'Is the Turk a White Man?' Towards a Theoretical Framework for Race In

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To cite this article: Murat Ergin (2008) ‘Is the Turk a White Man?’ Towards a Theoretical Framework for Race in the Making of Turkishness, Middle Eastern Studies, 44:6, 827-850, DOI: 10.1080/00263200802425973 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00263200802425973

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‘Is the Turk a White Man?’ Towards a Theoretical Framework for Race in the Making of Turkishness

MURAT ERGIN

A heated debate broke out in Turkey in 2004 after a Turkish-Armenian newspaper claimed that the adopted daughter of the republic’s founder, Atatu¨rk, had Armenian origins.1 Although some were quick to denounce the hunt for origins as an exercise in ‘outdated racism’,2 others considered the claim a conspiracy by external powers against the unity of the Turkish state.3 Soon, the military leadership issued a statement criticizing the news as an attack on Turkey’s national unity and reminding of the civic definition of Turkish citizenship as outlined in the constitution. The military’s response is a dramatic example of how seemingly incongruous views on Turkish identity can coexist even within the same statement. The military’s almost reflexive use of the image of a nation under threat in response to revelations of ethnic difference shows the uneasy fit between Turkishness and Turkish citizenship. The reference to the constitution in the military’s statement, however, showed the powerful appeal of civic citizenship. Increasing global influences on society, a general trend of economic and political liberalization starting in the 1980s, and the arduous process of application for full membership in the European Union have all contributed to the foregrounding of issues of identity in Turkey. Yet the search for the meaning of Turkishness is not new. Two decades after a 1909 New York Times article discussing the question of Turks’ whiteness in the context of immigration policies cheekily asked ‘Is the Turk a Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015 White Man?’,4 a full-fledged scientific mobilization was underway for the purpose of establishing the whiteness and Europeanness of Turks in historical, linguistic, and racial terms. Although the discourse with which identity battles are fought has changed, substantive issues tend to linger. Therefore, in the process of the search for a contemporary identity several issues implicitly or explicitly have revolved around the ethno-racial legacy of the early republican period (1923–50). The most prominent among these are minority rights, the content of Turkishness, negotiating a national culture in a global world, and reformulations of citizenship. Scholarship on Turkey needs to investigate the racial legacy of the early republican period in order to analyze identity issues in contemporary Turkey. The first aim of this article is to build theoretical connections between racial vocabularies in Turkey and the scholarship on race and whiteness. The persistence of race in the Turkish context has tremendous potential for contributing to the

ISSN 0026-3206 Print/1743-7881 Online/08/060827-24 ª 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/00263200802425973 828 M. Ergin

literature on race and its global variations. In this sense, an ambitious question drives this essay: do the many variations in the meaning and operation of race render the concept empty and defunct? Although no single study can answer this question, the key lies in building a theoretical framework that puts emphasis on transnational linkages while examining local responses to worldwide currents. This emphasis is needed because the affinity between race and modernity exposes the global character of race. However, racial discourses show a great deal of mutability in their meaning and operation within different settings of modernity. In this sense, the truly remarkable and yet ignored role of racial discourses in the construction of Turkishness during the first half of the twentieth century not only brings to the fore an under-studied case, but also provides an opportunity to tackle the question of whether race maintains conceptual consistency in the midst of contextual variation, or whether the insidious operation of racial differentiation loses its specificity across different settings, so much so that the concept could be surrendered to a broader approach based on dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Another aim of this article is to link race and modernity within the Turkish experience, thus stressing the circulation of racial discourses in local settings. While it is important to see the contributions of the Turkish case to broader questions, it is equally important to locate racial discourses in Turkey by using a broad theoretical perspective. I will draw upon critical race theory and whiteness studies, arguing that, despite the contextual differences in which these perspectives emerged, we can understand the Turkish experience better by recognizing the conceptual autonomy of race. Despite the close links between race, ethnicity, and nationalism, the literature on nationalism, if used alone, runs the risk of reducing the conceptual wealth and prevalence of race merely into efforts of nation-building. After critically evaluating five prevalent views that assign an aberrational and epiphenomenal role to race in Turkey, I will argue that one needs to take the role of race in Turkish modernity seriously. Finally, this contribution seeks historical links between racial ideas in the early republican history and those in contemporary Turkey, establishing temporal connections between past and present. Temporal connections are important in debunking the widespread myth that racial vocabularies of the republican era have no bearing on contemporary Turkish society. When examining the legacy of early republican racial discourses, I will identify two important consequences. The first Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015 one has to do with a broader influence in which racial assumptions, historically embedded in Turkish identity, create a sense of immutability and timelessness. The second consequence is narrower and focuses on a fascination with skin colour and related physiognomic features, which I call chromatism. The manifestations of these racial discourses usually spill over into the cultural terrain and metastasize into taken-for-granted assumptions. The following section will define and situate the terms immutability and chromatism in greater detail. After a discussion on the extent of racial discourses in early republican Turkey, the article will critically evaluate five perspectives that treat race epiphenomenally and examine the legacy of racial discourses in contemporary Turkey.

We live in a world in which there is racism without racists. The discursive defeat of racist ideologies throughout the world in the face of the horrendous consequences of ‘Is the Turk a White Man?’ 829

racist regimes did not result in immediate de facto racial equality. Not surprisingly, race and racism are touchy subjects when analyzing the early republican experience. Most recently, a book on the role of race science in republican anthropology5 has stirred controversy among scholars and intellectuals about the validity of race as a lens for understanding Turkish history.6 The book’s claims and methodology encountered a cool reception from scholars. At the heart of the debate were the author’s attempts to gauge the ‘racist’ aspects of Turkish anthropology in the 1930s, which raised the question as to whether using ‘racism’ for the Turkish case overstretches the term, especially considering the data at hand. Attempts to explore the connections between race and Turkishness have to find a fine balance between emphasizing the historical particularities of the Turkish case and drawing upon an ever-growing global literature on race and race relations. Rejecting US exceptionalism in whiteness studies and race relations opens up significant possibilities for inquiring into the presence of race and whiteness in remarkably dissimilar settings.7 Tapping into the mainly US-based race relations literature offers important opportunities for analyzing the role of race and racism in the Turkish experience. What gives racism its distinctive characteristics? Does racism have to do with individual and group attitudes appearing in the form of prejudices, or with structural inequalities in the form of institutional discrimination? Scholars who emphasize the systemic aspects of racial inequalities argue that race deserves a distinct structural status.8 The forerunner of structural views on racial inequality is critical race theory, a body of research that originated in the United States with the goal of analyzing the persistence of racial inequalities in the post-Civil Rights era.9 In fact, it was this perspective which finally liberated the social sciences from its incessant search for the roots of racial stratification in individual attitudes.10 Proponents of critical race theory have illustrated institutional consequences of racial inequalities, arguing that race and racism are embedded in the structure of contemporary societies and, hence, have historically gained a status autonomous from individual prejudices, at least in US society. An investigation of the conceptual operation of race could reveal to what extent and in what form the structural legacy of race and racism is pertinent in the context of Turkish modernity. Automatically equating each and every racial issue with racism obscures the historical and contextual variability of race. After building an ideological basis to Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015 maintain racial prejudices and ideologies, racism shows its distinguishing marks through institutional discrimination, which leads to enduring inequalities. In racist states, patterns of racial inequality would remain intact even if all prejudiced attitudes magically disappeared overnight. Considered this way, it would be a stretch of the imagination to classify the Turkish republican state in any period as a racist regime. Although the Turkish state flirted with the implementation of various racial ideas, it neither had the intellectual tradition to develop a sophisticated racist theory, nor could it foster the organizational power to institute a racist system of exclusion and inequality.11 The lack of sophisticated racist theory and systematic racist practice explains the complex conflation of racial discourses with a framework of constitutional belonging. The case against using the term ‘racism’ in the Turkish context, however, should not blind us to the structural consequences of discursive formations. Although the general pattern of racial inclusion and exclusion in the Turkish case appears to 830 M. Ergin

