This chapter considers issues of race and ethnicity in Iran, as well as in its borderlands with Iraq and the Persian Gulf. It interrogates the concepts of "Arabness" and "Persianness" as espoused by both indigenous and Western writers, especially in the nineteenth century when the academic interest in race and language gained popularity. The chapter parses anthropological assumptions about the differences in the racial and ethnic communities of southern Iran, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf and traces the ways in which these ideas gained fluency in political tracts and state-building efforts. Finally, the chapter argues that racism remained problematic in Iranian popular culture despite the country's solidarity with many Afro-Asian liberation movements in the second half of the twentieth century.