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A Different Kind of Whiteness: Lessons Learned from the Whitening Process of Ottoman Greek Immigrants
Abstract
Donald Trump’s electoral victory in 2016 politically united moderate conservatives and White supremacists (Schrock et al., 2022). His defeat in 2020 led a significantly sized contingency from these groups to an insurrection on January 6, 2021. The scenes on the ground from that day reflected White supremacist ideology through rhetoric, symbolism, and violence. This study explores the social construction and historical underpinnings of White supremacy that inspired the events of January 6. Moreover, the study argues that Whiteness is a separate and distinct identity from White supremacist Whiteness and provides the theoretical pathway for decoupling Whiteness from White supremacist Whiteness. To explore how and why individuals increase their proximity to White supremacist Whiteness’s socioeconomic benefits and privileges, I propose the Whitening Process Model (WPM) (Topalidis, 2022). The WMP describes a series of White Supremacist Discourses (WSDs) which White supremacists use to create boundaries around White supremacist Whiteness. They deploy WSDs during episodes of intersectional racial contestation and confrontation to disparage Black, Indigenous, Latinos, Asians, immigrants, women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and low-income Whites (Topalidis, 2022). These episodes result in psychological tension experienced by the targeted groups, which I identify as racial dislocation (Topalidis, 2022). I argue that racial dislocation has acute and chronic facets and that the result of chronic racial dislocation is White amnesia (Mills, 2007). Finally, I argue that White amnesia results in the descendants’ increased proximity to White supremacist Whiteness. I test the model by applying its tenets to Ottoman Greek migrants who arrived in the US during the early 20th century. This study concludes by arguing that the knowledge of a European migrant group’s whitening process by their descendants serves as a conduit for their engagement with intersectional, anti-racist praxis.
Discipline
History
Sociology
Geographic Area
Anatolia
Balkans
Ottoman Empire
Sub Area
None