resonate more with group attitudes rather than with institutional discrimination, in specific instances – such as in the implementation of the Capital Levy (Varlık Vergisi),12 an ad hoc one-time tax that specifically targeted wealthy minorities during the Second World War – the state was sufficiently powerful to institute a practice of racial discrimination. In fact, the distinction between attitudes and institutions should not be exaggerated, especially when analyzing contemporary Turkey. The spillover of racial discourses into the cultural arena facilitates the creation of historically specific fields of meaning and creates linguistic and practical conventions. Cultural manifestations of race in Turkey give the concept a sense of stability. Therefore, concentrating entirely on the structural consequences of race while dumping its cultural spillovers into the domains of ethnicity and nationalism misses the creative use of racial metaphors in the construction of non-western modernities. Race in Turkey figures in a large body of cultural hierarchies, classifying ‘low’ and ‘high’, producing ‘them’ and ‘us’, and distinguishing ‘sensible’ from ‘nonsense’. Race has an immense ability to show historical variations and to appear in different guises. To identify commonalities within such variations, it is important to distinguish the ‘official’ discourse around race from racist Turkism, an ideology aiming to unify Turkic peoples throughout the world. Although racist movements existed in Turkey throughout the republican era and although racist Turkism had considerable political power as some of its representatives played important governmental roles, individual racist agendas do not immediately indicate systematic racism as a mass movement in the Turkish context. Especially in the early republican period, racist Turkism presented a difficult dilemma for the government: although the extreme Turkism of these movements resonated with some of the government’s attempts to anchor Turkishness in essential characteristics, the expansionism of radical Turkism posed a major problem in Turkey’s diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.13 Racist Turkism throughout republican history evolved considerably, having differential amounts of power and legitimacy in the government.14 When compared to racist Turkism, ‘official’ racial discourses had more direct affinities to the bureaucratic elite, and it was disseminated in textbooks, conferences and newspaper and magazine articles. This discourse was not monolithic or historically static either. Racial definitions of Turkishness coexisted with constitutional definitions of citizenship. Scholarly challenges to racism15 were not absent even Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015 during the high time of political racism. Moreover, the 1950s mark the recession of overtly racial terminology of the ‘official’ discourse, whereas the 1980s indicate its conflation with Islamist claims.16 This article will focus on the operation of mainstream racial assumptions in Turkish identity, rather than on overtly racist Turkism, and seek traces of historical continuity and consistency within variability and heterogeneity. The consequence of racial assumptions in Turkish identity emerges in two distinct forms: immutability and chromatism. The fluidity of the barriers between group attitudes and structural consequences manifests itself in both forms. Immutability refers to the ways in which Turkishness is imagined as a category that defies historical transformation. Only after racial immutability successfully attaches itself to Turkishness and constructs it as a static identity do subtle differences between belonging and citizenship make sense: Turkic peoples of central Asia belong to the Turkish world whereas Turkish citizens from minority origins are considered ‘Is the Turk a White Man?’ 831

foreigners; textbooks in contemporary Turkey still propagate Turkishness as an unchanging entity, even in its cultural formations; immigration practices throughout the republican era favour Muslims of Turkish culture over other groups. Immutability reveals the fact that the limits of Turkishness stretch beyond citizenship. To accomplish that, it relies heavily on the conflations of race, ethnicity, and nation. The second aspect of Turkishness justifying the use of race as an analytical lens is studied even less: the pervasive chromatic fascination with skin colour and other physiognomic characteristics. Chromatism precisely reflects a tendency in early republican scholarly discourses to subscribe to rather superficial generalizations with regard to racial characteristics. While their western counterparts were leaning toward more sophisticated measures of racial differences, such as IQ scores, or questioning the concept of race entirely,17 early republican scholars remained content with examining skin colour, craniological measurements, or blood types. Chromatism has more explanatory power than racism to analyze this immense interest in race science not as a full-fledged body of structural hierarchies, but as an eclectic body of symbols that acts as a stable anchor in the treacherous waters of modernity. The chromatic twist in the development of Turkishness constitutes a unique and creative attempt to produce a scientific basis for participating in the project of modernity as equal partners in an international order of advanced nation- states, rather than being permanently relegated to the peripheries of the western world as the ‘Terrible Turk’. The articulation of whiteness within the context of modernity rendered racial assumptions widespread yet dormant in the cultural domain. Debates in contemporary Turkey, ranging from the hierarchies of taste between ‘white’ and ‘dark’ Turks to the perceptions of Africans, reveal intrinsic links with the republican fascination with whiteness.

A number of recent studies, despite employing different theoretical frameworks, cogently illustrated the scholarly and policy manifestations of race and ethnicity in early republican Turkey by using primary evidence.18 As this article mainly attempts to develop a theoretical framework toward racial discourses, the empirical details presented in this section will be brief and selective, striving more toward exemplification rather than representation. A brief historical overview over the rise Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015 and maintenance of racial discourses will specifically oppose the common view that racial discourses in Turkey emerged out of nowhere in the 1930s and, after garnering some strength during the Second World War, was crushed by the political elite to disappear into oblivion at the end of the war. Without a doubt, the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 as one of the successor states to the defunct Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) marked a turning point for Turkish history. Not only did the republican government build its image on the rejection of the Ottoman legacy, but it also instituted westernizing reforms under the leadership of the first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatu¨rk (1881–1938), leading to major changes in numerous aspects of Turkish society. Nevertheless, even the most radical revolution builds upon tools borrowed from the past. Analyzing the Ottoman sources of Kemalist ideology19 and of racialized frameworks of citizenship20 helps us pay attention to the continuities as well as discontinuities between the newly established secular republic and its multi-ethnic, multi-religious predecessor. 832 M. Ergin

The significance of the republican period lies in its transporting as well as transforming nature: racial discourses borrowed from the late Ottoman period grew into maturity in the early republican era and were transformed into cultural forms in the following decades. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Ottomans had well understood the significance of racial credentials for acquiring a meaningful existence in the new cosmology of modernity. Amidst intensifying economic and military pressure from Europe as well as anti-Turkish messages in European public opinion, belonging to a strong and virtuous race seemed to be the appropriate response.21 A number of key ideas in republican racial discourses – such as the purity and superiority of the Turkish race, the geographical extent of the Turkish world, the antiquity of the Turkish language, the historical homogeneity of Turkish culture, and contributions of the Turks to world civilization – emerged in Ottoman society in the second half of the eighteenth century. The sources of the Turkist mobilization in the Ottoman period were located outside the empire and within European scientific discourses,22 thus establishing an affinity with western modernity as it was perceived by the Ottoman elite. Orientalist scholarship gained momentum with the application of new archaeological and anthropological discoveries in Asia, and the rising interest in Turkish-speaking peoples eventually culminated in the establishment of Turcology as a separate scholarly discipline in European universities. Moreover, a number of Turkish-speaking intellectuals who left the Russian Empire to seek asylum in the Ottoman Empire complemented the Orientalist interest in Turkishness. The combination of these trends, and their warm reception among the Ottoman intelligentsia, were influential in the creation and the spread of Turkism as an ideology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.23 The establishment of republican Turkey marks the separation of the expansionist wing of Turkism from Turkish nationalism. The former slowly receded into the domain of extreme political ideologies; however, messages of racial and linguistic superiority, cultural continuity, and essentialist identity penetrated into mainstream nationalism. While Turkism was only one of the competing frameworks for saving the state in the Ottoman period, the republican era marks its coming to power, adopting modernity as a project of civilizational conversion and shedding irredentism to fit the context of a world dominated by national boundaries. Racial discourses remained Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015 dormant for a decade in the 1920s when the republican regime was struggling for survival but began to appear in the ideological mobilization of the 1930s. It was in this period that the search for the timeless origins of Turkishness and the fascination with whiteness occupied scholarly agendas with the government’s explicit support. Racial vocabularies were produced by scholars and the bureaucratic elite. The major sources of dissemination were textbooks, sympathetic and tightly controlled newspapers, public conferences organized by official organizations, and speeches and publications by the elite. The tone of racial claims was extremely self-righteous and confident. For example, in the first attempt to formulate a regime-friendly history textbook, the historian-cum-politician authors declared their goal as follows: ‘[W]e would like to open the road that goes into the depths of our nation’s creative capabilities, to uncover the secrets of Turkish genius and character, to show the specialty and strength of Turks to themselves, and to declare that our national progress is linked to deep racial roots.’24 ‘Is the Turk a White Man?’ 833

