KQED-FM (SAN FRANCISCO) -- When Iran makes international headlines, Iranian Americans are asked about what they think, what they know and what might come next. Persis Karim is an Iranian American writer and professor at San Francisco State University. She and Lily Jamali talked about facing their complicated identities.
“Whether we know it consciously or not, we have been affected by the news. And the way that Iran comes to us is through these rather negative news headlines. So imagine, for most Americans, that’s all they know,” said Karim, director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University. “... So how can we tell a more complicated, nuanced human story that is not the reduction of news headlines and images of bombs and mass protests of angry people in Iran? How can we tell that story?”