January 12, 2022

As a teenager, my mother had a crush on a Black man. That’s not a big deal today, but this was in the 1960s. And in Iran, no less. 

I believe my mother’s exact words upon seeing Sidney Poitier’s glorious face in the 1967 film, “To Sir With Love,” at a Tehran movie theater were “Mashallah, mashallah.” It’s an Arabic way of praising God for having created something wondrous, though Iranians of all faiths use the word without any Islamic or religious connotation. 

My mother doesn’t use social media, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her last week that Poitier had died at the age of 94; instead, she heard the news from her favorite Persian-language AM radio station. She was saddened by his death and humbled by the realization that her teenage crush was in his nineties, rendering her anything but a young woman.

Poitier joined two other actors — Betty White and Bob Saget — who also passed away recently, and who played an integral role in my (and my family’s) understanding of our country of refuge. Their obituaries, printed in newspapers across the country, highlighted what they meant to millions of Americans, but let me tell you how these three larger-than-life celebrities affected a family of Iranian Jews.

To this day in Iran, many people are not acquainted with Blacks. Some “Afro-Iranians’” reside along the coast and southern parts of Iran, but they constitute a minority population. Since at least the 6th century BC, Persia (before it changed its name to “Iran” in 1935) practiced slavery, like most Middle Eastern countries, though much of it was domestic slavery. Iran officially banned slavery in 1928, but as my mother once explained, most Iranians, even in the 1960s, still associated Black people with the terrible legacy of slavery. For centuries, Blacks in Iran literally waited hand and foot on mostly wealthy Shi’ite families, often with little to no pay. They were seen as exploited and downtrodden, even after slavery was formally banned (sadly, more modern versions of slavery, including child labor and human trafficking, still exist at disturbing levels in the Islamic Republic of Iran today).

For Iranians like my mother, the association of Blacks with a lack of agency and dignity all changed when they set their eyes on Sidney Poitier on screen. Here was a strong Black man who metaphorically stood taller than anyone in the room; he was no one’s domestic servant. 

When we came to the United States, I finally was able to watch one of his films on television. Like mother, like daughter, I found my teenage crush, too, only I discovered Poitier in the 1990s. 

He was one of the first Black men I saw on screen, and I was spellbound. 

If Iranians had preconceptions of Blacks, they also had rigid ideas about older women. That’s where Betty White blew everything out of the water for my family and me in terms of what we believed about women of a certain age. 

In Iran, I had never met a fabulous older woman. I’m sure she existed (beneath the oppression of the post-revolutionary headscarves and other Islamic attire that were forced upon all Iranian women starting in the early 1980s). Older women were supposed to be modest and homely. Their nails weren’t supposed to be painted. Who could peel dozens of potatoes and mix bowlfuls of ground meat with fabulously painted nails? When a woman grew old, she traded any sign of youth, including her social life, for what we Iranians saw as the dignity of sacrifice in one’s old age. Goodbye to glamorous clothes, youthful ideals, and even leaving the house after 5 p.m. 

Suffice it to say, when my family and I first watched four fabulous older women take a bite out of Miami life on reruns of “The Golden Girls” in the early 1990s, we were almost offended. Grandmothers didn’t go out on dates. They didn’t even wear sequins. And they certainly didn’t go shopping for condoms in anticipation of romantic getaways with their boyfriends. But there was the luminous Betty White and her three equally amazing roommates on “The Golden Girls,” living life at an age when most women in Iran, especially widows, were already buying their burial plots because they didn’t expect to live much longer. 

I, for one, was prepared to see half-naked, fabulous women and even teenagers in America even before we arrived here; my parents had given me ample warning about liberal American values. But nothing could have prepared me for the sight of Rose Nylund, a ditz who was nevertheless rewarded with best friends, a meaningful job, and a boyfriend whom she loved. Why, despite being such a simpleton, was she granted such blessings? Because, I deduced, she was in America. 

And now, so was I. And that could only mean one thing: Maybe one day, I could escape all of the literal (and metaphoric) potato peels that had rained on my female elders’ heads for centuries to become a fabulous, thriving older woman (in many decades to come, I assure you). For that, I will always be grateful to Betty White.

Whereas Poitier showed me the dignity of a Black man, and White made me excited to grow old, Saget was my first introduction to fathers in America, however fictional. 

Finally, there was Bob Saget. Whereas Poitier showed me the dignity of a Black man, and White made me excited to grow old, Saget was my first introduction to fathers in America, however fictional. Every Friday night, after my mother had lit her Shabbat candles and we had said the blessing over wine, my family and I (and our guests) raced to our fat television set to watch Saget play the perfect father to three young daughters on “Full House.” But there was something different about Danny Tanner, Saget’s best-known role:  The man loved to clean.

Can you guess where I’m going with this? If I’d never seen a fabulous grandmother in Iran, you can bet that I’d never, ever seen a man who cleaned his own home. But there was Saget’s Danny Tanner, armed with the one thing my own father possessed in spades (compassionate wisdom) and the one thing my father had never held in his life: a broom.

If I’d never seen a fabulous grandmother in Iran, you can bet that I’d never, ever seen a man who cleaned his own home.

Saget formed a literal bookend to our early weekends in America. On Friday nights, we obsessively watched “Full House” and on Sunday nights, we were treated to shenanigans on “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” which Saget hosted from 1989-1997. Perhaps I’m overdramatizing, even stereotyping, when I say that back in Iran, we didn’t associate camcorders (if anyone was lucky to have one) with hilarious hijinx; we lived in a hideous, repressive theocracy; we feared camcorders because it meant someone was recording us in “un-Islamic” acts, such as not wearing our mandatory headscarves. In America, we learned, most people used camcorders to capture the exact moment their uncle fell over a hill trying to hit a golf ball (I later learned “AFHV” was based on a Japanese variety show).

In contemplating what these three individuals taught me about this country, I’m reminded of a song — the theme of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” — and the words which lifted my anxious heart as a little girl in front of that television screen:

“You’re the red, white and blue/Oh the funny things you do/America, America this is you.”

Tabby Refael is a Los Angeles-based writer, speaker, and civic action activist. Follow her on Twitter @RefaelTabby