Prejudice Theme Analysis

Funny in Farsi is full of amusing observations about American culture. But it’s equally about how Firoozeh and her Iranian family are perceived by non-Iranian Americans, in particular those of white, European heritage. Many of the Americans who Firoozeh meets and befriends during her childhood in California are gracious and accepting of many different cultures. Tragically, however, others treat Firoozeh and her family with varying degrees of prejudice, sometimes rooted in ignorance of Iranian culture and sometimes (especially after the Iranian Revolution of 1979) in active hatred for Iranians.

Firoozeh experiences many different kinds of mild and serious prejudice as an Iranian-American in the United States. Especially when she’s a young child, she experiences mild, somewhat innocent ignorance about her culture and her heritage. Her classmates ask her questions about the camels and sand in Iran. At other times, parents, who ought to know better, treat Firoozeh in a mildly prejudiced manner as well—for example, assuming that she can speak the same language as anyone else who’s from the Middle East.

After the Iranian Revolution, however, Firoozeh’s family endures more serious forms of bigotry. Especially after the Iran Hostage Crisis, when student revolutionaries held American citizens in the American embassy in Tehran hostage, Kazem faces systematic discrimination because he’s Iranian: he can’t find a job, even though he’s a great engineer and has absolutely no ideological interest in the Iranian Revolution. Later in her life, when she’s at Berkeley, Firoozeh experiences other forms of prejudice that are harder to categorize: some of her classmates, who would be horrified to be accused of bigotry, treat her as “exotic” because of her Iranian heritage. This kind of behavior is sometimes called “soft bigotry,” since it involves treating people from other cultures condescendingly, even if it doesn’t involve any overtly negative or hateful behavior.

Although she describes many different forms of prejudice that her family faces in the United States, Firoozeh takes great care to emphasize that America itself is a tolerant, generous country—suggesting that any instances of bigotry are aberrations from the usual state of American society. (This is certainly a disputable claim, but it’s the view the book as a whole takes.) She stresses that America was always a highly tolerant country before the Iranian Revolution. Furthermore, when describing the prejudice that Kazem faces when applying for work—probably the nastiest and most pervasive kind of prejudice described in the memoir—she doesn’t discuss any specific instances of bigotry, and stresses that Kazem himself never loses his faith in America. In this way, one could argue, Firoozeh preserves her idea of America’s “innocence.” She believes that there’s certainly bigotry in America, but asserts that American culture and values themselves are free of this bigotry.