The Shahs of Sunset… and the Rest of Us: “Persian Money” in an Era of FBI Surveillance

“After years of rumors and talk of a Persian version of the Jersey Shore, the nightmare is becoming reality this March when “the Shahs of Sunset” premiers on Bravo. The show will follow six wealthy Iranian-American graduates of Beverly Hills High School who live in Los Angeles, mostly work in real estate, and love to drink, party, and fight. Among them are A$SA Soltan (whose music career I profiled brieflyhere) as well as what is probably American mainstream TV’s first openly gay Iranian, Reza Farahan. The rest of the cast is pretty forgettable.

So far, Bravo’s released only one two-minute trailer. The clip begins with a quick history lesson (“when the Revolution happened, we had to flee the old country… we really didn’t get to take our wealth with us… so we ended up in Beverly Hills!”) followed by various snippets of them describing their love of luxury and all things gold. One particularly revealing highlight is when one cast member explains to the audience, “we don’t work in buildings- we own them.” Basically, every stereotype Iranians have ever had about rich Beverly Hills Iranians is now going to be broadcast for the world to see. Talk about airing dirty laundry!

I would take this binary even further by suggesting that one of my big problems with the show is how it provides a monolithic narrative of vaguely ethnic, unambiguously wealthy Persians. This image obscures the very real social and political issues we face as a community. As much as we have tried to “become white” and move past the anti-Iranian discrimination that dogged us in the 1980s, we are still investigated in our mosques, put on terror watch lists and stopped at the airport, deported en masse, and subject to the same kinds of survelliance and discrimination that target other Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans.”

Read more: http://ajammc.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/the-shahs-o…

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