Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
The Asian American / Asian Research Institute’s CUNY Faculty Research Support Program is designed to support CUNY faculty to conduct research that seeks to answer critical questions about Asian American and Asian diasporic communities.
In this talk, based on her new book The Limits of Whiteness (2017, Stanford University Press), sociologist Neda Maghbouleh shares the under-theorized and sometimes heartbreaking story of how Iranian American young adults and teenagers move across a white/not-white color line. By contextualizing her ethnographic data with a century’s worth of neglected historical and legal evidence, she offers new evidence for how a “white” American immigrant group might become “brown,” and what such a transformation says about race in North America today.