In the context of the United States, white supremacy resonates with a long history and memories of slavery and Jim Crow, and the current resurgence of racism. In other parts of the world, the idea of whiteness stood in the middle of very different debates. In the late-19th and early 20th centuries, modernisers from Iran to Afghanistan, and from Japan to Turkey, turned to Western race science to bolster their efforts to establish the whiteness of the their nations in Western eyes, inject a much-needed confidence to their population in anticolonial struggles, and strengthen their bid for civilisation with racial credentials. While race science aimed to classify the world into the superior races of the West and the inferior races of the rest, modernisers around the world appealed to these same scientific precepts as authority for their campaigns. The Turkish case is a compelling one because of the magnitude of the whiteness campaign. In 1909, the US Circuit Court in Cincinnati set out to decide ‘whether a Turkish citizen shall be naturalised as a white person’. The New York Times covered the case without noting that the plaintiff who brought the case was a Turk. The Times asked: ‘Is the Turk… Read full this story
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The fantastic science of Turkey’s whiteness campaign – Murat Ergin have 277 words, post on aeon.co at April 3, 2019. This is cached page on NGHONG. If you want remove this page, please contact us.