"You look so exotic…what’s your background?” When I initially meet strangers who are not Persian, this is the question I get most often. People seem to have an innate need to fit others into easily digestible categories. I stopped counting the number of times people have asked me where I am from or what my “background” is, which is a nicer way of asking, “What are you?”

The most natural response that comes out is, “I’m Persian”. I have also heard my other Persian friends say, “I’m a Persian Jew,” or “I’m Iranian”. Does this mean that we all define ourselves differently, or are we all basically saying the same thing? Is it even possible to use easily dispensable labels to relate where we come from? The last few times someone asked me where I am from, I asked them to guess. People desperately tried to place me. The guesses varied from Latin American, Egyptian, Israeli, Indian and Alaskan to half-Japanese! It is truly a fascinating study in sociology to examine the reasons why people want so badly to compartmentalize others. Equally as fascinating is the answer that we give to this question.

An Iranian political science professor I once had took great offense to the fact that I refer to myself as “Persian”. He actually accused me of being afraid to refer to myself as Iranian, and claimed that “Persian” is a more user-friendly way for me to answer strangers. Maybe my use of “Persian” over “Iranian” is subconsciously motivated by other factors, but in the realest sense, it just feels right. I often interchange my use of Persian and Iranian when I am writing, but “Iranian” simply does not flow off my tongue or define the way I see myself or the country of my parents and their parents’ parents.

Those who disagree with the use of “Persian” as a descriptive term, use the argument that most Middle-Easterners want to stay as far away from Iran and Iraq, and the negativity associated with that region, as they can. Being Middle-Eastern has hardly ever been popular, but this is especially true now that Iran has officially been classified as part of the notorious “Axis of Evil” by our commander in chief. The repercussions of the “war on terror” are far and wide, but when it comes to issues of identity, they also go very deep.

It is not easy to cope with the realization that many Americans harbor ill feelings and negative connotations against the country you know as home. Turn on the news and you will see reports of Iran’s nuclear plans and undemocratic tactics. Turn on the radio and you will hear Alan Jackson singing, “I’m not a real political man. I watch CNN, but I’m not sure I can tell you the difference in Iraq and Iran.” Pick up the newspaper and you will see images of Islamic extremists burning Israeli and American flags. It is truly a travesty that most Americans do not know the difference between Iran and Iraq, that Iranians are being racially profiled and that the image of Iranians that is being fed to Americans is, by and large, a skewed one.

Do I know people who describe themselves as “Persian” to appease those who have fed-in to these prevalent stereotypes? Yes. But, I also know young Persians who refuse to call themselves Iranian because the Iran that exists today is inconsistent with the country they remember or to which they relate. 

What many people do not know is that Iran literally means “land of Aryans” and that Persia was only officially named Iran after Adolf Hitler referred to Iran as an “Aryan nation,” of people who were racially related to Germans. In the spirit of Hitler’s affirmation, in 1934, the first Pahlavi shah declared that the country should thereafter be referred to as Iran, instead of Persia. 

Clearly, Persia does not exist, so I would not recommend telling someone you are from Persia. However, I do think that how we choose to refer to ourselves is a personal decision. Most of my Iranian Jewish friends choose to introduce themselves to others as Iranian Jews because the prevalent image of Iran today is one of a deeply Islamic country. In the same sense, although Ukraine is no longer a part of Russia, many Ukrainians still refer to themselves as Russian. Moreover, Jewish Uzbeks still refer to themselves as Russian because Uzbekistan is a predominantly Muslim country.

Still, other young Persians refer to themselves as Iranian-American because their families are from Iran, but they were born and raised in America. Many Americans still think ‘Iranian Jew’ and ‘Iranian-American’ are oxymorons. There are still many perplexed faces when I introduce myself as an Iranian Jew to people who did not grow up in big urban cities like Los Angeles and New York. 

So who determines how we refer to ourselves? The catch is that there are no right or wrong answers. No political genius or history book can tell me that I should call myself Iranian when I reflexively want to say that I am Persian. It is virtually impossible to describe my culture and my upbringing in one word. So what I really say to those who bravely ask, “Where are you from?” is this: “I was born in Israel and raised in America by Persian parents in an Iranian Jewish home.” I think this about sums it up, covers all the bases and utterly confounds all those who try to make me an accomplice in their game of “what are you?”

Imagine a world where it does not matter where anyone was from; where we could approach each other without a nagging need to categorize one another into groups and subgroups; where what we say and how we treat each other is not tainted by pre-conceived notions or stereotypes…we can always dream.