February 17, 2023
The highest ranking Iranian-American elected to public office today is 60-year-old Khalil Joseph Shekarchi, who is the speaker of the Rhode Island House of Representatives.
He has been a member of the Rhode Island House since 2013 and became speaker two years ago. He is a Democrat in a very solidly Democratic state. He won election to replace a speaker who was seen as autocratic. He was seen by both parties as more collaborative.
His ethnicity proved no barrier. But then he is only half Iranian. The other half is Italian and Rhode Island is dominated by Italian ethnicity. Shekarchi knows only a few words of Farsi and has never visited Iran, but many of his dad’s relatives have come to Rhode Island over the years.
He knows little about Persian cuisine but that is normal when your mother is Italian and cuisine dominates the Italian-American community like no other ethnic community in America.
In fact, there is only one Persian restaurant in all of the state of Rhode Island. Shekarchi went there last month to be interviewed by Antonia Noori Farzan, a reporter for The Providence Journal who is also half Persian and half Italian.
Shekarchi told Farzan that not long after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he flew to a conference in Nashville, Tennessee. Mid-flight, he got up to stretch his legs and then realized that everyone on the plane was looking at him.
“I went right back and sat down,” Shekarchi said, recalling what was going through his mind: “They think I’m going to rush the cockpit or something.”
After 9/11, he couldn’t help but be conscious of the fact that his first name, Khalil, which he doesn’t use, appears on his passport. He noticed that he seemed to be getting pulled out of airport security lines for a pat-down more often the kind of thing where you’re told that it’s a random check, “but you know it’s not really that random.”
All of which might come as a surprise to Rhode Islanders, who’ve always assumed that he’s just Italian.
When you meet a dark-haired, olive-skinned politician who goes by Joe and has a thick Rhode Island accent, a Catholic school education, and a last name that ends in a vowel … well, your mind leaps to certain conclusions. And in Shekarchi’s case, those conclusions aren’t exactly wrong, since he is half Italian, even if that half is not the “Shekarchi” half.
Shekarchi is one of an extremely small number of Iranian-Americans living in Rhode Island.
He was born and reared in Rhode Island. His father, an Azerbaijani ethnic, attended the University of Tehran, married a Rhode Island native after coming to the US for his medical education, and ended up settling in Rhode Island for life.
The speaker and the reporter sat down at the only Persian restaurant in Rhode Island Shish Kabob in Pawtucket, which opened a year ago. It was Shekarchi’s first visit, but he soon discovered that he’d officiated at the owners’ wedding, demonstrating how small the local Iranian-American community is.
The reporter asked whether growing up as a member of an ethnic minority had shaped his political views, or if being Iranian was something that he had to overcome in order to get elected.
The answer to both questions was no. Shekarchi never thought of himself as a minority, he said. And he’d been active in Warwick politics for many, many years before he ran for a seat in the General Assembly in 2012.
“I bet the majority of people don’t even know you’re half Iranian,” his spokesman, Larry Berman, interjected.
“No,” Shekarchi agreed. “Most people think I’m Italian. Even though there’s no K in the Italian alphabet.” (There is also no J, W, X or Y.)
Later on, he said: “It never really came up. And I really think that Rhode Island, in general, is a very accepting state.”
Like many Iranians living in the United States, Shekarchi started using the term “Persian” to describe himself during the hostage crisis correctly guessing that most Americans didn’t know enough about the Middle East to realize that it meant “Iranian.” But he never experienced any real discrimination, he said, and never felt like an outsider.
His Iranian heritage is hardly a secret: It was mentioned in several Rhode Island news stories when he was first elected speaker. But it’s also slid under the radar.
Shekarchi’s name does not appear anywhere on a Wikipedia page listing American politicians of Iranian descent. Nor does it appear on the sizable list of candidates who have received the support of Iranian American PAC, which has a stated mission of supporting Iranian-Americans who run for public office. The Iran Times was unaware of him until Farzan’s interview appeared in The Providence Journal.
Yet Shekarchi is arguably the most powerful Iranian-American politician in the United States right now. Republican US Rep. Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma, who has an Iranian father, may be higher-ranking to some but the speaker of the House of Representatives in Rhode Island holds more raw political power than a junior member of Congress. Furthermore, Bice’s father divorced her mother and she was brought up with no links to or interest in Iran.
Shekarchi’s last name means “sugar maker,” a reflection of the family business: His grandfather owned a candy store in Khoy, in northwestern Iran. (Ironically, Shekarchi is a diabetic.)
His father, Khalil Shekarchi, grew up as one of eight siblings in Khoy. He later moved to Tehran and attended medical school at Tehran University.
Now 96 and dealing with severe health issues, Khalil moved to the United States for his medical residency in 1956, long before political upheaval prompted many Iranians to flee the country. His brother, Ebrahim, had been living in North Carolina and Tennessee while working as an archaeologist for Union Carbide, and encouraged him to come to America.
The young doctor-in-training wasn’t planning on staying. But after first landing in Troy, New York, he ended up at a Rhode Island Hospital, where he met a volunteer named Esther Esposito, who would soon become his wife.
It was a “mixed marriage,” as Shekarchi puts it a Roman Catholic marrying a Muslim. Esther’s Italian-American family approved, but with conditions: The wedding had to take place in the Catholic church, and the children had to be raised Catholic.
