“This is Sparta.”

It got yelled at me more than I care to recount. Elbow nudges, winks. All jokes. It’s funny after all. Here’s an over the top movie depicting the Spartans defeating the evil Persians. They’re sure the Persian friend thinks it’s funny, especially if they constantly bring it up. And if I get upset, I need to lighten up. It’s not real, everyone knows that. By the way, watch out you don’t fall into a pit.

It wasn’t enough that I am everyone’s enemy just because I’m from the middle east. Now I have to be a cartoonish bad guy too. So when someone tries to justify why they like it, I’m reminded of how it just tells me more and more that my culture, my heritage, is something to be made fun of, misunderstood, and demonized.

I never thought being Iranian was shameful. It wasn’t until 9/11 happened that I was first taught that I was evil. I was one of the many 8th graders who stared in shock as they showed the clips of the airplanes crashing into the buildings. By lunch time we knew they were from the middle east. By dismissal I had been asked and demanded several times to explain why my country did this. My country. It didn’t matter that I was born in America, with a father from Iowa. I look like my mom. I look foreign. I was no longer allowed to be American after that day.

For any other reason, it would have been fine. I would have loved to be mistaken for Iranian. It would have been a sense of pride. But instead, I’m known as the terrorist. I’m not Muslim, I’m not Arab, but I look like them. In the school full of white kids, my brother and I became targets of their “justice” for America. Threats in my locker, being called terrorist to my face, milk dumped on me at lunch, being told my Muslim family members were evil and would go to hell. My little brother got rocks thrown at him on the playground. They told us that to solve the whole problem, they should just bomb the whole middle east. My cousins. My grandmother. My grandfather. Our village. My childhood. We should just bomb it.

Thank god for the juniors who saw it was all messed up and let me sit with them. It stemmed the bullying from within the school. But I couldn’t expect them to walk with my family in the store on 9/11 anniversaries to keep away the cold, accusing stares and snide remarks. They couldn’t tell the lady to fuck off when she asked to check our receipt for the things we had bought, but no one else’s. They couldn’t walk with me to the airport and call out the bullshit of random selection that happened every god damn time. I had to find a new way to battle this. Maybe if I just started informing these ignorants more about my culture, they’d let up and know that actually we were a pretty cool group of people with lots of amazing stories and history. Heck, most people I talked to couldn’t even find Iran on a map. I learned quickly enough that no one cared to learn.

The movie 300 came out when I was in college. Oh, how my friends howled with glee and thought it was hilarious. My people put on the ugliest of displays. The immortals turned into devils. What little is taught of the Achaemenid empire turned into savagery. It’s not enough to tell me that my identity with a culture thousands of years old is to be ignored and untaught, but that all you should know about Persians is that they’re evil. Both in the modern day as well as the past. When I tried to explain that it was upsetting and why, they shrugged it off, assured me they didn’t actually think that, and that I was taking it too personally. They didn’t care about the times I tried to talk about my mother’s country. But they were willing to watch a movie about evil Persians.

Do not read our poetry. Do not admire our art. Do not delve into our scientific and mathematical advances. Do not listen to our music. Do not learn about how we were the first to make religious tolerance a law. Do not ever glorify our history.

Just listen to what the movies and the government tell you. I’m just a bad guy. Out of all the racism in this world, everyone can agree that I’m the evil terrorist that society as a whole can collectively hate. I am to be despised and ridiculed.

Yell in my face that this is Sparta. It’s just a joke.