For many Iranian-American families, this moment has us sick and terrified
This isn’t just detached political analysis and smug Twitter takes to us. It is about a lifetime of experience and broken US foreign policy.
Yesterday was my dad’s 58th birthday. In 1979 he immigrated to the US from Tehran, in large part because of political upheaval seeded by the US in Iran. His only common language with other high schoolers in America was soccer. He once made his way to a pay phone in an auto shop junkyard with fistfuls of change to place a call home, the only kind of contact he’d have with our Tehran family for months at a time.
My father lived with a student exchange family in Rochester, Minnesota. He met my mom, a Korean adoptee relocated to Owatonna, Minnesota, at community college. They transferred to the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, got married and had me.
My three earliest political memories are the Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone dying in a plane crash, the Clinton impeachment proceedings, and the most consequential event for the rest of my life as an Iranian-American teen with a Muslim-sounding name: 11 September 2001.
On TV, Dick Cheney and George W Bush talked about “weapons of mass destruction”, “pre-emptive strikes”, and the “axis of evil”. They named Iran, Iraq and North Korea the enemies of the free world. My friends joked that I was two parts Axis of Evil, even though we all knew my mom was from South Korea, not North Korea. In retrospect, these jokes were just a sad way to cope with our anxiety. It felt like the country my family had fled to had declared war on us.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ushered in a new era of hell and social dislocation for any black or brown kid with a Muslim-sounding name. My friends and I were profiled, harassed, and interrogated, in and out of school. Our parents were bullied and blamed at work, in public, on the news and in casual conversations with the white parents of their kids’ friends.
For many everyday Iranian-Americans, 9/11 also reactivated an old traumatic fear of being blamed and villainized by Americans for things the Iranian regime did. Many of them dealt with it by receding from politics in fear.
Yet a generation of us – their kids – ran headlong into it all instead.
Y esterday was my dad’s 58th birthday. In 1979 he immigrated to the US from Tehran, in large part because of political upheaval seeded by the US in Iran. His only common language with other high schoolers in America was soccer. He once made his way to a pay phone in an auto shop junkyard with fistfuls of change to place a call home, the only kind of contact he’d have with our Tehran family for months at a time.
My father lived with a student exchange family in Rochester, Minnesota. He met my mom, a Korean adoptee relocated to Owatonna, Minnesota, at community college. They transferred to the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, got married and had me.
My three earliest political memories are the Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone dying in a plane crash, the Clinton impeachment proceedings, and the most consequential event for the rest of my life as an Iranian-American teen with a Muslim-sounding name: 11 September 2001.
On TV, Dick Cheney and George W Bush talked about “weapons of mass destruction”, “pre-emptive strikes”, and the “axis of evil”. They named Iran, Iraq and North Korea the enemies of the free world. My friends joked that I was two parts Axis of Evil, even though we all knew my mom was from South Korea, not North Korea. In retrospect, these jokes were just a sad way to cope with our anxiety. It felt like the country my family had fled to had declared war on us.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ushered in a new era of hell and social dislocation for any black or brown kid with a Muslim-sounding name. My friends and I were profiled, harassed, and interrogated, in and out of school. Our parents were bullied and blamed at work, in public, on the news and in casual conversations with the white parents of their kids’ friends.
For many everyday Iranian-Americans, 9/11 also reactivated an old traumatic fear of being blamed and villainized by Americans for things the Iranian regime did. Many of them dealt with it by receding from politics in fear.
Yet a generation of us – their kids – ran headlong into it all instead.
I became one of many second-generation Persian kids who took the haze of Islamophobia and latent white nationalism that came to hang over our lives and did something with it. Today, the Iranian-American friends in my peer generation are organizers, activists, artists, policy aides and political candidates. They fight for voting rights, criminal justice reform, climate action, healthcare access, abortion rights and more.
We are a voice for the generation before us, who don’t always feel like they can speak but gave everything for their children to have the chance to. We see the fearful messages between our friends and family back home or here every time something happens that could instigate a war. We fight for an American democracy that doesn’t seem to acknowledge us; doesn’t seem to even understand itself, let alone our people.
Childhood me didn’t know that in my lifetime I’d fight a Muslim travel ban, battle Iranian family separation, watch a historic Iran deal be created that was decades in the making, then be reneged on by the US one administration later. In 2018, I became the first Iranian-American elected official in Minnesota history. As a city councilwoman, most of my work is for my constituency. But my family stories and the fallout of US foreign policy on my life experience is what propelled me and so many others into politics.
For so many Iranian-American families, this moment of precipice has us sick and terrified. It isn’t just detached political analysis and smug Twitter takes to us. It is about a lifetime of broken US Iran policy shaping a volatile current we have swum in for decades.
We are your teachers, cab drivers, fast food workers, doctors, engineers, hair stylists, journalists, shopkeepers, restaurant owners, artists, anti-war activists, activists and much more. We need you to see us. We need you to see through imperial narratives. Don’t let liars and warmongers justify more violence in our names. Don’t let our oppressors tell you that questioning yet another one of their endless wars is supporting oppression.
Without knowing what will happen or plunging into speculation, what I can tell you on a human level is that this is a terribly dangerous moment in our history. We need your solidarity. We need your congressional action, popular action, anything to prevent war with Iran and to hold to the searing light the truth about the path that got us here.
Now more than ever we must fight for our democracy with great determination, in spite of a country that doesn’t always seem to want us.
As always, we’ll fight anyway.
- Mitra Jalali is an organizer, activist and city councilwoman in St Paul, Minnesota
Source: The Guardian
