, we understand that social identities are relevant to a point, and they do embrace epistemic credibility; however, reducing identities to categories and groups would be as dangerous as not taking social identities into account. Alcoff’s interpretation of identities as horizons that bear knowledge would provide an efficient critique of identity politics and a good defence for the epistemic credibility of lived experience. Identities need to be seen as a process, not as fixed positions. As LaCapra points out, “identity formation is a matter of recognising and coming to terms with one’s subject positions, coordinating them, examining their compatibility or incompatibility, testing them, and either validating them by a process of reproduction and renewal or transforming them through questioning and related work on the self and in society” (LaCapra 2006, p. 238).

Chandra Mohanty—like Satya Mohanty, Alcoff, and Moya recognises the importance of the stories of experience and dismisses the “epistemological incorrectness” that has been assigned to experience by poststructuralists and positivists. They do not consider discourse analysis as the only approach applicable to reading narratives of experience. Instead, she focuses on those testimonies, life writings and microhistory accounts as subversive narratives that can contribute to the dominant macro narratives. Mohanty believes that underrepresented social subjects gain empowerment through the process of knowledge production, namely, writing testimonies and story-telling and those very social identities and their stories need to be studied in the context of both local and global discourses (Stone-Mediatore 1998, pp. 116–33). Furthermore, Mohanty reflects that daily lived experience is not only shaped by grand narratives and hegemonic discourses, but it also includes multiple forms of resistance to those very hegemonic discourses. As a result, lived experience narratives or microhistory narratives, in other words, can be narratives revisiting, rewriting, reinterpreting, and critiquing history, and the hegemonic narrative forms those histories. Mediator, in addressing the concept of experience in Mohanty’s scholarship, asserts:

Critical knowledge and political consciousness do not follow automatically from living in a marginalised social location; they develop only with the struggle against oppression when this struggle includes the work of remembering and narrating obscured experiences of resistance to, or tension with, social and cultural norms. Such experiences are not transparent or prior to language, for they contain contradictions and take shape in reaction to culturally given images and stories. Therefore, the narration of such an experience is no mere reporting of spontaneous consciousness. On the contrary, it involves rethinking and rearticulating obscured, often painful memories and forging connections between those memories and collective struggle. Mohanty’s insight is that this arduous and creative process of remembering, reprocessing, and reinterpreting lived experience in a collective context—and not the mere “substitution” of one interpretation for another”—transforms experience, enabling one to claim subjecthood and to identify with oppositional struggles.

(Stone-Mediatore 1998, p. 125)

In the discussions of subjecthood, the notion of agency is a hallmark issue for Mohanty and Mediatore in the context of marginal experience narratives. Mohanty considers the experience narratives as important means for marginalised people, especially Third World women, to express their political and epistemic agency. Political agency, according to her, is not only a product of the political struggles of an autonomous self but can be achieved through solidarities and alliances across class, race and national boundaries and in the context of discursive colonisation, which is not always political and could also be cultural3.

Moya points out the epistemological confusions in postmodernism, which miss out on the interconnections and relations between location, identity, experience, and construction of knowledge. Unlike Chela Sandoval (2000), a postmodernist Chicana feminist, Moya does not agree that all truth claims are “complicit with oppressive authoritarianism” because she believes that a realist theory of identity can allow us to see, verify and revise those truth claims. Moya considers this statement a denial of knowledge and believes that considering “the drive for truth” as always being a quest for “a brand of domination” (ibid., p. 14) as epistemic violence as this reduction of experience to an oppressive inclination takes away the epistemic value of experience and the truth value that exists in it. This critique is in line with my critique of the postcolonial scholarship on narratives of lived experience and the ways in which politics of publication and the neoliberal capitalism of the West have been represented as the pivotal reason for memoir publications. The realist theory gives me the opportunity to be critical of both the traditionalist epistemologists’ view of lived experience as the only source of knowledge and the postmodernists who question the truth value of experience and postcolonialists who give so much credit to the hegemonic discourses and consider narratives of experience as serving the politics of dominant imperial narratives. The Realist theory that I use in the study of lived experience narratives emphasises that our politics cannot be read through our experience because we interpret our experiences differently4. Alcoff’s concept of “hermeneutic horizon” is very useful when we approach identities and experience (Alcoff 2006, p. 9). As she argues, our experience is part of the hermeneutic horizon that we carry with us, and we use it to interpret our new experiences. Part of that experience is related to our group identity (race, ethnicity, gay/lesbian, etc.), part of it is related to our social location (class, for instance), and part of it is embodied (colour, disability, etc.). We cannot study identities using only hermeneutics; we need phenomenology to bring the body into the discussion because our visibility/invisibility and physical manifestations are crucial in shaping our experience.