The racial mobilization of that period is relatively easy to trace in scholarship. On one hand, anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians were busily working in two key areas, history and language, in an atmosphere in which the goals of establishing the antiquity of the Turkish language, history, and race superseded scholarly rigour. The so-called Turkish History Thesis attempted to write a Turco-centric world history, identifying the ancient lands of the Turks as the cradle of western civilization by racially tracing modern Europeans to Turks.25 The infamous Sun-Language Theory, built on the speculative premise that ancient humans uttered the first Turkish words when in awe at the power of the Sun, attempted to establish the antiquity of the Turkish language by claiming it to be a superior language from which all other languages were derived.26 Several international congresses were organized in Turkey, with the intention to attract western scholarly support for these ideas. In these congresses, race appears as a meta-discourse indicating the relevance and significance of historical, linguistic, anthropological or archaeological arguments. In moments of emotional effervescence, scientific rhetoric was occasionally replaced by anecdotal and self-referential evidence, which reflects the attitude toward whiteness in contemporary Turkey. For example, in the first Congress of Turkish History in 1932, the general secretary of the Turkish Society of History and the prospective minister of education, Res¸it Galip, gave a long presentation on ‘the history of Turkish race and civilization’ with the sole purpose of refuting claims as to the ‘yellowness’ of Turks. At one point during his lecture Galip quipped, ‘in order to disprove the classificatory theory followed in this work beyond any doubt, it is sufficient, I believe, for those who are present here as part of the Turkish race to take a look at one another’.27 Furthermore, a parallel scientific discourse emerged based on the work of psychiatrists, anthropologists, and medical doctors. In their passionate search for the essence of Turkishness, scholars, in studies that involved rather crude strains of nineteenth-century race science, used, among other indicators, blood types, bones, skulls, body types, hair and eye colour, and nose shape. A book published by the ruling Republican People’s Party in 1938 connected genetics to national identity and modernity in the following way:

The importance of genetics is great especially from a national perspective. A Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015 citizen who has learned how the weaknesses of body and character transmit and how these could create a disaster for the homeland would find a way to fulfil his duty in the most correct manner. Finally, it is again thanks to the knowledge of genetics that a nation, whose grandfathers created a great civilization, becomes sure of holding the same talents, although it stagnated for years without any development; and its chest that proudly rises with this confidence finds a greater strength to destroy the obstacles to progress lying ahead.28

Clearly, hereditary studies tried not only to reach a deﬁnitive view of biological Turkishness and to propose eugenic measures to protect this biological essence, but they also stressed the importance of racial essences for acquiring modernity. In a rather ambitious attempt to measure the racial characteristics of Turkishness, Afet Inan,_ an adoptive daughter of Atatu¨rk, collected data from 64,000 inhabitants of Turkey in the hope of taking a racial snapshot of Turkish citizens. The data sheets 834 M. Ergin

contained ten demographic questions and 27 anthropometric measurements, adding up to more than 2 million records for the entire research project. The project, part of Inan’s_ dissertation research at the University of Geneva,29 was fully supported by the government from its implementation to its publication.30 The government’s support for race science did not translate into extensive policy applications, as it did in Germany or the United States in the same period. However, scholarly discussions spilled over into popular debates and the legal arena. Historians wrote for the purpose of inculcating generations of students with pride in the superiority of Turkish history, language, and race. The ‘Speak Turkish’ campaigns attempted to eliminate minority languages from the public arena and especially targeted Jews.31 The Law of Settlement, enacted in 1934, attempted to assimilate minorities through forced migration.32 Minorities faced discrimination in numerous governmental domains, ranging from the military to public employment.33 This was a period in which race marked a domain beyond citizenship both in the deﬁnition of Turkish identity and the perceptions of minorities.

It is difficult to deny the empirical reality of racial vocabularies prominent in the formative years of Turkish national identity. Considering how the concept of race abounded in most mainstream and government-supported arenas, surprisingly little attention has been given to create a theoretical framework to understand the legacy of early republican racial discourses. The contentious question here is: how systemic was the role of racial vocabularies in the creation of the boundaries of national belonging? The relative lack of attention to race signals a tendency to consider republican racial discourses largely an aberration, a historical accident originating from the idiosyncrasies of individual deviations. Although a number of studies describe the systemic nature of ethno-racial concepts in the one-party era,34 defensive apologies seem to trivialize racial discourses instead of paying attention to their content and significance. Five prevalent arguments hamper attempts to take race in the formation of Turkish identity seriously. Common to all five is treating race as aberrational and epiphenomenal, a laughable Frankenstein created by an insignificant group of individuals. Before examining the role of immutability and chromatism in Turkish identity, it is important to analyze the following arguments Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015 critically. Race as Aberration 1: Race Merely Meant Nation. Reifying nations runs the risk of naturalizing nationalist practices in scholarship.35 A fine line exists between emphasizing the facticity and dominance of nationalism as a form of contemporary political organization and paying attention to the practice of nationalism as it has historically been conflated with other forms of differentiation, such as race, gender, and sexuality. The conceptual overlapping of race, ethnicity, and nation are hard to deny;36 yet relegating race to a terminological confusion by presenting it simply as the linguistic equivalent of nation37 reduces historical complexity. The distinctions between race and nation may appear relatively straightforward at first. However, immense challenges emerge from the historical trajectories of non-western cultures. For example, the terms ‘race’ and ‘culture/history’ are inseparable in Japanese,38 rendering the simple reduction of race into the biological and ethnicity into the cultural arena outright futile. ‘Is the Turk a White Man?’ 835

