Dearborn in the USA

If you’ve recently started a new job or embarked on a graduate degree, chances are you’ve had to engage in some sort of cultural-sharing exercise designed to promote diversity and inclusion. You know the drill: Sitting in a circle, each person tells his or her story—or, to use the proper nomenclature, offers his or her narrative. Participants from “subaltern” backgrounds are expected to tell stories of repression and exclusion; those who come from the “dominant culture,” meanwhile, must “unpack” their own privileges and wicked biases in front of the group.

Over the years, I’ve had to sit through many such sessions, be it at Teach For America, where new recruits are required to complete a grueling regimen of diversity training, or during my first year at law school. It didn’t take me long to realize that, as a Shia-born Iranian-American in the post-Sept.11 era, I have anecdotes aplenty that, told correctly, can place me right in the sweet spot of the race-gender-class matrix. I could recount how on that dreadful September day a high-school classmate of mine in rural northern Utah yelled out, “Hey, Sohrab, I heard your people bombed New York!” Or I could mention how I’ve learned to preemptively take the tension out of the room when I sense that my Iranian background might be an issue. (“I come from the heart of the axis of evil,” I say.)