Having discussed experience as a philosophical concept in this section, I will now take this paper into a discussion of daily experiences recorded in the form of “tweets”, which are one of the most informal modes of documenting daily lived experience. It is intentional that I take phenomenologies of racial experience into mobile cultures and digital ethnographies. This analysis is a way for me to trace the ways in which Eurocentric values and structures have also shaped migrants’ most informally documented diaries on social media, including the ways in which they racialise themselves.

3. Discussion

My understanding of race comes not only from my research and teaching background in critical race theory and whiteness studies. It also comes from my own lived experience of race as a woman of colour and my interactions with different communities of colour and white systems and structures around me. My understanding is not just led by my expertise, but also it is “felt knowledge” (Million 2009, pp. 53–76). In the process of data collection for this paper, I discovered many contradictory feelings about my own racial relations in the world and in my effect and empathy towards the stories that I was reading on social media. There is no simple explanation for why or how migrants of colour, Iranians in this context, racialise themselves. The racial labels they embrace are not fixed. They are contextual, intersectional, gendered, and oftentimes a product of their strategic “playfulness”, as Lugones would have called it (Lugones 1987, pp. 3–19; Ortega 2016). I will explain this using examples later.

In The Limits of Whiteness, Neda Maghbouleh (2017, p. 170) does a thorough analysis of Iranians’ relation to Whiteness and argues [Iranian Americans], “Caught in the chasm between formal ethno-racial invisibility and informal hypervisibility, work, love, and live through a core social paradox: Their everyday experiences of racialisation coexist with their legal, and in some cases, internal “whitewashing”5. Thus, it is not only Iranians themselves whitewashing their identities into something that they are not, but also their adoption of American politics of whiteness6, which plays upon hierarchies of colour and status, occurring in the binary of superior/inferior so much so, that the migrants themselves start using its terms and labels.

One of the most interesting threads I came across when researching Iranians and race was about the same questions Maghloubeh has researched in her book: “Are we white or not?”.

Some of the data collected for this section has come through searches using different keywords and hashtags in the advanced search on Twitter (X), such as #Iranians, #white #areIranianswhite, and #Aryan. Some of it has come through snowballing accounts that I had bookmarked over the years, as this project has been a work in progress. The discussions in this section are mostly dedicated to what a diverse range of users have to say about race, whiteness and Iranian identity. I analyse these quotations and build on what Maghbouleh calls “the limits of whiteness”. If a racial group is legally considered white in the US census but culturally and socially labelled as brown and Muslim, how do they navigate their personal and collective identity amongst political, legal and social contradictions?

One common argument amongst the users is around the race and racism problem of the Iranian diaspora. I came across this thread in multiple accounts that had either quoted or replied to each other, engaging in a conversation around whiteness. One Iranian user says:

@alexshams_

Jul 24, 2016

Replying to

@alexshams_

In #Iran diaspora, theory of “Aryan race” persists, combines with Islamophobia in effort to assimilate to Whiteness

Aryanism, Islamophobia are dangerous ideologies that fit directly with right-wing European extremism.

Ayran race theory has long, despicable history in #Iran and is often directly combined with Islamophobia

@WoeToChorazin

Dec 31, 2022

The Iranian diaspora in California has a racism problem that extends to the second and third generations. Diasporic communities think that aligning with right-wing hegemony will gain them acceptance in society. The reality is that white supremacy won’t include you.

@AssalRad

Sep 2, 2019

Some #Iranians disavow #Islam as an “#Arab” issue: 1. #Iran is a nation-state w/many ethnicities & religions 2. #Race is a social construct & Iranians are not “white” 3. Millions of Iranians practice Islam #ReligiousFreedom is crucial, so is not being #racist, practice both…The aryan idea was debunked after Nazism. “#Race” isn’t biological, it’s a social construct. I was born/raised in US & reminded daily that I’m not considered “white”. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of.

