Abstract
ABSTRACT In the light of Trump-era American racial politics, Iranian Americans in rural Kentucky have adeptly rearticulated their racial positionings by navigating the intricate interplay of discourses on race. Through this process, they have challenged dominant U.S. discourses on race generated by the political dynamics since the 1970s, casting doubt upon the Whiteness of Middle Easterners. Despite their racial ambiguity between the U.S. Census and post-9/11 lived realities, Iranians in rural Kentucky not only feel that they belong in the U.S. but also lay claim to the mantle of Whiteness through context-specific strategies of deracialization crafted in the temporal and spatial milieu of rural Kentucky. This article sheds light on the contextual strategies Iranian Americans have employed to articulate, contest, and reproduce the dominant discourses to secure their racial positioning, capitalizing not only on their class privileges but also on some of their White-associated phenotypes, remnants of their perceived ‘Indo-European’ lineage.
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