Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017)

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, high-income 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.1