The above examples are just a selection of tweets that centre around “whiteness” and racism. To provide a bit of background to this context, a few terms and ideologies need to be explained.

Kashani-Sabet does a historiography of the name “Iran” coming from “Aryan” and links it to the dominant ideologies of the Reza Shah period, which centred on secularism, pre-Islamic nationalism, anti-Arabism and relations to Western civilisation (Kashani-Sabet 2011 p. 162). The so-called postcolonial discourse of the Pahlavi period was, in reality an assimilation discourse, i.e., highlighting the similarities between Iranian civilisation and Western civilisation and the unification of both and arguing that there has always been a cultural transaction between the two civilisations (Adibzadeh 1387, pp. 21–22).

The postcolonial discourse of the Pahlavi (pre-revolutionary era) starts with the identification of the “Iranian us” and the “Western them” and ends with the unification with the West and emphasising the common civilisational and racial roots which arise from European supremacist ideologies (Adibzadeh 1387, p. 25). “Nativism” (Boroujerdi 1996) as a response to Eurocentrism and colonialism7 takes a different meaning in the context of Iranian intellectualism during the Pahlavi period. The bigger “evil” or the colonial Other for the Iranian intellectual of that era is the Arab Muslim invaders whose influence not only shaped the Iranian Shiite ideology, but it was also the root of all so-called “backwardness” and “wretchedness” of the country. Therefore, nativism in Iran of that era is not necessarily a postcolonial response to Eurocentrism, but it is an Islamophobic, anti-Arab ideology that highlights and mythologises the secular values, human rights and liberatory discourses of pre-Islam Iran.

Ostovar (1392) argues that the Iranian identity has been influenced by three different symbolic spheres: First, the symbolic sphere of archaic (pre-Islam) Iran; second, The symbolic sphere of Shiite Islam (Post-Islam Iran); and third, the symbolic sphere of the Western modernity (Ostovar 1392).

Thus, as we can see, these nationalist nativist definitions of identity do not only exist in official/state-produced historical grand narratives, but they are also reproduced in microhistories documented in the virtual spaces. The racial understanding of Iranians of their identity extends from what Rad explains as vacillating between the Shiite Islamic Iranian identity that goes beyond the 1979 revolution and the opposite, which emphasises “the linguistic and racial ties to Europe and Aryanism, as well as the 2500-year monarchy and civilisation established by Cyrus the Great in the Persian Empire” (Rad 2022).

The latter identity is embraced by the group who identify as “white Iranians”, “Persians”, or “Aryans”. There are very mixed reactions to this racial identity on X. As seen above, some are very critical of such racial labels and directly link this whiteness to anti-Arab and Islamophobic ideas. It is as if embracing a white mask or the “white-out” bottle (Morsi 2017, p. 9) would deflect and stop all the racism that Iranians receive in “multicultural” Western countries. There are a plethora of responses to such claims around the “racist Iranian diaspora” on X, some of them mentioned below for exemplification:

@Lukaz_Meno

Dec 25, 2022

Most Iranian Diaspora have an inferiority complex and seek to distance themselves from their Islamic heritage in hopes of being accepted as White. You will never be white.

@morvaareed

Mar 30

Replying to

@still_oppressed

Racist diaspora out here unironically trying to inveigle people into believing the essential whiteness of Iranians. Meanwhile, the US changes its definition of racially and ethically “white” to exclude Middle Easterners by finally giving us our own check box on the 2030 census.

@Hussssayn

May 29

Dear Iranian diaspora. You’re not white.