The question of what race meant in early republican Turkey (lineage, descent, nation, and so forth), a question justified in its attention to perceptions of historical actors, should be followed by what race did in terms of a formation of immutable identities, insurmountable differences, and persistent distinctions. Employing the concepts of nation, language, or ethnicity euphemistically in instances where racial discourses serve nationalist projects reduces the complexity of racial discourses. The important point to recognize here is that the maintenance of racial hegemonies occurs within the institutional and discursive frameworks of nationalism. Regardless of how the term itself is used, Balibar describes racism based on its characteristic insistence on the insurmountability of cultural differences and the dangers of eliminating national borders for existing traditions.39 Race, then, goes beyond prejudice, foregrounding its ability to define.40 The literature on nationalism tends either to reject race as an aberration or to accept its articulation in only certain types of nationalisms, although a large body of research has explicated how the practice of nationalism cooperates with race empirically and theoretically.41 Balibar observes that it is difficult to analyze nationalism ‘because the concept never functions alone’.42 The idea of race harbours a powerful sense of essential, timeless, and unchanging identity, so that ‘group formation seems destined as eternal, fated as unchanging and unchangeable’.43 Similarly, Manzo claims that questions of belonging to particular national communities tend to be resolved at broader levels of inclusion and exclusion, which permeate the distinctions between ethnic/biological and civic/cultural differences. ‘Nationalism’s dominant conceptual partners’, states Manzo, ‘are not simply nation and state. They are also race and alien, for without the racialized kind of alien there can be no national kin.’44 Manzo’s analysis takes the connections between race and nation beyond historical accidents and into a realm of ideological framework of sameness/difference, inclusion/exclusion, and self/other, illustrating that ‘[n]ational inclusion is contingent upon racial sameness’.45 The existence and continuation of a national system of inclusion and exclusion depends on and makes possible the formulation of racial projects and daily practices even in the absence of the term.46 Thus, one can talk about race without uttering the word at all.47 Race as an Aberration 2: The Absence of Resentment. In their quest to build an anti-colonial identity, post-colonial nationalisms attempt to manufacture a distinctive identity different from and opposed to the identity imposed by what Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015 they imagine as ‘the West’. Cultural autonomy and particularity, so central for late nationalisms, coexist with a related desire to compete with the West by using a strategy of modernization. This paradox of inventing a unique ‘folk’ culture while trying to join a ‘universal’ scheme of modernization48 is further complicated by Chatterjee: one of the fundamental tenets of western modernity which post-colonial nationalisms are so eager to adopt revolves around the veiled yet powerful idea that the late adopters (the colonial, ‘Eastern’, or ‘backward’ subject) represent the very negation of modernity. In other words, the definition of modernization stipulates the existence of others whose essential qualities make them unfit for modernization.49 Acknowledging the paradox between authenticity and modernization, Greenfeld identifies post-colonial resentment toward the West as a historical black hole that sucks late nationalisms toward primordial self-identification.50 Turkey as a non-colonized late modernizer presents an anomalous case. Gellner insists that Turkey’s non-colonial past singles it out as a case of endogenous 836 M. Ergin

modernization, for modernization, he argues, was not imposed by western powers.51 For some scholars, Turkey’s non-colonial past indicates a lack of resentment towards western powers, which, in turn, leads to the unproblematic adoption of modernity. According to this view, the main motive in Turkish nationalism was acquiring modernity, and primordial discourses only had some limited and largely marginal role within the project of modernization. In a sophisticated example of this view, we encounter a model that, similar to Greenfeld’s, revolves around the nature and amount of resentment toward the West and identifies Turkish nationalism as neither civic nor ethnic, but as a modernist type.52 Countries like Turkey, as the argument goes, can afford to emphasize modernization at the expense of ethnic nationalism thanks to the absence of western colonization. Even before asking whether in theory modernization and ethnic nationalisms are mutually exclusive categories, one needs to evaluate the empirical claims that modernity was not imposed on Turkey and that its non-colonial status significantly restrained feelings of resentment. Since the late Ottoman modernization, modernity was periodically imposed through wars, economic coercion and political domination. Ottoman efforts of modernization as the precursor of Turkish modernity can be summed up as ‘the growing influence of Europe in the Ottoman Empire and the reactions it brought about in the Ottoman state and society’.53 As far as resentment is concerned, even a cursory look at the popular western perceptions of the Turks and Turkey in the twentieth century reveals the continuation of centuries-old prejudices. The historical images of ‘the Terrible Turk’, ‘the scourge of Europe’, and later ‘the sick man of Europe’54 were so ingrained over time that westerners in the first half of the twentieth century who questioned these images upon closer contact with Turkey presented their change in opinion as a radical conversion.55 The Republican elite were painfully aware of stereotypical presentations of ‘the Terrible Turk’. They were also aware that stereotypes about the lack of civilization in Turkey were deeply racial, referring not to temporary conditions, but to permanent dispositions. The resentment toward European misconceptions gave the cultural modernization in the 1930s its anti-western character. The racial vocabulary of Turkishness was in part a response to European images of the sub-human Turk. The difficulty of adjusting to the power politics of the inter-war period, especially after having lost the imperial power of the Ottoman Empire, also made the Turkish elite Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015 resentful of what was seen as losing the achievements on the battlefield to European manipulation at the negotiation table. An important consequence was a chronic sense of injustice and the idea of the lonely Turk confronting the entire world. Charges of western misunderstandings slowly led to ‘social paranoia’.56 In 1938, a member of the official Turkish History Association set out to answer western claims about the Turks’ lack of propensity to make progress: ‘this fifteen-year-old history of our Reforms refuted, rejected in reality, and contradicted the claims and theories that were put forth in the past, both by our friends and our enemies, along the lines of ‘‘Turks are no good, the racial capabilities of Turks are not fit for progress’’’.57 It would be a mistake to reduce the discursive and material presence of ‘the West’, as it was perceived by the early republican elite, to the institutional arrangement of colonialism. Only after acknowledging this complex reality of ambivalence toward modernity can we see that, despite Turkey’s non-colonial status, the racial orientation in Turkish nationalism was not an unruly force peripheral to modernist ‘Is the Turk a White Man?’ 837

tendencies. Modernization and race were cooperative, not competitive. Resentment toward the West did not result in aborting the project of modernization, but led to attempts to manufacture a native modernity, on the one hand, and, in moments of extreme self-confidence, to appropriate the project of modernity in its entirety as a genuinely Turkish product on the other hand. The bonds between race and nation in the context of modernity, while transnational in origin, served particular local purposes. To elaborate the links between modernity and race, we need to examine what ‘the West’ represented in the eyes of republican reformers. The Turkish adoption of race into nationalism is an inventive attempt to resist imitative modernization and create a sense of non-western modernity. While liberty and equality on an individual basis was becoming the basis of modernity, intellectuals in the West engaged in a gigantic task of classifying groups of people according to race using pseudo-scientific methods.58 The Enlightenment promise of equal access to modernity had been waning throughout the nineteenth century, resulting in conservative trends in a search for Turkish authenticity.59 It was in this context that the late Ottoman and early republican elite realized that claiming selfhood in the modern world would not be possible without appropriating a racial affiliation. Race was not only a particularistic identity to cling to in the modern world, it was also a quasi-universalist way of affiliating oneself with the project of modernity on the side of the classifiers – that is, the West. Western scientific traditions emphasized the correlation between whiteness and modernity so successfully that the direction of causality had effectively lost its significance: modern was white; therefore only whites had the ability to modernize. The abstract picture of modern rationality portrayed its subjects as ‘exclusively white, male, European, and bourgeois’.60 As modernity lost its earlier universalistic appeal and was transformed into particularistic projects embedded in the context of nation- states, national elites scrambled to establish the racial purity and whiteness of their national communities, since race was an important criterion in deciding who would be included in the project of modernity.61 The republican elite were aware that an effective way to acquire the abstract and universal identity of modernity was to cling to concrete and particular identities of white and European. Republican efforts to rewrite Turkish history and, in doing so, to reject its imperial Ottoman past had crucial consequences for the emergence of racial discourses. On Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015 the one hand, the republican elite clearly and genuinely deemed modernization a desirable goal, and they were ready to crush anything that potentially constituted an obstacle on the road to modernization.62 On the other hand, late Ottoman modernization complicated this project of regulated amnesia, because rejecting the Ottoman past simultaneously implied rejecting Ottoman modernization.63 Ottoman modernization was superficial, because it did not successfully penetrate larger segments of Ottoman society. Westernization in the Ottoman past, when effective, was also too deep, because modern Ottomans were too cosmopolitan and imitative. Against this putatively rootless and imitative modernization, the republican way was presented as something more than a simple derivative discourse. Republican revolutionaries attempted to assemble a modernity that was not foreign to the origins of the Turks, while they were busily inventing these origins. A side effect of these efforts was a mixed approach toward the West. As the inspiration of modernization, the West was to be adored. Nevertheless, it was also to be feared, for 838 M. Ergin

