This paper explores the late Ottoman and republican Turkish state elites' racialization of the Kizilbash Kurdish inhabitants of the Dersim region as being “Muslim sons of Muslims” in 1890s to becoming “Turkish sons of Turks” by 1930s. In their internal writings, state elites never doubted the Kurdishness of Dersimis, even after they came to believe that they had successfully Turkified them. Publicly, however, they argued that Dersim Kurds were indeed the purest Turks; that their Kizilbash belief system, which the state elite had until then perceived as deviant and threatening, reflected primordial Turkish shamanism; and that Dersim’s inaccessible geography had preserved ancient Turkish characteristics in Dersim’s Kizilbash. By the 1940s, the “Turkishness” of Dersim Kurds was so established that government officials considered calling them Kurds in public tantamount to a curse. The paper traces the historical evolution of this racialization process from the perspectives of both the state actors and the inhabitants of the region through archival sources, memoirs, travelogues, oral traditions, and ethnographic studies in multiple languages. It argues that racialization through epistemic violence served to legitimize the state's implementation of necropolitics and genocidal violence to colonize Dersim in the late 1930s.