Ugly Persian Houses and the Racial History of Iranian America

“Freakshow,” “truly hideous,” “garish,” and “a monstrosity” are just some of the photo captions on UglyPersianHouses.com, a website that compiles anonymously submitted photos of “Persian palaces” in greater Los Angeles. Beyond the Internet, the city of Beverly Hills has, since 2004, legally codified its distaste for “over-the-top” Persian palaces by enforcing a style catalogue which outlaws “architecturally impure” construction to “protect property values” and preserve “historic charm.” What do the tensions surrounding Ugly Persian Houses tell us more broadly about “purity,” race, and attendant national anxieties about Iranian immigrants in American neighborhoods? Drawing from research by Tehranian (2008) on employment and housing discrimination and Bakalian & Bozorgmehr (2009) on hate crimes against Middle Easterners, I find that the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric which surfaced in Asian and Middle Eastern-American racial prerequisite cases of the early 1900s reverberates in the contemporary experiences of Iranians in the U.S. Through an examination of “anti-Persian” architectural housing codes, which draw from the same “white spatial imaginary” and political practices that have isolated and segregated American neighborhoods for centuries, the liminal racial position of Iranians is revealed when matters of aesthetic taste and cultural difference stand-in for anxious neighborhood talk of race.