modernizing inappropriately could result in losing one’s essential identity. At this point, the republican elite took a daring, almost desperate, step to tackle the paradox by making modernity invariably native. Establishing racial, historical, and linguistic ties between Turks and Europeans operated as a mechanism for this purpose. If one could show that western achievements were originally a Turkish creation, there would be no danger in adopting modernity. Beyond the farcical façade of the likes of the Sun-Language Theory linger audacious and lasting attempts to negotiate with modernity. The racial vocabularies of the 1930s helped create an atmosphere where Turkish modernization was seen as claiming what was originally Turkish. Studies to prove the whiteness of Turks used rather crude arguments of race science; however, insertion of modernity into the equation took them to the cultural terrain. Whiteness ended up being a dominant yet silent social category that defined Turkishness and linked Turkey to modernity. Race as an Aberration 3: Not Enough Biology. In this view, the conceptual presence of race in Turkey is merely epiphenomenal because it refrains from references to biology.64 Çagaptay, for example, insists that race in Turkey was ‘defined through language and not genetic factors’,65 ignoring the fact that linguistic efforts of the period implicitly or explicitly intended to establish Turkish racial superiority. In the ‘not enough biology’ argument, it is hard to miss the efforts to classify nationalism into ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ types. Distinguishing between civic and ethnic nationalisms has been so fundamentally embedded in the literature on nationalism that the dichotomy, in its scholarly guise, has accommodated a moral evaluation at an almost subconscious level, although this pernicious distinction has been thoroughly questioned in recent works.66 Beyond its moral position, however, we need to question the historical basis of this argument. An explicitly biological body of work – inspired by global eugenics and supported by the Turkish government – was circulating in the scholarly arena in addition to racial vocabularies employed in historical, linguistic, and anthropological studies.67 However, blindly delving into historical data to show the extent of biological manifestations implicitly internalizes the premise of ‘not enough biology’. Too much attention to biology in race ignores the way racial discourses are disseminated in cultural disguises. Thus, the major weakness of this argument stems from its simplistic definition of race as merely a biological category. In certain settings, race is Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015 at the foreground. In others, it ominously sits in the background, denying its significance (or even existence) within a fuzzy cultural nexus. Critical whiteness studies68 draws attention to racial camouflaging: the real power of racial classifications originates not in their ability to reveal, but to conceal. Race and ethnicity are as much a characteristic of the centres of societies as of their margins, and it is not unusual for dominant identities to enforce their powerful positions by concealing their very existence. Invisible power works more efficiently and offers fewer possibilities for resistance. In order to understand whether racial discourses were, and still are, deviations from the normality of civic citizenship, we need to identify how the ‘normal’ sense of belonging to a Turkish identity was constructed. Two important aspects destabilize a simplistic distinction between biological and cultural aspects of race in early republican Turkey. First, the cultural, historical, and linguistic boundaries of Turkishness emerged as immutably drawn. The pre-given nature of culture excluded any possibility of change in the certainties of historically, ‘Is the Turk a White Man?’ 839

linguistically, and anthropologically established essences. The systemic significance of immutable essences linked nationalist projects to racial ones. Secondly, the ambivalent characteristic of Turkish modernity surfaced in an atmosphere of admiration and suspicion toward the West. The early republican efforts to invent a genuine modernity – while scientifically establishing the racial capabilities of Turks for modernization – linked race and modernity in resolute ways. These links between race, nationalism, and modernity reveal how racial discourses in the early republican period overflowed into the cultural domain. Race as Aberration 4: The West Had It, Too. An appeal to historical necessity usually accompanies this argument, according to which it was only natural to see the diffusion of racial vocabularies to Turkey, considering the European and North American interest in race science in the same period. Apart from its superficiality, this argument also builds around a sense of unilinear history: non-western countries automatically follow western trends. Both justifying and trivializing racial discourses in Turkey, this argument turns into a defensive apology or justification for the past. It inhibits critical analysis, reveals Eurocentric tendencies, and undervalues the historical significance of the Turkish case. The deterministic angle presented in this argument ignores the fact that the development of racial vocabularies in the 1930s followed a more complex picture in which local actors were sifting through global currents, applying them according to the demands of local contexts. This perspective also falls short of offering a comparative framework which analyzes the nature of racial vocabularies in different settings. The apparent comparison between Europe and Turkey ends up being formulated only in terms of similarities and differences,69 simultaneously naturalizing nation-states as the only comparative entities. A more fruitful approach would focus on the transnational nature of racial vocabularies, paying attention to linkages and movements across nation-state borders. The 1930s witnessed an immense amount of exchange between European and Turkish scholars in formulating the chromatic base of Turkishness. A perspective that mechanically compares the similarities and differences between the West and Turkey misses the significance of these linkages. Race as Aberration 5: Race Was Only Intended to Build Self-Confidence. For the proponents of this argument, racial discourses in the early republican period served in the framework of national confidence-building and then simply disappeared after Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015 the Second World War, when they were no longer needed. The republican elite, according to this view, intentionally used exaggerated racial claims of Turkish superiority merely to facilitate the process of transition from imperial to national identities and to inject a strong dose of self-confidence into the dejected Anatolian population. Race could be considered a secular rival to Islamic and imperial identities of the Ottoman past. However, taking this argument too far implies that the outlandish racial claims were historically necessary, and that a unified and manipulative bloc of elite existed to disseminate them to a passive recipient. Although a part of the elite might have considered racial mobilization as a tool for building national consciousness, it is hard to talk about the conspiracy of an omniscient elite group, because clearly the majority sincerely believed the validity of racial claims and enthusiastically participated in their production. The goal of building a self-confident national culture, even if true, does not convincingly establish that racial discourses in Turkey were insignificant, necessary, justified or 840 M. Ergin

benign in nature; nor does it show that they were transient. As the following section will illustrate, the links between modernity and racial discourses resulted in systemic eﬀects, rendering them simultaneously taken-for-granted and concealed. Although the 1950s marked the disappearance of biological vocabularies from the oﬃcial idiom, the cultural content of race has remained intact.