There are many ways of interpreting this use of “white-out” by the Iranian diaspora. A lot of the interpretations make this a “diaspora” issue, a way of assimilation, integration, Islamophobia, anti-Arabism, Monarchism and the list goes on. What I would like to point out here is to take a step back and see these attempts at whitewashing as a “reaction”. I am hesitant to render a reductionist interpretation here, saying this is all a systemic issue and individuals are not to blame. Neither do I intend to defend such whitewashed reactions to racial vilification. What I argue here is that it is possible to also have an empathetic understanding towards “the reason” for such reactions that are labelled as racist and Islamophobic. By empathy, I do not mean to provide any excuses for racism and Islamophobia. I simply argue that from a realist post-positivist perspective, there is room for such contradictions in complex identities, as Alcoff argues, because people’s politics cannot be interpreted through their lived experience per se. People’s politics are also shaped by reactionary mechanisms which they develop towards white systems and structures that use identity politics to marginalise and box them into labels. Furthermore, in relation to Iranian identity, as discussed above, it is not just the white systems in the West. It is also the Western sanctions that make it extremely hard for Iranians to migrate anywhere. Once they are out, the need to dissociate from the Islamic state becomes a must. Otherwise, they are a threat, and this does not just arise from being Muslim but also from being from Iran. Hence, in order to have an “imaginary” safe life post-migration, not only do they have to strip themselves of their religious and cultural identity and assimilate hard, but they also need to detach themselves from their home country, which is associated with terrorism, gender apartheid, and many other orientalist traits.

Part of the adaptability mechanisms that racial identities from Iran develop is to self-orientalise. This self-orientalisation can take the form of using labels such as “Persian” rather than Iranian, as it is considered less threatening, more historical and less politicised in their view. It can also be emphasising the Aryan roots and the great Persian empire. As an example, these few tweets have responded to the previous ones accusing Iranians of “wanting to be white”:

@Artemish1991

Jun 18

Replying to

@azarthepersian

اینها نمیدونن ما به گذشته نژاد و هویت خودمون افتخار میکنیم. هزاران ساله با تمام مشکلات نیاکان ما این رسوم زیبا رو به ما رسوندند و ما ازشون پاسداری میکنیم. هویت ما جدای از اسلام و خاور میانه تعریف شده

Translate: They have no idea how proud we are of our race, history and identity. For thousands of years, our ancestors have carried these beautiful customs in spite of all difficulties, and we are now guarding them. Our identity is totally separate from Islam and the Middle East.

@Xerxes2nds

وایت ها تا همین دویست سال پیش آدمخوار بودن چرا باید بخوام وایت بشم؟ ما برده داری رو ۲۵۰۰ سال پیش ممنوع اعلام کردیم، اولین بیانیه حقوق بشر را ما منتشر کردیم، اولین تمدن دنیا در فلات ایران بوده افتخار از این بالاتر ؟

Translate: Up until two centuries ago, white people used to be cannibals. Why would I want to be white? We abolished slavery 2500 years ago, and we issued the first charter of human rights. The first civilisation in the world existed in the plateau of Iran, anything more glorious than this?

The first tweet rejects the accusation of Iranians “wanting to be white” using the nativist discourse, as explained earlier. To justify why they do not embrace whiteness, they need to aim higher than whiteness in the racial hierarchy, and the only way to claim that is through the nativist discourse of “us” being superior because of our “older civilisation”. They also claim a separate identity from other Middle Easterners and Muslims. On the first look, this reads like a tweet coming from someone who is rejecting geographical determinism and state-mandated religion as the factors shaping their identity. On a second look, however, one can also see that they are rejecting the monolithic identity that has been defined for all people of the Middle East as Arab and Muslim, undermining the religious, cultural and ethnic diversity in the region. It can be interpreted as a rejection of white boxes, whether legally (as in the US census) or culturally and socially, where there is no room for racially complex migrants to self-identify. It is a wobbly attempt at critiquing that whiteness is still used as a medium against which all others are racialised. For racially complex identities such as Middle Eastern background people who are legally considered as white but socially as brown and persecuted due to religious background, no clear boxes have been considered.

The second tweet also reproduces the same narratives around Persian civilisation as an avant-garde culture of human rights and dignity. The discourse around the Charter of Human Rights is reproduced by many monarchists who repeatedly refer to the charter and the abolition of slavery not only to separate themselves from and to critique the Human rights violations of the Islamic Republic of Iran but also to establish a nativist identity in the West, claiming superiority regarding liberal democratic rights.

There is a plethora of arguments around what “race” is to Iranians on Twitter. The statements below not only inform us about the versatility of the views and the confusion around how whiteness is measured, but they also tell us about the systems and structures that have shaped racial boxes for migrants of colour around the world. One user says:

@AryJeay

Apr 13, 2022

Sometimes I feel like I don’t belong anywhere. I’m too diaspora for Iranians and I’m too muslim and brown for Europeans… makes me sad sometimes but then I remember I belong to the children of Imam Hussein and that’s the only thing that matters.

