By Naazley Boozari, Center Graduate Student Researcher
Liliana Bakhtiari shocked the City of Atlanta as the first Queer Muslim member on the City Council in 2021. Being gender fluid, using both she/her and they/them pronouns, Bakhtiari has faced many challenges in defining herself in the context of an Iranian identity. However, despite these challenges, she says that she has continuously been inspired by her cultural roots as an Iranian American to advocate for people of many different backgrounds. “I have hope,” she explains, “but I also think there needs to be an implosion of the two-party system. It is not representative [of our country] anymore, and people are becoming resentful when going to the ballot box to vote for individuals that don’t represent them. And they are certainly getting sick of those from a different generation who kept telling us to have hope in a broken system. But I have hope because there’s more of us [the general public] than of them [those who oppress].”
With a mother born in Buffalo, New York, to doctors who immigrated to the United States in the 1950s, and a father who was born to farmers just outside of Tabriz, it’s no secret that Bakhtiari’s family unit played a major role in her activism and her eventual career in public service. Her maternal family settled mostly in Stone Mountain, Georgia, where Bakhtiari would also grow up—a predominantly white and conservative town—despite, she says, a large immigrant and refugee populations there. Her father escaped violence and war in Iran, and endured a difficult and dangerous journey to the United States in 1982. During a tumultuous journey from Iran to India to Tijuana and finally to America, Bakhtiari explains that her father eventually met her mother “the same day he got papers telling him he would be deported.” As her father is one of nine children and her mother is one of six, Bakhtiari says she had a family large enough to always feel connected, but “outside of this bubble, I did not experience much of an Iranian community in Georgia,” she adds.
Growing up in an Iranian family, Bakhtiari says she spoke both Persian and Azeri, but as she got older, experienced an “othering” and gradually lost a great deal of her language skills so she could appear and sound more ‘American.’ She explains that she “was very fluent in Persian, up until I started going to a predominantly white public school, and because there was fear, there was also a push to assimilate.” Not being able to shave, pluck eyebrows, or wear clothes that her peers wore, Bakhtiari says she stood out. These feelings of “being different” were accentuated by the extreme xenophobia and Islamophobia of post-9/11 US culture, and, as a result, she says that the racism she faced as an Iranian-American child in the South had a tremendous impact on her.
“Being part of a predominantly non-English-speaking family in a white, conservative town was definitely difficult at times. My experience was that I had very racist teachers growing up–some weren’t, but a majority were. And you throw on top of that my grandparents, who didn’t speak English and would come to school wearing chādors and hijabs (because they’re Muslim); it made it difficult at times. Teachers were actually bigger bullies than students.”
Despite these difficulties, Bakhtiari says she has always been inspired to work for her community. She says she was heavily inspired by her father, whose political activism influenced her to integrate public service into her life. “My father was very big on raising me in charitable work. So, I spent a lot of my time working in his pharmacy, did a lot of volunteering downtown, at homeless shelters, and in the community. I also worked in refugee resettlement. And, of course, there was Qur’anic school on Sundays,” she says.
Bakhtiari says that for some, particularly Iranians, her identity as both queer and Muslim can be perceived as problematic. But, she says, even while she considers herself more culturally than religiously Muslim, “there are people from different (both religious and non-religious) communities who have made harmful assumptions about me and my upbringing.”
“It’s always fascinated me that in religions where we uphold God as all-knowing and omnipotent, that there are people who would think that there can only ever be one pathway to God. It sounds absolutely idiotic to me because, in the same breath where people would tell me that ‘I shouldn’t exist and that I’m going to be punished on the day of judgment’, they would also talk about how all-knowing and how all-powerful God is. To me, there are infinite pathways to God.” Bakhtiari, however, says that she has gained reassurance and support for both her sexuality and Muslim Identity in a community of queer Muslims in Atlanta.
“I say to people: the pillars of Islam are embedded in my entire upbringing because of my father. It has shaped me and my belief in public service; it was the key thing he instilled in me from a super young age, and it has gotten me through depression and low points in my life—public service is how I center myself,” she adds.
And while she says she has always been motivated to advocate for her community and beyond it, she never intended on running for public office. She specifies that her family’s difficult mistreatments at the hands of both the Iranian and US government, had always made her critical of those who held positions in politics. It was only after Executive Order 13769, better known as the “Muslim Ban,” (implemented in the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency) that she says felt she felt the need to do more for her family and community.
