Today we’d like to introduce you to Hajar Yazdiha.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
In 1983, my parents left their homeland on foot then horseback, in the dead of night, over the mountains from Iran to Turkey, then eventually into Germany. My mother was pregnant with me all that time until I came screaming into the world in a Berlin hospital. They named me Hajar, loosely translated as “one who has journeyed a long way from home.” It is no surprise, then, that I am fascinated by journeys of identity, time, and place, that my research is taken up with questions about identity and belonging, about our changing ideas about where we hope to arrive.
I grew up in Northern Virginia in a community that was, at the time, predominantly white. I’ve come to find that a lot of my childhood experiences, of feeling like I was a perpetual outsider trying to fit in, of feeling both invisible and hypervisible at the same time. In my adulthood, I have come to find these are experiences I share with a lot of children of immigrants growing up in the 1990s.
When the planes hit the Twin Towers, I was in the second week of my first year in college at the University of Virginia. My parents asked me if I would like to change my name. I didn’t. However, the name was a liability, and I remember the way furrowed eyebrows would lift upon hearing it, connecting my ambiguous brownness to the more clearly situated name.
But the histories of Black thought saved me. I was an English major at UVA, drawn to writers like W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Frantz Fanon—especially the idea that identity was a political project and that it was ongoing.
After a lengthy post-college detour (six wonderfully aimless years in New York City!), I knew I wanted a career in academia, which I pursued first with a Sociology M.A. at Brooklyn College then to the doctoral program in Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
I was especially interested in research that uncovered systems of power and showed how everyday people were coming together to resist it. This is what brought me to a career as a professor at USC, studying the politics of inclusion and exclusion and writing the book The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
To be sure, it has been a windy road getting here, especially in negotiating how people saw me with how I saw myself. From a young age, my mother was advocating for me at school, showing up to demand her daughter be taken seriously and not written off or ignored because of my funny immigrant name. It seemed to me that being seen by others only came with danger, being made a target and hyper-scrutinized, so I made myself as small and benign as I could. I was very quiet for a long time. I did well in school, but I never did “too” well.
However, in my senior year of high school, I had an AP English teacher, Mr. McCabe, who saw something in me. He wrote personal notes to all of us at the end of the year, and I remember one line he wrote to me, “You are one of a handful of true academics. Speak up and use your voice.” It stuck with me. It would be another decade before I fully embraced the power of his words to pursue a career as a professor, but I never forgot the feeling of being seen and valued.
As it turned out, getting older and gaining a deeper sociological understanding of the world around me – why it is that I was underestimated for so long, why silence and self-erasure was a defense mechanism – would also show me that some of the greatest obstacles that remain now are within myself. It is a lifelong practice to quell an inner voice – internalized from the outside – that tells me to stay small and out of sight so that threatened people in power don’t come for me. I have found that becoming a mother has forced me in some ways to confront that voice and to continually engage in this deep healing.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am a sociologist, writer, and professor at USC, an expert on the politics of inclusion and exclusion, and author of the new book, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. My work asks questions like, what are the social forces that bring us together and keep us apart? What does it take to feel like we belong, to a community and to one another? My research shows how powerful institutions like law and media categorize groups into an “us” and a “them” and make the boundaries between us feel real and natural. I also show how these categories matter for everyday people, the communities where we feel like we belong, and how this “groupness” shapes our identity, our politics, and even our imaginations of what type of society may be possible.
My book has been a natural extension of this work, taking forty years of data to analyze the political uses and misuses of the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement over time. I set out to write a book that would answer why Dr. King’s words have been used in the service of such oppositional political projects – for example, gaining rights for immigrants versus repealing affirmative action and why it matters for contemporary politics. What I found really surprised me and concerned me. The misuse of the memory of Dr. King and civil rights has transformed into a revisionist history that politicians have used to create an alternative reality that perpetuates social inequality. For anyone who is worried about our deep divisions and the state of politics, I think this book really helps us understand how we got here and where we might go next.
A great source of pride comes from teaching and learning from my students. I have been so inspired by Gen Z and their resilience and creativity through the dark height of the pandemic. They bring such openness and imagination to thinking about the worlds we could create.
Recently an interviewer said to me, “It’s obvious you really love people.” It occurred to me that this may not be common to love people. After all, we live in a really difficult and complex world, and there are many reasons to draw distinctions around which people we love. Particularly as an introvert, it makes me laugh to think that I do, in fact, love “the people” and it may be the force that uniquely animates my work, my writing, and my teaching.
Before we go, is there anything else you can share with us?
Embarking on my book tour has reminded me how much I love speaking to and learning from different audiences about their different community and organizational histories, the unique challenges they face, and how we can work our way out of them.
Folks should reach out if they are looking for a speaker on questions of belonging, organizational culture, solidarity, and action. And please stay in touch on social media!
Pricing:
- The Struggle for the People’s King: $29.95
Contact Info:
- Website: www.hajaryazdiha.com
- Instagram: @ProfHajarYazdiha
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hajar-yazdiha-2ba0843/
- Twitter: @HajYazdiha
- Other: TikTok: @Prof Hajar Yazdiha
Image Credits
Hajar FINAL-3: Chandra Wicke Hajar FINAL-5: Chandra Wicke Hajar FINAL-16: Chandra Wicke Hajar FINAL-35: Chandra Wicke Portland-3: Josh Ferrell Boston-2: Solmaaz Yazdiha Book Cover: Princeton University Press