There is a fascinating engagement under this thread by users from different ethnic backgrounds who share a “Shiite Muslim” identity. In their definition of belonging, they go beyond racial identity and call themselves “children of Imam Hussein”. Intersectionally speaking, it is their “faith” that creates a social community for them where they feel a form of belonging that transcends racial and ethnic boxes. This stands against the group who completely reject their religious identity as Muslims and claim Persian roots, as we discussed earlier. Another user comments:

@milkstrology

it is tone deaf to comment on an iranian person’s anything and inform them they are white… we weren’t white enough for America during muslim ban, we aren’t white enough unless it’s to erase our identity…

also I’m not denying white passing, etc but I’m saying if we don’t get treated as white people—you should perhaps… not…

@Phlegmbuoy

May 20, 2023

The fact that I haven’t been able to see my family in 7 years is a direct result of being “Persian” or Iranian or whatever. I don’t care about your dorky ass theoretical schemes of what counts as “white”. I haven’t been treated as white by anyone.

Whiteness in the last two tweets has been defined based on mobility and border-crossing. When the Muslim ban (Executive Order 13769, titled Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States) was issued, many Iranians, including myself, were affected in different ways. As the first tweet suggests, Iranians cannot be white if they are also included in the Muslim ban, which was to protect the American nation from terrorist, even if they strip their identity from anything that links them to the Iranian state, including their birth certificate, it is an adequate reason for them to be classified as a threat. The second tweet mentions that they have not been able to see their family for 7 years, and that is enough reason for them not to care about the categorisation of Iranians as white in the US census. To put this in context, most Iranian background students who apply for a student visa after receiving admission from American universities receive a single entry visa (Virtual Embassy Tehran 2024). As part of the US sanctions against the Iranian state, Iranian citizens who may have served compulsory military service are ineligible for a visa or will be put through an FBI clearance check process, which might take months or become an indefinite process. If and when they get cleared, only a single entry visa will be issued, which will allow them to go into the US, but they can not leave and visit their families. If they leave, they will need to apply for a visa again, which is not guaranteed to be granted. This mostly applies to research students and has been framed under sanction laws. The US virtual embassy in Iran explains the single visa entry category ending with this line: “Iran must cease its support for terrorism, including by using the IRGC to spread terror and violence across the Middle East and beyond”. Thus, the Iranian racial identity is not a simple and straightforward category defined and dictated only through legal categorisations and the American census. It intersects with many other political, social and cultural realities people live through in their migration and border-crossing process.

Apart from race as an identity marker, the channels through which Iranian migrants enter a Western country shape their class status. There are a few questions raised here: How do migrants get classed through the schemes they enter the US, Australia or other Western countries? How does whiteness create classes of migrants? How does that intersect with cultural capital? For example, if you enter a country as an asylum seeker or as a skilled migrant, are you put into different classes? How does one’s speciality intersect with racial categorisation?

When I had just migrated to Australia, there was a question that was repetitively asked by other fellow Iranians, and that was, “how did you come to Australia? Are you a boatie or a planeie? Your answer to that question would determine the rest of the conversation: how you’d be socially profiled, how you’d be placed in terms of class, and how your socioeconomic conditions would be speculated. Until recently, I had a lot of hatred for any questions sounding like this or along these lines, and when I started doing some field searches on twitter, I found many examples of this question or people’s documentation of their daily interactions amongst the diaspora communities, profiling them socio-economically. I had not realised the extent to which these questions were systemic and structural and not just a nosey ethnic fellow profiling me. Such questions can become even more violent inquiries when your political perspectives are speculated through your answers. It took a while to realise that all these words are coded politically, and a careless answer would not just end the conversation but can lead to traumatic interactions. On twitter, though, these interactions turn into long threads of interactions amongst users and accounts, some of which are real, and some could be trolls. However, what matters the most to me as a researcher in race studies is to trace the systems and structures that have shaped these interactions and intersectional relations to which a lot of the users are “reacting”. When talking about migration status, many Iranian users on Farsi Twitter cannot separate politics and class. In fact, it is not only regional politics but also global politics that determines where and how you land as a migrant. Furthermore, the systems of immigration designed by so-called liberal democracies have created categories, ranks, and linear hierarchies for these migrants who internalise such markers and rank themselves accordingly. I analyse some of the examples of such threads in this section

@profamirattaran

Jan 10, 2020

The aircraft that went down in Iran was full of doctors, scientists, architects, artists, professors, brilliant students—and children. This is what immigration brings you, or what war and sanctions cost you.

