Abstract The founding fathers of the Turkish Republic worked to create “an imagined community” that would define them as Turks, regardless of their ethnic differences or primordial bonds with the “homeland.” Their rules were simple: if someone identifies as a Turk, they will be accepted as one. Within that framework, Afro-Turks, descendants of Africans brought to the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, became part of the new nation through citizenship, linguistic assimilation, and everyday participation in the civic rituals. Their visible difference did not prevent their integration, reflecting a model that operated through legal and cultural criteria rather than formal racial hierarchy. Yet their recent articulation of an “Afro-Turk” identity raises deeper questions about the mechanisms through which Turkishness is produced, negotiated, and transformed, particularly amid the post-2000 identity landscape, where new nationalist discourses and large-scale migration have reshaped how difference is perceived and accommodated. Drawing on in-depth interviews and historical analysis, this article demonstrates that Afro-Turks’ long-standing incorporation reflects the workings of everyday nationalism, symbolic whiteness, and conditional inclusion. Their experience shows that the republican promise of equality is realized most fully when difference is demographically small, politically unthreatening, and culturally unobtrusive, revealing the tacit norms that continue to structure belonging in Türkiye.
Buket Oztas (Wed,) studied this question.