Eroded Crutches: Ethnic Pride and Its Discontents

In 1988, my family fled Iran to seek political asylum in Canada. I was 5 years old. When we arrived, we did what all desperate immigrants from war-torn countries do: we found our ethnic enclave and surrounded ourselves in it as much as possible to help ease the transition.

During these years, I thought I was the default, the norm. That is to say, I thought I was white.

Author at age 5, with family (Tehran, 1988).

All of my friends were Iranian. We ate the same food, pronounced each others names correctly, and our parents spoke the same language, making staying out past 9pm in the summer a very welcomed possibility. I was accustomed to having enough people from my parent’s part of the world in close proximity that I never had to deal with any racial tensions at all. All of the other ethnic groups like the Tamils, Latinos and Jamaicans at school did the same. Everything fit.

My ethnic identity wasn’t something I thought much about. That was until we moved from Scarborough, Ontario to Burnaby, British Columbia when I was 11 years old. Suddenly, my school had only one other Iranian family amidst a sea of white and Chinese kids.

I was bullied frequently. Sometimes because a popular girl liked me for a week, but mostly it was out of sheer ignorant ridicule based on some accusation that I ate “weird brown sauce” called curry that “smelled funny”. I didn’t understand at first, but now I knew I was different.

While watching The Simpsons with friends, I remember recoiling when Apu would come on the screen, bracing myself for any lazy insults meant to hurt me. It was confusing because I didn’t really know anything about Indian culture. I just knew it wasn’t desirable to be associated with it.

I didn’t even know what curry was exactly, even though within my own Iranian culture, one of the worst things to be called is a Hindu, or a Paki — which was almost as bad as being mistaken for an Arab. Interesting to see how much flagrant accusations of racism mainstream culture generously directs to whites, while completely looking the other way when “people of colour” cruelly, and quite openly do it to each other.

There’s a scene in Casino where Joe Pesci’s goon bought blackmarket jewelry from ‘sand-niggers’ that spoke Farsi. So, I thought I was white and now they say I’m black? Further confusion ensued. The occasional rerun of a cheesy Chuck Norris film with its herds of shrieking, angry villains with mascara eyes and bushy eyebrows in rags toting AK-47s didn’t offer up much breathing room either. When I reminisce on it now, I think, well at least they got their geography less wrong. Progress!

Author at age 14 (Burnaby, BC, Canada).

I was always smaller than the other kids and kept my defences up by being a sharp-tongued little prick. This usually worked but when it came to racial jokes from whites I found myself without my usual silencing comebacks. With the Chinese bullies it was easier, but to the whites, what would I say in response? “Hey Brody, you look just like that Home Alone kid that everyone wants to be like!” Let’s just say it didn’t stick.

I didn’t have the tools at that time to know how to deal with it appropriately. No other kid looked like me, and I didn’t want to trouble my overworked parents with this, who were too busy trying their best to inch out of welfare; not that I thought they could understand or do anything about it.

This was a particularly lonely part of my childhood because I didn’t have Amir, Kianoush or Soroush to validate that which I couldn’t change about myself. Years passed, and I brooded.

Age 11, at a party (Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, 1994).

As I got older, I became attracted to the more ethnocentric elements of my culture and felt warm nestled within it after years of feeling out in the cold. As a shortcut to show strength, or at least to not appear weak, I too learned to play the “race card”, which at first, I used as a defence.

In my childhood and later on in my more formative years, I saw how my ethnicity was used as a weapon to make me feel small, or at least to make someone else feel big — without really earning it. It was a game about power and I quickly learned how to perform within my own version of it, but this time I placed myself at the top of yet another racial hierarchy. Without realizing it, I was exercising my own version of racism.

Like many boys, I was attracted to stories about gangs, violence and crime. I even sold mushrooms and pot throughout high school, and ended up getting suspended for it. My marijuana-enhanced fantasies of being strong and dangerous felt more real when we visited cousins in Los Angeles.

They told me stories about ethno-criminal gangs like Persian Pride and I revelled in it because their perceived strength and unity were based on the ethnic group that I was born into. I also loved to hear stories about how we had the largest empire on the planet and just how many Iranian-Americans were in NASA. I became addicted to the sugar high of pride that I felt from achievements that weren’t mine.

It’s understandable to want to be proud of your heritage, especially when you are a minority and don’t necessarily see it reflected back within the culture that you live in. But there is a reason why pride is a deadly sin; partly because it usually doesn’t end with an innocent and private fondness of a flag or a salute to a symbolic dead president that resembles that beloved grandfather, which you’ve never met. It can easily turn into a dishonest distortion of history, to a version that feels better.