@Castagnaccio345

May 7

How is it that a qualified Iranian engineer asking for asylum is kept in detention under threat of deportation to Rwanda when the U.K. is crying out for qualified engineers? Are we totally and hopelessly stupid? @RishiSunak

@Kian15629094

Feb 9, 2019

All of the world must hear us and know, we are not useless.most of us trapped here with highest level of education/skills and best talents and… nobody wants leave his/her home countries other than that he/she be in danger. We have right to live in peace.#IranianRefugeesInTurkey

The systems of migration have been designed to attract skilled workers from the global south to the global north countries. Increasingly, I have seen comments and tweets such as @profamirattaran’s that critique this system, and migrants are aware of the ways in which neo-colonial structures function through wars and sanctions. The displacement under such structural disruptions is more subtle. The visa applicants are not displaced asylum seekers who illegally try to enter a country or stay in refugee camps for years to be permitted residence. They are indeed willful, skilled and competent packages that can enter a job market and are labelled as qualified. However, the socio-political and economic climate in their home country, Iran, in this instance, has driven them out and as some have indicated, if they had the option to stay and live a semi-decent life, they would have. Such migrants are not “displaced” in the traditional sense of the word, and they refuse to be labelled as asylum seekers due to all the connotations and politicised and racialised meanings of the term. On the other hand, as mentioned by @Castagnaccio345, there are qualified migrants who are kept in detention centres despite being qualified skilled workers since they have entered the UK illegally. @Kian15629094 also describes the state of many skilled, educated migrants who are illegal in Turkey. To contextualise this, many of these refugees are in Turkey waiting in long queues for asylum-seeking in Western countries such as Australia, the UK or the US. Despite being skilled and educated, and since many of them are undocumented and have illegally exited the borders of Iran, they cannot apply for migration through skilled channels, and they end up in asylum-seeking queues. What we see in many of these stories and testimonies is that having the skills does not necessarily translate into a skilled subclass of visas. Migrants are not classed through their real skills, but they are classed through arbitrary visa subclasses suggested by the Departments of Immigration, which assign social capital to them.

Migration systems create border-crossing experiences that have internalised the extractivist colonial norms and bear gratitude. The bureaucracy in the system is designed in such a way that the applicants have to focus on the steps one by one, while there is no time for critically thinking about the reasons for all the steps and assessments. The pointed systems of skill assessments in countries such as Australia or Canada evaluate one’s usefulness numerically, and the credit points drive the length of the process. Migrants go through skill assessments, English competence exams (even if they have a PhD degree in English literature from an Australian university), education assessment and finally, medical assessment. Once one passes through all these steps, they have greatly contributed to the costly neoliberal migration system and received a place of residence. The pointed evaluation system creates a competitive hierarchy amongst migrants through which they socialise and assess the status of one another. This is what @Gavaznab calls “elitism”:

@Gavaznab

Jul 14

این نگاه نخبه‌گرا به مهاجران ایرانی هم قابل تأمله. اینکه فکر می‌کنند همه با آیلتس فلان و تخصص و فروختن املاک‌شون از ایران رفتند و همه هم متخصص هستند و مشاغل کلیدی تو آفیس زیر کولر دارند و هیچ‌کس هم کارگر و غیر متخصص نیست و کار یدی نمی‌کنه

Translate: The elitist view towards Iranians migrants is worth contemplation. The fact that people think every migrant has had to get an IELTS exam done, be a specialist and have sold all their assets to leave Iran and they all have key office jobs under aircon in their host country and nobody is a blue collar worker, or a manual worker or unskilled.