“When I decided to run [for City Council] it was out of fear and desperation; I felt like representation was the only way to protect my family and my community, and that it was the only way to impact legislation that would influence thousands of lives,” she adds. Her first campaign in 2017 went viral in less than 24 hours, and because she had a history of organizing as a youth, she drew on that for the success of her grassroots campaign.
Despite her popularity in her community, running for political office also made her a target. Her ethnically ambiguous background and Muslim faith were met with scrutiny and personal attacks from both the right and the left. In fact, some people accused her of making up the racism she experienced while growing up in Atlanta. Ironically, she says, much of the xenophobia she faced came from those within her party, specifically those who labeled themselves as ‘progressive.’ “The campaign was challenging, hard, and exhausting. But it was worth it,” she adds. While she was not elected in 2017, she was ultimately successful in 2021.
Bakhtiari says that beyond the binaries of sexuality and gender, she also doesn’t quite fit the binaries of the two-party system. With Georgia becoming more of a swing state in each election, she says “the internal cannibalization of these parties is incredibly frustrating,” and often comes at the expense of the communities she seeks to represent. “The infighting within these parties, as well as the lack of communication or understanding across the aisles, needs a lot more attention,” she adds.
“I think that Georgia could have done so much better in the midterms. We could have flipped so many more seats. I’m glad that the red wave ended up being just a red ketchup stain, but I don’t feel like we contributed to that in any way. I’m glad we were able to pull it off for the presidency, but the state should be fully purple, veering on blue. Republican gerrymandering doesn’t help with that, but we could still be doing a better job,” she says.
One of the most contentious issues she’s confronted since her election has been the project called “Cop City”—a $90 million police-training facility that covers 85 acres of land within a forest near Atlanta. Bakhtiari says that Cop City has garnered a lot of attention because of strong public criticism of police violence as well as the encroachment of this training facility on Georgia’s natural habitat.
“No matter where a person stands in their political beliefs,” Bakhtiari explains, “I want to work towards a world in which the need for officers as we define them now is obsolete, and working towards a world that has a more holistic understanding of what constitutes public safety,” Bakhtiari explains.
The highly-militarized environment of Cop City has, in recent months led to violence between protesters and the police, including the death of climate activist, Manuel Esteban Paez “Tortuguita” Teran on January 18, 2023. Bakhtiari explains that the facility totally missed an opportunity to create a more inclusive and well-rounded space that would address the needs of the community, rather than support what many perceive as already-violent police tactics. Bakhtiari says that the “poor execution around the Public Safety Training Center lacked communication with the people of Atlanta who have very real concerns about public safety and community well-being.”
“I don’t know at what point in this world, accountability became a thing of treachery rather than an action of love,” says Bakhtiari. “We hold the things/people we love accountable and constructive criticism is a way to be accountable. The real lesson to me is that democracy is a super fragile thing, and we completely divided the public and failed at engaging them in something that should have been a city-wide effort.”
Bakhtiari says these divisions are also echoing in the Iranian-American community particularly since the protest movement erupted in Iran in September 2022 after Mahsa Jina Amini’s death at the hands of the morality police. Like so many others, she hoped it would lead to democracy in Iran, but says many here seem to have used it to “advance their own political agendas.”
“I’m incredibly passionate about the Woman. Life. Freedom. movement, but what’s breaking my heart in this movement are the divisions we see. I want democracy in Iran. I don’t want Shahs, I don’t want supreme leaders, I don’t want a monarchy. You can only oppress people for so long, and the Iranian people have shown they don’t have anything to lose,” she adds.
However, Bakhtiari says she also sees a great deal of hope for our community. She emphasizes that Iranians are more than just the flawed representations in Hollywood. “We are more than our struggles, and we are more than our successes.” When asked about what she sees as the unifying elements within the Iranian diaspora, she responded with: “The resiliency of our people. Because wealthy or not, most Iranian people in this country are immigrants or refugees. I think something that will unite us is reclaiming our story, and not being afraid to actually educating people on what Iran is.”
Bakhtiari embodies this resiliency and continues the legacy of those, like her father, who push back against systems that keep us divided. Whether these systems are in our ancient homeland or our new ones, she emphasizes “my father always taught me that the real fight is not the revolution, it’s what comes after.” She also encourages other young Iranian Americans to go into public service, whether in government positions or simply volunteering at a local food bank. Bakhtiari says to fight for Iranians of different economic, social, religious, ethnic, and sexual backgrounds, is important, “because at the end of the day, we are a community made up of many unique and beautiful stories, and that is our greatest asset.”
With a Trace: Documenting and Sharing the Experiences of the Iranian Diaspora 