ABSTRACT
This piece is written as a beginning exploration of the experience of intersectionality in my life. I am the daughter of Iraqi-Iranian Jewish parents who immigrated to the United States in 1963. My parents came to the United States during the period when the Shah was in power and US relations with Iran were much different than they are now. My family is Iraqi and Iranian Jews. This is a fact that somehow surprises people in the United States.This surprise gives me pause. What is it about the perception of the Middle East that makes this ethnic configuration so difficult for people to perceive? Most likely it is the layers of Orientalism (Said, 1978) that are present in popular and high-culture textual representations of the Middle East (Shaheen, 2009). Even I make reference to stereotypical pop culture images of “the place I have come from” when trying to understand and place my cultural understanding and image of myself. Orientalism, alongside other racial and ethnic stereotyping, has been present for a long time in the United States (Prashad, 2000; Shaheen, 2009). This ongoing activity has been compounded by the current wave of prejudice against the group of people put together under the category of “Arab” in the United States. While more concrete forms of prejudice occur, in the form of unnecessary detentions, racial profiling, and so on (Bayoumi, 2008), the textual forms created by the mass media have produced a newer meaning of the racialization on the “Arab” body, affecting the mapping and configurations of race constructs in the United States.
