who counts as white?
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One of the first things I learnt after moving to Quebec and researching on its history was the relation between francophone/anglophone tensions and whiteness. I read the poem "Speak White" by Michèle Lalonde, where she writes about the discrimination faced by francophone Canadians in the 60s-70s at the hands of English-speaking Canadians. Many anglophones would yell at French speakers to "speak white" if they were heard speaking in French - which definitely complicated the notions I had of race and whiteness, since I would not think of francophone Quebecois people as non-white today. I think this is something seen regularly throughout history, where groups of minorities who are previously othered and racialised somehow "become" white over time. Some examples are Irish people (I'm thinking of the scene in Bend It Like Beckham when Joe tells Jess he understands racism because he's Irish, which was accurate during the time period, but many people find laughable now), many Eastern-European minorities, and Jewish people. I think it's interesting how conceptions of whiteness develop over time from just including English-speaking Christians to other ethnic backgrounds as well.
After reading Maghbouleh's article, I found that Iranians' relationship with whiteness is quite different to these examples. As she explains, the belief that Iranians are the "true Aryans" or the "first white people" comes from a nationalist project after the Persian Empire was losing its territories (Maghbouleh 54). The main goal of this belief is to separate Iranians from other Arab identities and link Persian history with European identities, "through the figure of the Aryan" (Maghbouleh 55). By giving examples of older Iranian immigrants in America who insist on a kind of "racial purity" upheld by their people, Maghbouleh illustrates the anti-Arab and Eurocentric beliefs upheld by the wider Iranian diaspora even today (55-56). This kind of "off-whiteness," where the racialised group insists upon its own proximity to whiteness almost as a survival tactic, is not the same as other previously racialised groups becoming assimilated into whiteness. Many white people still view Iranians as non-white from an outsider perspective, while this is not the case for my previous examples of the Irish or Eastern-Europeans.