Visiting cousins at age 12 (Los Angeles, 1995).

An example of this drunk dad-level conspiracy theory thinking that I parroted was the notion that the 1979 Islamic Revolution of Iran was actually a Western plot to undermine Iran’s sovereignty and development. This line of thinking comes part and parcel with ethnic pride in that any criticism or shortfalls of one’s identity are quickly blamed on external factors. A lie such as this, becomes more effective and more believable when it is built upon a related truth. American institutions did secretly interfere with the democratic process of many sovereign nations, including Iran throughout the 20th century for their own interests and did it quite successfully such as Project Fat Fucker in (Eqypt, 1952), Operation Brother Sam (Brazil, 1961–4), the Anti-PKI Massacres (Indonesia, 1965–7), and many, many more littered throughout the century.

Before Iran became an Islamic Republic, it was governed by a monarchy. Shah Pahlavi was reinstated as the monarch in Operation Ajax that ousted the democratically-elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. Mossadegh ran on a platform that promised to nationalize the oil industry and remove it from the imperialist powers of America and Britain. The Iranian people felt betrayed by a Westernized puppet-king in a golden cape, making the right-wing populist cry of the Islamist, Khomeini all too appealing. This reactionary stance, amongst many other factors, made them more susceptible to fall into his ideological-trap of believing that a theocratic rule of law was best for the sovereign of the country.

History is complicated and it is the work of shallow ideologues and conspiracy theorists to attempt to distill it down to a bite-size version of reality designed to extinguish shame and promote a collective paper-tiger pride, rather than to develop one’s true actualization and possibly even healing.

My campaign of resentment and revenge raged on at full speed. I began to turn down the volume on Iran’s Islamic history and amplified its Western-friendly qualities such as paisleys, pistachios and pretty eyes. I referred to myself as Persian rather than Iranian, yet I still reminded everyone within earshot that the word Iran comes from Aryan — a silly and uneducated attempt at the whitening of my own culture. One can easily come across this same babble on white supremacy forums online.

Blaming America for the backwards nature of my home country felt right to the resentful teenager I used to be. As I grew older and proclaimed my grievances with conviction, my lefty friends never contradicted me because I was railing against the man. I was punching up. Who needs facts, when you have a nodding, guilt-ridden white ally to vent to? It was like a woke masturbation session that offered a symbiotic catharsis light years away from the distaste of guilt and shame.

Race-based pride is birthed from the absence of a strong centre, and feeds on the impulses of the ego. I began to build my own ideological world that felt safe and reassuring; and I connected with other like-minded people that were playing the same game. It felt good but I didn’t stop there. It turned from a subconscious and desperate defence against accusations that what I am is somehow sub-human, into a socially-accepted, anti-white rhetoric that’s ironically encouraged by the liberal mainstream and many of my urban white friends.

When I got older, I moved to Montreal for university where I seized opportunities that built up my confidence and identity in a meaningful way. After that I taught English in Brazil for several years and picked up Portuguese and Spanish. I met people from around the world, which helped me to better situate and understand what Canadian identity was and how much of it is actually quite near and dear to me.

Life became too interesting, thrilling and complex in and of itself to pore over an insubstantial dichotomy that effectively pitted ethnic groups against each other, and left me feeling empty in the end.

With the little tools I had at that time, and fuelled by a strange brew of ego and resentment, I was attempting to conquer my childhood foes by playing their game better than they did.

But I’ve learned that the key to a deeper, more meaningful and sustainable truth is not to get trapped in playing that game at all.

I wanted to share this very personal and vulnerable story to offer a rationale as to why a youth would find solace in anti-white rhetoric, which is usually accompanied by a peculiarly comfortable victimhood mentality, and a hint of state-sponsored, weaponized sensitivity. Such a deadly cocktail is one of the more divisive and unhelpful trends found in the contemporary social justice worldview.

This story also serves as a memoir for a past version of myself, and for any young readers that may relate to my experiences in youth, whether they be a white Dutch girl in a Muslim neighbourhood or a Syrian refugee boy wrapped in a donated oversized parka in the Canadian hinterland.

It was also written for the trolling “free speech warrior” who is more interested in “owning the libs” than bridging the gap.

If you consider yourself a free-speech advocate and classic liberal who abhors identity politics, please think of my story before you launch into your next fusillade. The people to whom you are directing your lectures and barbs usually are in some stage of the cycle I have described regarding my own life. And the feeling of being attacked by the outside world is what made anti-white ethnic pride so attractive to them in the first place.