Book Review: Tehranian, Whitewashed
Mar. 3rd, 2010 10:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ajnabiehWhitewashed: America's Invisible Middle Eastern Minority, by John Tehranian
One of the great ironies of the experiences of Arabs and other Middle Easterners in the US is that, legally, they're white. Yes, that's right: persons from the Middle East and North Africa are considered white by law, yet pretty much nowhere else in American society. The reasons why lie in the early history of Arab immigration to the US at the turn of the 20th century, the politics of migration and citizenship before the 1924 Immigration Act, and the political project of assimilation that was key to immigrant incorporation at the time; their effects remain, despite the fact that the reality of being Arab-American has changed over the past hundred years. This book begins with Tehranian's personal story of not receiving a job offer, and being told it was for diversity's sake: they wouldn't give the position to a white man. "Thats not what they say at the airport," he responded.
This book was recommended to me by a scholar of Middle Eastern American communities, who said he thought it represented a new perspective on the question of race and Middle Easterners in the US. So I eagerly picked it up at my next library run (hey, I don't invest until I'm sure). Reading it, I could see the appeal; Whitewashed is clearly written, concise, and covers a great deal of material in a short span of pages. It's a book that is accessible enough for a lay person, and includes a large number of personal anecdotes, yet it also uses the very productive lens of critical race theory, which I don't see much of in the literature.
The problem with the book, as far as I can see, lies in that term: Middle Easterner. Tehranian wants to talk about more than just Arabs; he wants to explicitly include other Middle Eastern communities, especially his own Iranian and Armenian communities, in the analysis. It's a goal I understand and support, but I just don't think he pulls it off. The experiences of different Middle Eastern communities have a lot in common. However, most of the attempts to treat them at once end up prioritizing one group over another, or distorting the various experiences to fit a common narrative. There are days I barely think the Arab-American community is a coherent enough whole to study, given the splits along the lines of religion, class, national origin and immigration status. I have even less hope for a single unit that includes Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Kurds, Chaldeans, Armenians, and others.
While Tehranian hits the highlights of the literature on Arab-Americans, all of his anecdotes but one, and many of his other examples come from Iranians. (In part, this is probably a function of the fact that Arab-Americans are the most written about Middle Eastern minority group in the US.) I'm glad to see his attention to Iranians, but frustrated at the disconnect between the regional focus of the title and literature, and the single community focus of the narrative. It strikes me that Tehranian, commendably, wanted to write a book about discrimination against Iranians, but didn't want to do so without referencing the similar ways in which other Middle Eastern groups experience discrimination. But I think the book goes about that tactic poorly. Rather than assuming that all 'Middle Eastern' experiences are the same, and make that argument with Arab-American scholarship and Iranian-American anecdote, why not write about the Iranian-American experience, in all of its religious and sub-identity diversity (of which there is much), making explicit and repeated connections to the existing literature on Arab-Americans where relevant?
One other caveat. I think Whitewashed is probably best for the lay reader. For someone trying to specialize in Middle Eastern Americans, there's simply too much other literature out there that does the same thing in greater depth. For race and racialisation, there Sara Gualtieri and the edited volume by Jamal and Naber; for pop culture, there's Jack Shaheen; for governmental profiling, there's Bakalian and Bozorgmehr. In other words, there's a ton of other literature on these questions; only in the integration of critical race theory, in particular the interesting use of the concept 'covering,' is there anything that's not available elsewhere.
Nevertheless, for a novice interested in these questions, or particularly interested in an Iranian version of these common experiences or critical race theory, Whitewashed is a smartly written read. Plus, there's a Beverly Hills 90120 joke, which I won't spoil. How could you not like that?
(Total aside: for folks who are interested in digital culture and law (as I know so many DW-ers are), Tehranian's next book, Infringement Nation, looks really interesting; here is a publicly available paper by him with the same title. Key quote from the abstract: "We are, in short, a nation of copyright infringers.")
One of the great ironies of the experiences of Arabs and other Middle Easterners in the US is that, legally, they're white. Yes, that's right: persons from the Middle East and North Africa are considered white by law, yet pretty much nowhere else in American society. The reasons why lie in the early history of Arab immigration to the US at the turn of the 20th century, the politics of migration and citizenship before the 1924 Immigration Act, and the political project of assimilation that was key to immigrant incorporation at the time; their effects remain, despite the fact that the reality of being Arab-American has changed over the past hundred years. This book begins with Tehranian's personal story of not receiving a job offer, and being told it was for diversity's sake: they wouldn't give the position to a white man. "Thats not what they say at the airport," he responded.
This book was recommended to me by a scholar of Middle Eastern American communities, who said he thought it represented a new perspective on the question of race and Middle Easterners in the US. So I eagerly picked it up at my next library run (hey, I don't invest until I'm sure). Reading it, I could see the appeal; Whitewashed is clearly written, concise, and covers a great deal of material in a short span of pages. It's a book that is accessible enough for a lay person, and includes a large number of personal anecdotes, yet it also uses the very productive lens of critical race theory, which I don't see much of in the literature.
The problem with the book, as far as I can see, lies in that term: Middle Easterner. Tehranian wants to talk about more than just Arabs; he wants to explicitly include other Middle Eastern communities, especially his own Iranian and Armenian communities, in the analysis. It's a goal I understand and support, but I just don't think he pulls it off. The experiences of different Middle Eastern communities have a lot in common. However, most of the attempts to treat them at once end up prioritizing one group over another, or distorting the various experiences to fit a common narrative. There are days I barely think the Arab-American community is a coherent enough whole to study, given the splits along the lines of religion, class, national origin and immigration status. I have even less hope for a single unit that includes Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Kurds, Chaldeans, Armenians, and others.
While Tehranian hits the highlights of the literature on Arab-Americans, all of his anecdotes but one, and many of his other examples come from Iranians. (In part, this is probably a function of the fact that Arab-Americans are the most written about Middle Eastern minority group in the US.) I'm glad to see his attention to Iranians, but frustrated at the disconnect between the regional focus of the title and literature, and the single community focus of the narrative. It strikes me that Tehranian, commendably, wanted to write a book about discrimination against Iranians, but didn't want to do so without referencing the similar ways in which other Middle Eastern groups experience discrimination. But I think the book goes about that tactic poorly. Rather than assuming that all 'Middle Eastern' experiences are the same, and make that argument with Arab-American scholarship and Iranian-American anecdote, why not write about the Iranian-American experience, in all of its religious and sub-identity diversity (of which there is much), making explicit and repeated connections to the existing literature on Arab-Americans where relevant?
One other caveat. I think Whitewashed is probably best for the lay reader. For someone trying to specialize in Middle Eastern Americans, there's simply too much other literature out there that does the same thing in greater depth. For race and racialisation, there Sara Gualtieri and the edited volume by Jamal and Naber; for pop culture, there's Jack Shaheen; for governmental profiling, there's Bakalian and Bozorgmehr. In other words, there's a ton of other literature on these questions; only in the integration of critical race theory, in particular the interesting use of the concept 'covering,' is there anything that's not available elsewhere.
Nevertheless, for a novice interested in these questions, or particularly interested in an Iranian version of these common experiences or critical race theory, Whitewashed is a smartly written read. Plus, there's a Beverly Hills 90120 joke, which I won't spoil. How could you not like that?
(Total aside: for folks who are interested in digital culture and law (as I know so many DW-ers are), Tehranian's next book, Infringement Nation, looks really interesting; here is a publicly available paper by him with the same title. Key quote from the abstract: "We are, in short, a nation of copyright infringers.")