When I first arrived in the United States in 2014, I would remind my friends that Persians are white—and not just according to the Census Bureau. I’d tell them that Persian, just like English, is an Indo-European language, and some in the Aryan tribe that migrated from India to Europe settled in Iran (also called Persia), which means the Land of Aryans. Those Persian settlers are my ancestors.

The Donald Trump era increased racial awareness in America. My personal life hadn’t changed much because of his presidency, but I became an audience for apologetic Americans who wanted to assure me that they had no problem with me. A brown asylum seeker from Iran—a country included in Trump’s Muslim ban—had to be apologized to. Soon I realized that, in calling myself white, I had been working against my interests. “As a brown person” started to replace my insistence that “Persians are white.” To my progressive peers, this identity swap gave my arguments more merit. My arguments had not become any stronger, nor I any wiser. But they now saw me as having a form of moral authority and wisdom merely because of my new identity.

A similar transformation happened when I began my job search and had to specify my race, sex, military status, disability, and sometimes even my sexual orientation. According to the Census Bureau, I am white. I am also male, with no military record, and healthy. Wait a second! I’m at the bottom of the hiring pyramid. I don’t get a leg up in the name of diversity or equity?