@teresalisbon101

آخه اصلا کی گفته که نیروی متخصص مثلا مهندس و پزشک کارشون باارزش تر از کار یک کارگر ی پاکبانه. تو یک جامعه همون قدر که به پزشک نیاز داریم به کارگر هم نیاز داریم. بعد اینکه بدبختی یک آدم که با پژو و به سختی مهاجرت کرده واقعا درست نیست دست مایه ی تحقیر کردنش بشه

Translate: Who says the work of skilled workers such as engineers and medical practitioners is more worthy of a worker or a cleaner? In a society, we need as many blue collar workers as we need GPs. To humiliate someone because of the ways they have sought asylum or have migrated illegally is shameful.

The idea of belonging has been a concept that I have explored before in previous research (Shahbazi 2023, pp. 431–47). I have also been personally engaged with the concept, trying to explore the myth of home and belonging in relation to inclusionary and exclusionary practices of migration. When exploring the concept on Twitter, many different understandings and practices were recorded as daily attempts to integrate and line up with the status labels that migrants receive in their host countries.

In this section, I focus on a few examples that seem to be centering on adaptability practices by migrants.

Some questions can be raised here: to assimilate into the new culture and society, what games do migrants play? Which game is a strategic one, and which one is selling out? Some migrants describe the experience as an ontological crisis due to all the “uprooting” and “demythifying” that migrants have to do. Some examples below clarify this point:

@leiluniran

Aug 4, 2023

مهاجرت یک نوع خودکشی اجتماعی است که‌ تو گویی ما تجربه اش را به خودمان مدیونیم! و «چرا برنمی گردی بعدش»همانقدر احمقانه است،که ملامت میت از اینها تلخ تر و آنطور که من فهمیدم،مردمان آن جغرافیا حتی مهاجرت هم نمیکنند!در بهترین حالت در به در و خانه به دوش میشوند و همچنان درگیر #ایران

Migration is a social suicide the experience of which we also get blamed for. If we complain, we face “why don’t you go back where you come from?” and the bitter truth is that the blame comes from people that have never had to move countries.

The perception of migration in the West is the white experience of migration: one has a “choice”, and they moves willfully as a free individual. No complaints are accepted, no criticism is allowed, and one needs to be grateful for the opportunities they have been “granted”. For migrants of a complex background, such as Iranians, there is not much understanding of their context. The general public does not know what sanctions mean and how they have affected people’s lives. Border crossing, even in the form of skilled migration, is not always willful. It is a practice for survival even if such migrants are not categorised as “asylum seekers”. Seeking asylum has been associated with reasons such as wars, environmental pressures, poverty, to mention a few, and fleeing expansionist colonialism. ‘Sanctionality’ is one of the most conspicuous forms of coloniality of power, and its necropolitical nature (see Mbembe 2019) has been undermined as one of the driving forces of border crossing. The complex ways it affects people in their home country are hard to explain; for instance, officially and on paper, there should not be any sanctions on medicine and medical devices, but in reality, trade embargo and freezing assets are common forms of sanctions, medicine import is naturally affected, and therefore people’s lives are directly impacted. Migration for such groups does not always result in better living conditions, but as the above quote mentions, many such migrants become displaced and stranded in new countries as they do not meet the requirements of a perfect migrant, including medical checks.

There are a plethora of racial and religious stereotypes that migrants need to explain, and at times, they strategically bond over such “over-explanations” for integration purposes. Some also learn how to benefit from what I call “white pity”, which is mostly of a gendered nature and falls within white saviour narratives of the oppressed Muslim woman. Abu Lughod’s “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? (Abu-Lughod 2002, pp. 783–90) questions the Western missionary and colonial rhetoric on Muslim women using Afghan women as an example. Since 2002, when this article was originally published, the same colonial and white saviour rhetoric has shifted targets to Iranian women and their bodily autonomy rights. The overrepresentation of Iranian women’s rights in the mainstream Western media has paradoxically created a different image of “Muslim” women: the liberated anti-hijab Islamophobe who rejects any affiliation to the Islamic state of Iran. Through this rejection, these gendered bodies assimilate into the idea of the liberated “Muslim” woman and create a so-called secular sense of belonging in their Western host homes. When they are asked, “How come you are different to other Muslim women?” they explain their difference not only through a rejection of the religion they were born into but also a fictitious racial term ‘Persian’ which presumably links them to whiteness. On a social level, this link to such fictitious ancestral whiteness might create a sense of social integration for the migrant and simultaneously activate ‘White pity’ in the white person who is questioning the difference. However, on a structural and institutional level, such strategic playfulness, gratitude complex and wilful adaptability do not necessarily differentiate a “liberated” Muslim woman from the “oppressed” one. The same person who has well integrated socially in the neighbourhood and feels a strong sense of belonging to the new home might receive job rejections one after another because of the name that marks their identity as a problem (Adamovic and Leibbrandt 2023, pp. 1–13).

