"Duru ve saf olanı al, karışık ve bulanık olanı bırak."

Vahidiyet ile Ehadiyet kavramlarının farkı

Turkish Whiteness

This is an excerpt from Murat Ergin’s article on aeon.co. Full version of this essay was published as ‘Turkey’s Hard White Turn’

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Afet İnan, Atatürk’s adopted daughter, took a French geography book to Atatürk, and asked him if, as the book says, Turks are of the yellow race. His response: ‘No, it cannot be. Let’s occupy ourselves with it. You work on it.’ İnan was only 20 years old. However, by delegating İnan the task of searching for Turkish origins, Atatürk made her a state-supported proponent of Turkish whiteness.

The Turkish government sent her to the University of Geneva in Switzerland to pursue a PhD in history under the direction of Eugène Pittard (1867-1962), a well-known anthropologist friendly to the idea that Turks were white. İnan later reported that her incredulity toward the Swiss scholar’s claim that Turks were part of the yellow race had two sources: 

Based on the pictures and information [in his book], I was looking around [to people’s skin colour] and noticing that [the information in the book] was not in agreement with reality … I also had bought Prof Pittard’s book Races and History (Les Races et l’Histoire, Paris 1924) at that time. Evidence in it did not correspond to this geography book either. 

İnan’s doctorate in sociology, completed in 1939, surveyed the physical characteristics of 64,000 Turks. She used her survey data to argue that the Turkish people were white.

So began the search for Turkish whiteness. It would veer between science and science-fiction, excavating skulls, searching for historical documents, analysing blood types, and studying ancient languages. At one point, the effort to establish Turks as the cradle of world civilisation led some Turkish archaeologists to even investigate the mythical sunken continent of ‘Mu’. They hoped that ‘Mu’ would establish what they believed to be the Turkish origins of Mayan civilisation. Turkish scholars in various disciplines – history, anthropology, archaeology – wanted to show that the West (and the entire world) owed its civilisation to ancient Turks. Both the Turkish people and Western publics had to be convinced.

In order to prevail over Western prejudices, the Turkish government overhauled the educational system using the West’s own weapon of science. They invited Western scholars to Turkey, and sent students for training abroad to leading, mostly European, universities. Turkish modernisers believed that importing science and modernity from the West was really just reclaiming what was originally Turkish.

The debate around Turkish whiteness had also arisen in the 19th century. After 1839, which marked the start of an imperial edict to modernise the Ottoman Empire, nationalist intellectuals in the empire promoted smaller-scale whiteness campaigns. The Ottomans ruled over large chunks of non-Turkish and non-Muslim populations, especially in Eastern Europe. Until the turn of 20th century, half of the population of Istanbul, the capital city of the empire, was non-Muslim. In such a heterogeneous society, the idea of Turkishness as the common identity emerged only in the 18th century. It was in part a response to the new assertions of Greek, Bulgarian and Arab nationalisms that arose in parts of the Ottoman Empire. 

**

The Ottoman empire entered the First World War on the side of Germany. Defeat led to the collapse of the empire, and the emergence of the Turkish republic. By the 1930s, Turkish reformers began emphasising the need for deep cultural transformation. In Europe and the US, the image of the ‘terrible Turk’ carried real popular power. Chester Tobin, an American who coached the Turkish Olympic track team in 1924, wrote in his memoirs: ‘The European cliché of the “Terrible Turk” had been sharply imprinted in the minds of Americans by the close of the First World War. It was cast in human baseness.’ The ‘Terrible Turk’ imagery was a legacy of the Ottoman government’s handling of non-Muslim minority populations and their nationalist claims. It also derived from brutal ethnic conflict between Muslim Turks and non-Muslim populations during the tumultuous years of First World War.

Americans and Europeans tended to understand differences between peoples and societies in racialised terms. In their minds, civilisational and racial qualities were deeply linked. This is why Turkish modernisers set out to establish the Europeanness or whiteness of Turks. They saw it as a means to the end, a way to authorise their reform goals: creating an ethnically homogenous country, Westernising it through cultural transformation, and insisting that Turks are the rightful owners of Western civilisation.

As it did in many countries, eugenics helped to shape Turkish nationalism. Eugenics was a pseudo-science that sought through manipulation of human evolution to encourage the reproduction of superior races and inhibit the growth of inferior races. The movement reached its epitome, and its catastrophic results, during the Nazi regime in Germany. Some of the Turkish scholars wanted to base claims to ancient Turkish civilisation on the supposedly scientific basis of eugenics’ biology. However, the eugenic canon of the first half of the 20th century assigned white superiority to Europeans, and relegated Turks to a class of inferior races. Turkish nationalists longed to change this, through scientific research.

Eugenics reached its peak of influence in North America and Europe, but prominent Turkish eugenicists also expressed their public support. Sadi Irmak (1904-90) was the most prominent. After an education in medicine and biology in Berlin, Irmak started popularising eugenics when he became professor of physiology at the University of Istanbul in 1933. Unlike an aloof academic, Irmak prolifically used popular media, such as newspaper articles, public talks and books, to popularise eugenic knowledge. Never hiding his fascination with Nazi policies of sterilisation and extermination, Irmak saw the Holocaust as an extension of rational government against racial mixture. In the 1970s, he served for a brief period as Turkey’s prime minister.

Other prominent Turkish scholars of eugenics also tried to popularise the cause. Newspapers published articles with eugenics-inspired headlines such as ‘Should the Mad, the Feeble-Minded, and the Sick Be Sterilised?’ While Turkish eugenicists were trying to establish the whiteness and Europeanness of their civilisation, Hitler was fantasising about a superior race that availed itself of what he saw as Islamic immorality and ruthlessness. In his memoirs, Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister of Armaments, noted that Hitler expressed admiration for the ruthlessness of Muslim Turks. Hitler wished Turks had conquered Europe and converted the continent to Islam. He imagined a superior race of ‘Islamised Germans’ who could circumvent the moral limits of Christianity. So race science could lead its believers to an array of conclusions about preferred or desirable political outcomes.

Working hours

Expecting people to wake at 6.30am and then to be mentally sharp when they arrive at work at 8am or 9am involves something of a fight against nature. Like physical performance, your mental skills peak and trough at various times throughout the day. Logical reasoning tends to peak between 10am and noon; problem-solving between noon and 2pm; while mathematical calculations tend to be fastest around 9pm. We also experience a post-lunch dip in alertness and concentration between about 2pm and 3pm. However, these are averages, so an early riser’s peak in problem-solving may arrive several hours earlier than a night owl’s.

Research into this area is only just beginning, but managers with early-bird tendencies have been found to judge employees who start work later as less conscientious, and to rate their performance lower, compared to those who share such managers’ sleep preferences. Not only would a greater appreciation of these individual differences, and allowances for different schedules, help to level the playing field, it could boost workplace productivity, and employees’ health and happiness: “If you are forcing an evening person to show up at 7am, all you have is a grumpy employee who sits there and drinks coffee, procrastinating until 9am because he simply can’t focus,” says Stefan Volk, a management researcher at the University of Sydney Business School.

Linda Geddes, Guardian