Although racism today has no mainstream appeal, its consequences persist, both institutionally (especially in education and the economy) and discursively (especially in immigration policies and religious and cultural debates).70 Turkey is no exception in terms of the persistence of racial discourses in the face of acute denial of their existence: ‘The official discourse, revealed in newspapers, textbooks, and class discussions, even voiced by my family, has always been denial of racism in Turkey.’71 The public distaste toward the term ‘racism’ takes its ammunition from anecdotal evidence of Turkey’s tolerance toward ethnic and religious difference, usually ending in an often-cited statement: ‘we cannot be racists’.72 The negative connotations of racism stifle discussion as to the significance of racial conceptions in understanding Turkish identity. However, the gradual fading of race from scientific terminology, scholarly conferences, textbooks, or public speeches does not indicate the absence of an importunate legacy in cultural debates. Rather than concentrating on actual inequalities among different ethnic groups or the characteristics of minorities, this section will present selected examples to illustrate the discursive operation of race in contemporary Turkish identity. (However it is important to note that actual inter- group differences/inequalities are frequently used to justify a racial ideology of inferiority/superiority.) The most important manifestations of racial discourses surface in two forms: Immutability of Turkish identity and chromatic fascination with whiteness. A palpable characteristic of both forms is their concealed and taken- for-granted status. Racial discourses reside in dormant forms in the interstices of Turkish culture and erupt into visible existence only when stimulated. Recent scholarship emphasizes the malleability, hybridity, and socially constructed nature of identities.73 However, in the face of overwhelming religious, ethnic, and cultural diversity in contemporary Turkey, the idea of Turkish identity as a timeless and essential category persists. In this section, I will present examples to Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015 illustrate how Turkishness transcends citizenship to create a loosely marked yet widely taken-for-granted essential core. This core, ostentatiously excluding groups of Turkish citizens (such as non-Muslim minorities) while welcoming citizens of other nation-states (for example, central Asian Turkic republics), clearly extends beyond the voluntary and transient criteria implicit in national and ethnic belonging. The racial immutability of Turkishness surfaces in numerous venues of socialization, most importantly education and the media. Mass education invariably propagates national myths that manufacture a stereotyped image of both self and others.74 The gradual, although incomplete, decline of the nationalist paradigm and the Great Man history in several industrialized countries75 did not emerge as fast in Turkish textbooks, especially in challenging assumptions of immutability. From the 1930s, textbooks throughout the republican period have never portrayed a historically variable Turkishness. Despite the decline in the vocabulary of race per se and the rise of Islamic interpretations in ‘Is the Turk a White Man?’ 841

historical narratives, textbooks preserve early republican assumptions.76 In addition to including obvious references to the Turkish Historical Thesis, textbooks are still eager to claim a broad range of cultural zones as Turkish and carefully establish ethno-racial continuity between ancient civilizations and contemporary Turkey. When the Turks are anachronistically presented as a nation throughout history, students quickly realize that there is an innate and essential side to Turkishness beyond citizenship. History textbooks interweave the continuity between ancient Central Asian peoples and contemporary inhabitants of Turkey in such a timeless vacuum that students rarely distinguish 500-year-old from 5,000-year-old. As Bora shows: ‘Turks in every epoch of history and in every geography are imagined as being the one and the same political and social subject with present day Turks of Turkey.’77 Anachronistic comparisons and the compression of historical time in textbooks project into a timeless past in which central Asian heroes emerge as the precursors of the Kemalist ideology.78 Atatu¨rk’s authority is frequently conjured up to support views on the superiority of Turks in a decontextualized history: ‘Atatu¨rk had respect for all nations but saw the Turks as superior to all of them. He believed that there is no nation on earth more grand, pure and older than the Turkish nation and that there has never been one, either, all through the history of humanity.’79 The media, too, occasionally gives explicit references to the perpetual legacy of early republican racial theories. For example, a piece in a widely circulated newspaper about the most recent ‘scientific support’80 for the long discredited Sun-Language Theory did not create any public suspicion or debate. Some textbooks promote the idea of a superior race through an exaltation of the Turkish language, reproducing the premises of the Sun-Language Theory in contemporary Turkey. For example, a high school linguistic textbook claims: ‘Turkish does not contain the consecutive y’s or forceful r’s of Italian, or the consecutively used ‘sin’s, resembling the hissing of a snake, and the lisping s’s and z’s of Greek . . . The superiority of Turkish is thus revealed.’81 Textbooks assume that ‘societies have certain psychologies and personal characteristics for some historical reasons, which developed and survived with no change at all throughout history’.82 The trope of internal and external enemies, prejudiced views against minorities, ethnocentrism and xenophobia in textbooks83 are other characteristic manifestations of immutability. The myth, widely propagated by the Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015 educational system, that ‘every Turk is born a soldier’ shows the links between military service and the terrain of culture, nation and race.84 Ethnic and religious minorities in Turkey play a significant role in exposing assumptions of immutability that demarcate an acute distinction between citizenship and belonging in contemporary Turkey. While there exists a legal framework for constitutional citizenship, a subtle sense of distinction between Turkish citizens and Turks permeates society not only in daily life but also in the law.85 Examples indicating the nature of Turkishness as a category that is closed to some Turkish citizens are plenty. The story of the do¨nme, a group of Jewish converts to Islam, illuminates some of the tensions between citizenship and belonging. Although they are Ottoman and Turkish citizens for centuries, public mistrust toward the do¨nme frequently surfaces in conspiracy theories and media coverage.86 Recently, public discussions regarding property rights of minorities revealed a tendency to treat and name them as ‘foreigners’.87 These slips of the tongue, affecting even the prime 842 M. Ergin

minister of Turkey, mark the limits of belonging offered to those outside of immutable Turkishness. In contrast to internal others whose belonging is suspect, there are external others whose Turkishness is more readily confirmed despite the absence of citizenship ties. Easily discernible evidence for this claim, as revealed in such slogans as ‘one nation, two states’, is the treatment of the people of the Central Asian Turkic Republics by Turkish media88 and textbooks89 as part of a broad category of Turkishness whose boundaries are certainly wider than civic. Similarly, the immutable nature of Turkish identity reveals itself in the case of people of Turkish descent who have acquired another citizenship. Consistently naming them Turks regardless of their preferences indicates how Turkishness has been imagined as having a core that can resist assimilation. For example, the Turkish media perceived a Turkish-German rap group’s popularity as a sign of what the ‘Turk’ is capable of accomplishing, thus denying any contextual variability to Turkishness.90 In a more recent example, the candidacy of Dutch citizens of Turkish origins to the Netherlands’ national assembly appeared in the Turkish media as a conspiracy against ‘Turkish’ parliamentarians.91 ‘[The westerner] receives a shock’, eminent historian Toynbee explains in his book on Turkish transformation, ‘when his Turk turns out to be a White Man...indistinguishable in figure, features, colour and countenance from a native of Transalpine Europe’.92 Toynbee’s use of chromatic weapons as a test of the Turks’ ability to acquire modernity is not exceptional. The trope of a westerner who is shocked because of the resemblance between Turks and Europeans was routinely used by sympathetic westerners who wanted to support the Turkish efforts of modernization. While the racial immutability of Turkishness draws a line between Turkish citizenship and a fixed Turkish identity, chromatism manifests itself in a different form: fascination with skin colour and other physical features. A large body of literature has established the significance of skin-colour stratification, indicating that European features, such as light skin, light-coloured eyes and pale hair, are disproportionately rewarded in various settings. Although much of the research focuses on the way lighter colour among African-Americans corresponds to higher socio-economic status,93 the pattern applies to other racial groups in the US94 or even other countries, such as Hindus in India.95 In fact, some Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015 argue that skin colour functions as accurate a predictor of socio-economic status as interracial differences.96 Multicultural societies today need new visual paradigms and discursive practices to oppose the taken-for-granted nature of whiteness.97 Having emerged as a result of complex negotiations with modernity, chromatic imageries in contemporary Turkey survive in routine aspects of daily life. The transmogrification of biological statements into culturally charged notions of taste and distinction does not make race any less pertinent. Instead, the spillover of chromatism into the domains to tastes, lifestyles, and class distinctions indicates the mutability of racial discourses. Despite appearing in considerably different cultural contexts, certain racial ideas show immense resilience throughout the republican period. A rather peculiar one that hints at the unproblematic marriage between nationalist and racial discourses is the idea of the ‘Turkish type’ and the prestige associated with having a ‘European look’. An excerpt from the memoirs of Selma Ekrem, an early example of ‘nobody in ‘Is the Turk a White Man?’ 843

Europe believed I was a Turk’, indicates how racial responses to Turkishness from western audiences prompt a chromatic self-perception among the Turks:

No one believed that I was a Turk. The same astonishment followed in every place. I could not be a Turk, I was not the type. And when I asked what the type was, the Americans seemed lost to answer me. Some said they thought all the Turks had black hair and black eyes, and I being fair could not be a real Turk. Surely I must be mistaken. . . . And then I realized why no one believed me. Here in America lived a legend made of blood and thunder. The Terrible Turk ruled the minds of the Americans. A huge person with ﬁerce black eyes and bushy eyebrows, carrying daggers covered with blood. I did not ﬁt into the legend of the Terrible Turk, and so I was not one. In fact many people were disappointed: to meet a real Turk who turns out to be fair, meek and not very unlike an American.98

A number of studies present ethnographic evidence for the distinction associated with a ‘European look’ in contemporary Turkey. The economic transformation of Turkey in the 1980s and the emergence of middle classes in search of distinction led to the dissolving of chromatic discourses into matters of taste and consumption. Navaro-Yashin argues that European looks99 and blue eyes100 act as symbols of modernity and personal assets in the chromatic economy of urban self-representation. The positive value assigned to whiteness also emerges from the interactions between prostitutes from former Soviet Republics and their Turkish clientele.101 In sharp contrast, Turkish citizens of African descent, whose ancestors were brought to the Ottoman Empire as agricultural and domestic workers, are virtually invisible in definitions of Turkishness.102 In his study of different types of nationalism in Turkey, Tanıl Bora perceptively argues that ‘liberal neonationalism’ in Turkey suffers from ‘class racism’, conflating cultural, educational, professional, and consumption- related markers of class with ‘‘‘biological standards’’ (light complexion, tall stature, and other physical ‘‘acquisitions’’)’.103 Furthermore, for Bora, this cultural discourse conflated with chromatic statements runs the risk of ‘lead[ing] to the eugenic tendency of neoracism in the event that it gets carried away by the enthusiasm embodied in the assertion ‘‘the Turkish populace is becoming more comely’’’.104 Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015 Whiteness maintains a crucial symbolic role in Turkish debates around culture, class, lifestyle and status. The 1980s in Turkey witnessed the creation of an urban middle class elite in a liberalizing country. When the newly emerging middle classes began leaving city centres for a new life in gated communities,105 their representatives in the media discovered the power of the chromatic approach to a multitude of social issues. One of the key concepts, ‘white Turks’ marks the permeability of the boundaries between race and class/status distinctions. The term was originally produced as a critique of the new middle class yearning for distinction. The implicit assumption in its original meaning was the expression of a naı¨ve disbelief at the magnitude of inequalities in a country without races. However, the term ‘white Turks’, together with the embedded racial references against which the term itself was coined to oppose, was quickly appropriated by the representatives of new middle classes in the media. The significance of physical markers in this cosmology of cultural distinction leads some scholars to call this post-1980 844 M. Ergin

phenomenon ‘white Turk racism’.106 The term ‘white Turks’, usually to be contrasted with ‘dark’ or ‘black Turks’, corresponds to categories of civilizational superiority and inferiority as well as their attendant physical manifestations,107 reveals the immersion of chromatism in concrete issues of daily life. The language of chromatic distinctions range from a fear of ‘invasion’ of urban centres by uncultured masses to markers of otherness, such as moustache, body odour, and dark complexion.108 For example, a newspaper columnist, Ertugrul O¨zko¨k, considers one of the defining characteristics of ‘new Turks’ their physical appearance.109 Another, rather sharp-tongued journalist, Mine G. Kırıkkanat, employs a broad framework of Orientalism towards groups that she identifies as ‘masses’,110 identifying the inhabitants of Istanbul’s slums as almost subhuman groups consuming the economic and cultural resources of the city.111 Kırıkkanat’s imagery portrays the ‘masses’ as thick people with short legs, long arms and hairy bodies112 who are apparently similar to Africans or Arabs.113 The use of whiteness in delineating the limits of modernity and civility requires identifying ‘others’ whose difference improves the discursive stability of chromatism. Prejudices against Arabs and, more recently, against immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa114 need to be evaluated in the light of chromatic formations in Turkey. Images of Africa and the Arab world have been successfully associated with darkness, backwardness, and disorganization in such a way that widespread statements along the lines of ‘this [insert a negative event] would not happen even in Uganda’ makes intuitive sense within the confines of Turkish culture. In order to emphasize the sense of difference between Turkish whiteness and African or Arab darkness, some columnists, for example, do not hesitate to use extremely offensive terms toward African-Americans, calling them thieves and orang-utans.115 Losing any kind of inhibition becomes easier when talking about external others, rather than internal ones. Similarly, the outright racist approach in the Turkish media toward athletes who were born in African countries and the former communist bloc and later acquired Turkish citizenship116 indicates that the criterion for Turkishness is far deeper than citizenship. In addition, black soccer players in Turkey frequently suffer from chromatic encounters. Black players are usually taken as stereotypical images of their country or of the entire African continent. A sports commentator’s attempt to teach a black player the value of Turkey by stating that ‘this is not Patagonia or Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015 another African country’117 resonates with the discourse of ‘this is not Uganda’. In fact, a vivid example of discursive dehumanization and reduction of black players occurred when a Turkish club owner called an African player ‘cannibal’.118

The literature on whiteness posits that race is not simply a characteristic of racial minorities. Similarly, evaluating the use of race in the Turkish context cannot occur by merely concentrating on minorities. Some scholars cite the assimilative zeal of inter-war Turkish nationalism as an indication of the ineffectiveness of racial ideas in that period;119 however, one needs to realize that assimilation efforts presuppose that a central question has been answered: ‘Assimilate into what?’ The answer entails the construction of a central, ubiquitous, and equally vague identity that defines the nature and terms of the process of assimilation, while limiting the option of assimilation only to certain groups. Assimilation in inter-war Turkey was inclusive, ‘Is the Turk a White Man?’ 845

because the ideology of the period proclaimed that almost everyone in the world had historical, linguistic, or racial linkages to Turkishness. Yet it was not inclusive in the sense of accepting cultural differences under a broad rubric of national culture. In this sense, assimilation was formulated in terms of Turks’ natural capabilities to assimilate others into an undefined Turkishness. This essay started with the question of how we can create a theoretical framework for investigating the racial vocabulary of the early republican period in Turkey. Given the multitude of racial metaphors, references, and works in that period, the absence of scholarly interest on this issue is striking. While Omi and Winant rightly insist on the autonomy of racial formations in the context of US race relations,120 the seemingly unlimited capacity of the concept of race to mutate should help us qualify its universal appeal and conceptual coherence. On one hand, we can take the historical experience of modernity as the central force in the formation of racism.121 In this view, race emerges as a historically specific concept whose manifestations can be clearly identified despite extreme variations. On the other hand, others present a picture in which race functions as part of a general category of group formation.122 When addressing the issue of the specificity of race as a historical product, the Turkish case may offer the possibility for a middle ground for these two views. Throughout the article, I have argued that race and modernity are intrinsically related in the Turkish case. However, the conceptual clarity of the term has also been lost over time. In this sense, racial vocabularies have lost their specificity and become conflated with other forms of group formation, especially with class and cultural distinction. In order to examine the contemporary conflation of race and its combined effects with ethnicity and nation in the Turkish context, scholars first need to take the racial vocabulary of the republican period seriously and employ a broad perspective that acknowledges the intermixtures between these concepts. I employ the concepts of immutability and chromatism for two reasons. First, they go beyond the linguistic barriers set by current connotations of race and racism that stifle the public reflection on the issue. They are also useful for drawing attention to the difference of the Turkish experience, which never led to the institution of a racist state formation, while at the same time acknowledging the fascination with race in the republican era and its legacy in the formation and maintenance of Turkishness. Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015