The testimonies below demonstrate the ways in which practices of “home tactics”8 can or cannot translate into a sense of belonging:

@shoharamme

Feb 8

جوابش طولانیه. ولی چیزی که توی پایان‌نامه‌ات بایو لحاظ کنی اینه که belonging الزاما مترادف با خوشحالی نیست. خیلی از belonging ممکنه از چیزهایی مثل عادت، رفاه، یا قد و بندهای شخصی بیاد. و الزاما تبدیل به رضایت نمیشه.

Belonging does not necessarily mean happiness. Belonging does not necessarily lead to satisfaction; it can however be affected by things such as habits, welfare, or personal boundaries.

@chaaabok

Feb 7

چند سال طول کشید اما باید گفت خیلی به شرایط کاری بستگی داره جالبه یه جایی اون وسطها خیلی خوب بود ولی وقتی دیدم اینها بسیار نژاد پرست مخفی دارند کمرنگ شد

It took me a few years to realise that it [belonging] depends on your work situation and at some point it was really good for me, but mid way, when I eventually saw the implicit racism in them it vanished.

@HazratGorba

Feb 7

من حس يك درخت بي زمين رو دارم راستش. اونجا حس خوبي نداشتم، اينجا هم يك شهروند درجه دو هستم در نتيجه خيلي فرقي بحالم نميكنه. عمده فرقش يك چيزايي مثل اينترنته كه خداقل با خونريزي دست ادم نميرسه

I feel like a tree without a land. I didn’t feel great back there [at home] and here I am a second class citizen so it does not really make a difference for me. The main difference is things such as “internet” which does not come through blood and sweat.

@Comfort77267488

Feb 7

من خیلی اوایل تلاش کردم که اینتگریت شم و خوش بین بودم که اینجا خونه منه. هر چی می گذره بیشتر می فهمم که خودم هم بخوام اونها من رو نمی پذیرند. البته باز هم یه این جامعه بیشتر از جامعه ایران احساس تعلق می کنم.

At first, I tried so hard to integrate and I was optimistic that this is going to be my home. The longer goes by, the more I realise that even if I wanted to be integrated, they would not accept me. Having said that, I still feel some sort of belonging here, more than I belong to the Iranian society.

Belonging, as a dynamic effect and a body of felt knowledge, results from existing on the margins of whiteness. Belonging is a “response” to whiteness. It is a form of adaptability, the extent of which is different from one person to another. As we see in the above examples, some define that as “satisfaction”, some as “work and financial situation”, and some as accessibility of bare minimum amenities such as “unfiltered internet”. However, from what I have observed in most of the examples I researched for this paper, belonging is never a static or a fixed effect.

4. Conclusions

A Realist post-positivist approach to experience and identity has been a liberating theoretical framework for me as a researcher and a knower. It has also equipped me with an empathetic approach to understanding the contradictory nature of our everyday politics and stories as migrants of colour. I was once asked by an academic fellow how I manage my “bias” in research, given that I research “experience”. My response was that the whole point of my research is to demonstrate that there is still knowledge in all these contradictions, or what the white Eurocentric philosophy has labelled as split or fragmented identities, and that is the very structure and system that has split them. In this paper also, I am simply arguing that we can experience a whole lot of contradictory emotions when reading any of these daily tweets and still empathise and understand why migrants of colour “react” to all the assimilatory structures that have been imposed on them. It is important to see the homogenising structures of migration and the false sense of unity that “multiculturalism” discourses indoctrinate. Whether a migrant calls themselves white or not does not really change anything about the reality of where and how they are placed in a system. It, however, changes the ways in which they imagine their positionality within the communities they frequent. It is also important to acknowledge that migrants’ adaptability and home tactics strategies are their strategic playfulness and, at times, their survival mechanism to protect themselves from racial vilification, meanwhile that they will probably never be equal in a “multicultural” host home.