The Taser Incident and Race

I assume that if you are living in the United States you must have heard of the Taser Incident at UCLA. If you are not, you can start here or here.

Basically, what happened was that an Iranian-American student at UCLA, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, was handcuffed and tased repeatedly when he failed to produce his student ID card during an ID check at the university library. I agree with those who think the police overstepped their authority.

When the news initially broke, there was nary a mention of Tabatabainejad's Iranian background. However, this fact has become more and more prominent in later developments, as you can see from the second link above. Muslim student organizations were at the forefront of the demonstrations. In the comments section of that news piece, people claim that Tabatabainejad was targeted because he was "brown" and that he was resisting because he also thought so himself. He supposedly urged the police officers to ask Caucasian students to produce IDs as well, and did not appreciate being singled out.

Now, I don't know anything about the people involved in this incident, but an Iranian-American claiming that he is "brown", if true, would strike me as a very interesting development. I've never met any Iranians (and this is especially true for the Iranians one encounters in the US) who show any sense of identification with the "brown" community. To the contrary, they strongly identify as white (Iranian=Aryan).

This is not to say that Tabatabainejad did not identify himself as brown or that he was not targeted because of his ethnicity. I do not know what happened there. Yet all of this makes me think, once again, of how race is so strongly socially constructed. Race is supposedly about physical appearance, yet it is really about class and religion and culture. And not even those as they are measured objectively, but rather by our perceptions and stereotypes around those categories.

Here we have a person, who I would guess (and I apologize if I am wrong), could be French if one were to go by looks, who probably comes from a family who fled Iran after the Islamic revolution, who probably is relatively affluent and probably not particularly religious. Yet because of 9/11 he is now identifying and/or being identified as an Other.

Observing this phenomenon is tricky in itself, because there is a danger that the observation itself sounds like a judgment on being Brown or an Other. Growing up in Turkey, I did not think much about race, but if someone asked me I would have identified as white. I think most Turks would. Yet since coming to the States, I have been called exotic (I assure you there is nothing remotely exotic about my looks) and friends have commented, jokingly, on the coolness factor of hanging out with a nonwhite person. If confonted with such a comment, there is an urge there to say "But I am white" and having someone else decide what race I am feels like a denial of my own judgment and experience. On the other hand, any kind of protest makes it sound as if there is something wrong with not being white, which there is not. So one keeps quiet and tries to rejoice in the fact that one is not completely blind to these power dynamics.