In this paper, I develop an argument about how Iranian-Americans conceive of race in ways that differ from the dominant ways of navigating U.S. racialization while underscoring conceptions of race that are inescapable across the social domain. At the same time, however, they offer understandings of race that diverged from the phenotypic dimensions of race that are predominant in U.S. racialization. Drawing on an ethnographic analysis of how Iranian Americans racialize their fellow Muslims, for instance, I explore how they perform racialization based on ethnohistorical and communal imagining rather than their shared Middle Eastern phenotypes. Iranian Americans’ plain description of race as a belief that culturally binds a group of people together complicates the way anthropologists commonly think about how people from Middle Eastern backgrounds encounter U.S. racialization. I demonstrate that race and religion are conflated in a way that demonstrates the ways that Shi’ism might be understood as a religion, surely, but also a historical ethnicity or culturally-shaped racial group. Iranian Americans’ conceptions of race shape and are shaped by terminologies that extract meaning from their communal memories beyond the U.S. context. In this essay, I demonstrate how Iranian Americans in the U.S. South, where the notion of people fitting strongly into one category or the other is much stronger than in other parts of the country, strategically refer to the term “Aryan” race (nezhad ariyayi) to justify their whiteness. By investigating the alternative strategies Iranians develop to negotiate their racial identity I provide a different and critical perspective on the racial politics that have shaped the lives of Middle Eastern immigrant communities in the U.S., which have failed to identify them exclusively ‘white’ or ‘non-white’ but have convinced them that they are indeed Other. My investigation of Iranian Americans’ understandings of race sheds light on how they navigate different strategies to create a niche for themselves in the U.S. racial hierarchy while maintaining Muslim identity in the predominantly Christian society. By looking closely at how Iranian Americans create racial meanings and navigate different strategies to claim whiteness, I develop an argument about how Iranian Americans conceptualize race and construct a whiteness that is shaped at the intersection of commonalities having to do with citizenship status, class, education, economic success, location, ethnohistorical memories—both within and beyond the U.S.