Notes 1. E. Kalkan, ‘Sabiha Go¨kçen Mi Hatun Sebilciyan Mı’, Hu¨rriyet, 21 February 2004. 2. D. Karaosmanoglu, ‘Modası Geçmis¸Irkçılık Manzaraları’, Radikal, 7 March 2004, p.6. 3. O¨. Yılmaz, ‘Ermeni Iddiasını,_ Ilk_ Uçus¸Tarihi Çu¨ru¨ttu¨’, Milliyet, 23 February 2004; H. Tekin, ‘Sabiha Go¨kçen Tartıs¸masında Kim Ne Yazdı’, Hu¨rriyet Pazar, 29 February 2004, p.6. 4. ‘Is the Turk a White Man?’ The New York Times, 30 September 1909, p.8. 5. N. Maksudyan, Tu¨rklu¨gu ¨ O¨lç mek: Bilimkurgusal Antropoloji ve Tu¨rk Milliyetç iliginin Irkçı Ç ehresi 1925–1939 (Istanbul: Metis, 2005). 6. A. Aktar, ‘Kemalistlerin Irkçılıgı Meselesi’, Radikal Kitap, 15 July 2005; U. O¨zkırımlı, ‘Maksudyan’da Yeni Birs¸ey Yok’, Radikal Kitap, 5 August 2005; S. So¨kmen, ‘Irkçılık, Bir Bakıs¸ Açısı ve Du¨nyayı Yorumlama Tarzıdır’, Radikal Kitap, 26 August 2005; K. Varol, ‘Tu¨rk’u¨n Antropoloji Ile_ Imtihanı’,_ Radikal Kitap, 1 July 2005. 7. A. Bonnett, White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives (Harlow and New York: Prentice Hall, 2000); A.W. Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 846 M. Ergin

8. B. Blauner, Still the Big News: Racial Oppression in America, Rev. and expanded ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); E. Bonilla-Silva, White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Boulder, CO: L. Rienner, 2001); H.L. Dalton, ‘Failing to See’, in Paula S. Rothenberg (ed.), White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism (New York: Worth, 2002); C. Herring, V. Keith and H.D. Horton, Skin Deep: How Race and Complexion Matter in the ‘Color- Blind’ Era (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 9. K. Crenshaw et al., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: New Press, 1995). 10. For examples of the latter, see G.W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: Addison- Wesley, 1954); P.R. Ehrlich and S.S. Feldman, The Race Bomb: Skin Color, Prejudice, and Intelligence (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1977); J.M. Jones, Prejudice and Racism (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1972). 11. A.Aktar, Varlık Vergisi ve ‘Tu¨rkles¸tirme’ Politikaları (Istanbul: Iletis_ ¸im, 2000), pp.89–99; Ç.Keyder,State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development (London and New York: Verso, 1987), pp.107–9. 12. Aktar, Varlık Vergisi ve ‘Tu¨rkles¸tirme’ Politikaları; R.N. Bali, Cumhuriyet Yıllarında Tu¨rkiye Yahudileri: Bir Tu¨rkles¸tirme Seru¨veni (Istanbul: Iletis_ ¸im, 1999). 13. G.G. O¨zdogan, ‘Turan’dan ‘Bozkurt’a: Tek Parti Do¨neminde Tu¨rkçu¨lu¨k (1931–1946) (Istanbul: Iletis_ ¸im, 2001); U. Uzer, ‘Racism in Turkey: The Case of Huseyin Nihal Atsiz’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol.22, No.1 (2002), pp.119–30. 14. O¨zdogan, ‘Turan’dan ‘Bozkurt’a: Tek Parti Do¨neminde Tu¨rkçu¨lu¨k (1931–1946). 15. M.S¸. Bas¸oglu, Irk Psikolojisi (Istanbul: U¨niversite Kitabevi, 1943). 16. E. Copeaux, Tarih Ders Kitaplarında (1931–1993) Tu¨rk Tarih Tezinden Tu¨rk-Islam_ Sentezine, trans. Ali Berktay (Istanbul: Tu¨rk Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1998). 17. E. Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); S.J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981). 18. M. Yegen, ‘Citizenship and Ethnicity in Turkey’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.40, No.6 (2004), pp.51– 66; S. Çagaptay, ‘Population Resettlement and Immigration Policies of Interwar Turkey: A Study of Turkish Nationalism’, The Turkish Studies Association Bulletin, Vol.25–26, No.1–2 (2002), pp.1–24; I._ Aytu¨rk, ‘Turkish Linguists Against the West: The Origins of Linguistic Nationalism in Atatu¨rk’s Turkey’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.40, No.6 (2004), pp.1–25; M. Baer, ‘The Double Bind of Race and Religion: The Conversion of the Do¨nme to Turkish Secular Nationalism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol.46, No.4 (2004), pp.682–708; Bali, Cumhuriyet Yıllarında Tu¨rkiye Yahudileri; S. Çagaptay, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who Is a Turk? (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); K. Kiris¸çi, ‘Disaggregating Turkish Citizenship and Immigration Practices’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.36, No.3 (2000), pp.1–22; B. Oran, Atatu¨rk Milliyetçiligi: Resmi Ideoloji_ Dıs¸ı Bir Inceleme_ (Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi, 1990); T. Parla and A. Davison, Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004); A. Yıldız, Ne Mutlu Tu¨rku¨m Diyebilene: Tu¨rk Ulusal Kimliginin Etno-Seku¨ler Sınırları (1919–1938) (Istanbul: Iletis_ ¸im, 2001).

Downloaded by [Bilkent University] at 00:02 13 January 2015 19. S. Deringil, ‘The Ottoman Origins of Kemalist Nationalism: Namik Kemal to Mustafa Kemal’, European History Quarterly, Vol.23 (1993), pp.165–91; E.J. Zu¨rcher, ‘Kemalist Du¨s¸u¨ncenin Osmanlı Kaynakları’, in A. Insel_ (ed.), Kemalizm, Modern Tu¨rkiye’de Siyasi Du¨s¸u¨nce (Istanbul: Iletis_ ¸im, 2001). 20. B. Isyar, ‘The Origins of Turkish Republican Citizenship: The Birth of Race’, Nations and Nationalism, Vol.11, No.3 (2005), pp.343–60. 21. Copeaux, Tu¨rk Tarih Tezinden Tu¨rk-Islam_ Sentezine, p.23. 22. J.M. Landau, Pan-Turkism in Turkey: A Study in Irredentism (London: C. Hurst, 1981); F. Georgeon, Tu¨rk Milliyetç iliginin Ko¨kenleri: Yusuf Akç ura (1876–1935), trans. A. Er, 3rd ed. (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1999); D. Kushner, The Rise of Turkish Nationalism, 1876– 1908 (London: Frank Cass, 1977). 23. M. Arai, Turkish Nationalism in the Young Turk Era (Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1992); Y. Akçura, Tu¨rkçu¨lu¨gu ¨n Tarihi (Istanbul: Kaynak Yayınları, 1998 (1928)). 24. T.O.T.T. Heyeti, Tu¨rk Tarihinin Ana Hatları (Istanbul: Devlet Matbaası, 1931), p.1. 25. The thesis, formulated in the early 1930s, canonized in the second Congress of Turkish History in 1937. For the proceedings of the congress, see T.T. Kurumu, Ikinci_ Tu¨rk Tarih Kongresi (Istanbul_ 20–25 Eylu¨l 1937): Kongrenin Ç alis¸maları, Kongreye Sunulan Tebligler (Istanbul: Tu¨rk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1943). ‘Is the Turk a White Man?’ 847

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