Firoozeh Dumas 'Nothing More Than Peelings'

In Firoozeh Dumas’ “Laughing Without an Accent,” she writes many accounts about how her differences made her and her family stand out, and not necessarily in a good way. One account that I can relate to is in the chapter, entitled “Peelings, Nothing More Than Peelings. In this chapter, Dumas describes how because they had a lighter more European skin than most Iranians, they were put higher on the social ladder. However, this also caused them to be mistaken as foreigners in the market where vendors would attempt to rack up the price even though she knew better.

This feeling of being different because of how I look was never something I encountered until very recently. I have grown up in the suburbs of North Texas. Here, I am surrounded by mostly white people, so I don't feel different. Even though there are other that are not white, we are still the …show more content…
While I have traveled and felt lost and confused, I have never felt like I didn’t belong. Last summer, I spent five weeks in San, Francisco, California at a dance intensive. When I first got there, I had no idea what was going on. However, I could still blend in and pretend. Here, in Brooklyn, there is no blending in. All that being said, Brooklyn is not the culture I expected it to be. I was told before coming that I needed to always carry around a can of mace and to hope that I didn’t get shot. When my Uber driver was driving me to my apartment, I started to get very scared. Brooklyn looks like the places in movies and on TV where only bad things happen. But when we pulled up to our apartment, our hosts created up with sunflowers and showed us nothing but love and welcome. As we went to eat that night, we realized how close all of these people are and how important family is to them. When my roommate and I were trying to figure out which train to take, multiple people saw our confused faces and immediately offered