Obama and the Black Turks
I had dinner last night with a Turkish-American friend who had watched Barack Obama’s speech about race. She said it reminded her of the Turkish situation. The Black Turks need to understand that when the White Turks say they’re afraid, that they need to be taken seriously, that there’s something behind that fear. They shouldn’t just be dismissed as anti-religious fascists. Similarly, White Turks need to look beyond their disgust at the headscarf and understand that the sense of oppression felt by pious (Black) Turks has a real cause. (I’m elaborating here a little on what my friend said, but I think the comparison is apt.)
Black Turk is popular shorthand for pious, conservative Turks, and White Turk for Kemalist secular elites. “Black Turks” is usually used by White Turks in a slightly derogatory way.
My friend also said she thought that the more outrageous nationalism became, the more ostentatious the outfits and symbols.
Prosecutor Yalcinkaya
The term “White Turks” was invented and then popularized by the late journalist Ufuk Guldemir, and in a similar vein, on a couple of occasions, female students wearing headscarves commented that “we are the blakcs of Turkey,” however I have never come across these terms, neither “the white Turks” nor the “black Turks,” employed by the “white Turks” themselves. Any acceptance of these terms by them would wholly negate their position. They reject that the headscarf issue is a civil rights issue, they believe that women wearing headscarves fall into either one of the following categories:
(i) they are ignorant, uneducated, and with limited intellectual capacity,
(ii) they are cunning and deceitful, and trying to play victim in order to gain material advantage,
(iii) they are forced by their fathers, brothers, or husbands into this secondary-class status of wearing headscarves,
(iv) they are simply ugly, and try to hide it beneath the scarf.