Racial otherness, citizenship, and belonging: experiences of “not looking like a Turk”

How does “not looking like a Turk” affect belonging and exclusion in contemporary Turkey? Perceptions of skin colour have the power to transcend socio-economic and national boundaries through experiences of racial otherness. This paper illustrates racialization by focusing on diverse groups of “outsiders”. Foreign-born professional athletes navigate a media field that mark them as permanent others, as demonstrated by media controversies around soccer player Mehmet Aurelio. Irregular migrants and African Turks undergo cumulative reminders of non-belonging in everyday encounters. This paper examines how a sense of racially motivated exclusion run through these experiences by (a) distinguishing legal citizenship from an immigrant’s symbolic belonging, (b) assigning immutable differences based on skin-colour perceptions, and (c) colonizing everyday life through microaggressions in both face-to-face and mediated interactions. Racialized microaggressions feed from a combination of historical residues – including Ottoman slavery and whiteness campaigns in the formation of Turkish identity – and contemporary global cultural flows.