Abstract
This study contributes to scholarship about the social construction of racial identity and its social memory. This contribution expands Golash-Boza’s (2015) conceptual model of Race and Racisms by incorporating a Whitening Process (WP) model. The WP model connects elements from racial formation theory, Whiteness studies, and Social Memory theory to show how White-supremacist discourses about a Southeastern European immigrant group, the Ottoman Greeks, were constructed, utilized, remembered, and forgotten. To test the WP model’s elements, this study employs a mixed-method approach. The approach consists of three distinct data samples and methodologies. First is the analysis of newspaper articles and books by opinion-makers that addressed Ottoman Greek immigrant identity construction. Second is the statistical analysis of archival data collected from ship passenger lists that included the documentation of national and racial classification (n=2046). This analysis presents the contribution made by the US Immigration Bureau to Ottoman Greek immigrant identity construction. The final data set and methodology is the coding of in-depth semi-structured interviews with 36 descendants of Ottoman Greek immigrants. The analysis of this data assesses the impact that the White-supremacist discourse had on their ancestors’ racial identity claims through the descendants’ recollections. The study’s broader objective is two-fold. First is the forging of social solidarity between descendants of Southeastern European immigrants writ-large, African Americans, and recent immigrants from Central and South American within an antiracist framework. And second, is the dissociation of White-supremacist Whiteness from Whiteness.
Presenters
Georgios TopalidisPhD Candidate, Sociology, University of Florida, Florida, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2022 Special Focus—At the Crossroads of Paradigms: Considering Heterodoxy in the Social Sciences
KEYWORDS
Whiteness, Immigration, Social memory, Late Ottoman Empire, United States
