Brown people in media (brown here an intentional obfuscation) rely on the ignorance of the general population who consume their articles, books, and talks.

It’s how they get away with conflating experiences, geographies, and cultures. They paper over everything with their identity as a protective layer.

I’m finishing Porochista’s book and like Jia’s blog on her parents I’m concluding that the majority of people don’t have a basic understanding of race, identity, history, geography, laws and society after 9/11 so they just believe the brown face presenting the story.

Rather questionable how no reviewer saw through this. Many red flags throughout.

Beyond the weird hang ups and infantilized understanding of race and obscuring of Balochistan as why she is Afro-Iranian her understanding of her Jewish heritage came from someone at a dinner party telling her the city where her mom is from is Jewish.

If any “brown” person I know in diaspora took what people told them about where they are from as factual and accurate of their history I really don’t know where we would be. People tell me about Morocco all the time and I’m smart enough to know they’re wrong or it’s not about me.

Perhaps even more infuriating is how she uses the word refugee disingenuously throughout the book and minimizes her dad having a PhD from MIT.

Her understanding of basic facts about Islam and Muslim identity in the West also reveals what I would argue is a grift or things she should work out before a book. She definitely does not know the difference between a niqab and burqa.

There is also a dizzying way she discusses her relationship to Iran and she’s too old to not know what her relationship to Iran is at this point and be clear about it. Likely because it’s a book of essays and sometimes she wants to show she’s rooted to certain audiences.

In a recent townhall interview she does reveal that her relationship to Islam has grown throughout the years and essays yet she still seems to meander with it and it seems to just be a label and not a relationship.

End result is an audience with no knowledge of Muslim identity in the West or geography or culture or geopolitics could maybe consume this but then they would have to get over the weird way she writes about her black boyfriend and her blackcent