They moved into Esther’s mother’s house in Warwick while Khalil, who’d trained as a surgeon, tried to get his medical practice established. Though he’d completed his residency at Rhode Island Hospital, he ran into an obstacle, according to his son: The tight-knit network of local doctors wouldn’t allow him to operate there.
“I don’t want to sound, like, prejudiced or anything, but there was an Italian faction and a Jewish faction of doctors. And my father wasn’t in either of those factions, so he couldn’t get in,” Shekarchi said. “He couldn’t get hospital privileges. And as a surgeon, if you can’t operate in a hospital, you can’t operate.”
His father ultimately wound up at Pawtucket Memorial Hospital, which “ended up being one of the best decisions of his life and his career,” Shekarchi said. There, he developed a reputation as a top-notch surgeon.
“The greatest compliment I can give him is [that] his peers and his colleagues, when they needed a surgeon, they all went to my dad,” Shekarchi said. “And when their children and their spouses needed a surgeon, they all went to my dad.”
There’s a stereotype that Iranian immigrants pressure their children to become doctors or engineers. But none of Khalil’s three children followed in his footsteps they’re all lawyers. Shekarchi recalls that his father cared about one thing: making sure that they all got an education.
“It wasn’t optional in our family; it was required,” he said. “He didn’t care where, or how, or what major, but we were all going to graduate from college.”
Khalil also became a father figure to many young Iranians who immigrated to Rhode Island after he did, or came over to attend college, recalled Mo Raissi, who was among them. That’s how, years later, the younger Shekarchi ended up officiating at the wedding of Raissi’s niece Shish Kabob co-owner Sogand Raissi.
Shekarchi only knows a handful of words and phrases in Farsi hello, how are you, cheers, goodbye. He’s not familiar with popular Persian dishes like ghormeh sabzi, or certain cultural traditions, like celebrating Shab-e Yalda on the winter solstice.
“I kind of gravitated towards the Italian culture, the Italian food, the Italian customs here in Rhode Island,” he said.
Shekarchi’s mother, who died in 2007, came from a prominent Italian-American family. When Shekarchi was growing up, she purchased a Persian cookbook and tried to learn how to cook Persian food, he recalled. Once a week, she would serve a traditional Iranian dinner, but the rest of the week, it was Italian-American cuisine.
“My mother was a very good Italian cook, and my father grew, I think, to prefer Italian food,” Shekarchi said.
Growing up, he was Joe. Sometimes Joey, sometimes Joe-Joe. As a teenager, he did get a vanity plate that said KHALIL. But then the hostage crisis happened, “and it really wasn’t in vogue to say you were Iranian.”
All three Shekarchi children Joe, Mary and John were given Iranian names in addition to more traditional American names. They all attended Catholic schools, at their mother’s insistence.
It seems safe to say that not many other Khalils appear in the yearbooks of Mount Saint Charles Academy in Woon-socket, which Shekarchi attended from seventh through 12th grade. But he remembers the school as “kind of a melting pot,” drawing students from French Canadian and Italian families.
“I never felt out of place,” he said. “I took a little bit of ribbing when the hostage crisis came, but no more than any other student took on anything else.”
What type of ribbing? “Oh, ‘Don’t take my books hostage,’ or something like that.”
Shekarchi credits the teachers at “the Mount,” who at the time were mostly Brothers of the Sacred Heart, with being “very protective” of students and quick to shut down any bad behavior.
“Maybe they were extra protective of me, I don’t know,” he said. “But I never felt uncomfortable at school.”
Growing up, Shekarchi always wanted to go to Iran. When his cousins visited the United States, he would “torture them with questions,” he recalls. But his mother feared that he wouldn’t be allowed to leave until he completed the military service required of all Iranian men.
Then, in 1979, the Islamic Revolution happened.
As a teenager watching the unrest from Lincoln, Rhode Island, Shekarchi realized that his prospects of getting to see his father’s homeland had grown considerably dimmer. And he grew increasingly frustrated with President Jimmy Carter.
To this day, he believes that the United States should have done more to keep the Shah in power or, ideally, allowed the Shah’s son, who belonged to a younger generation and “could have appealed to the masses,” to take over.
The Shah “was making real reforms for the country,” he said. “But they weren’t fast enough, I guess, for the people, and they overthrew him. And we abandoned him.”
Shekarchi is a lifelong Democrat. But in 1980, when he cast his first-ever vote in a presidential election, he was so disappointed with Carter that he voted for Ronald Reagan instead.
Today, he acknowledges that there were concerns about the Shah’s record on human rights. But he points out that the United States currently supports the Saudi Arabian government, which is “much more oppressive than the Shah was.”
The Shah was a stable US ally in a dangerous and unstable part of the world, he said. If things had gone differently, “we would have a whole different Middle East today.”
Shekarchi has been following the protests. He’d hoped to see “more of a revolution,” he said, but remains optimistic that change will come. And he believes that the United States should intervene “I don’t mean militarily. I think culturally.”
“Maybe I’m idealistic and wishful, but I think that Iran and the United States will unite again,” he said. “But I don’t think it will be the governments I think it will be the people.” “I’d like to see it in my lifetime.”
