'Is the Turk a White Man?'

Samuel Dolbee, New York University

Salloum Mokarzel (and many onlookers) giving Eleanor Roosevelt Lebanese cedar trees at Arlington National Cemetery. Mary Mokarzel Papers, University of Minnesota.

On Sep. 30, 1909, The New York Times published an editorial referencing American court cases struggling to decide whether, to paraphrase the piece's headline, "the Turk" might be considered "a white man."  This was a high-stakes question for many migrants.  Being considered a "free white person," after all, meant qualifying for American citizenship at the time.  

The editorial's entire purpose was to place the "Turks" within these racial hierarchies.  The piece suggested that "the original Turks were of the yellow or Mongolian race" but had become "intermingled with the Caucasian races whom they subjugated" as they moved west.  The Turks of 1909, according to the newspaper, emerged from a mix of "Arabs, Kurds, Slavs, Albanians, and Greeks" as well as "foreign slave girls of more mixed ancestry."  The editorial further noted that "the deposed Sultan Abdul (sic) shows unmistakably Semitic features."  This process of becoming whiter informed the Times's ultimate backhanded compliment: "They are a cruel and massacring people, and they have lost none of their ancient proclivities.  But they are also Europeans, as much 'white' people as the Huns, Finns, and Cossacks."  With Turkish racial genealogy traced, the Times concluded that Turks ought to be eligible for citizenship in the United States.    

But such a pronouncement did not end discussions in the Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman Turkish Republic (explored by Murat Ergin in his recent book), nor did they end discussions in America itself, where at least one reader was less than pleased. Salloum Mokarzel, the Lebanese-American editor of Al-Hoda, one of New York's largest Arabic newspapers at the time, registered a point of disagreement several days later in a letter to the editor.  No, he was not stung by the WASPy ideas about difference.  He didn't contradict the claims about what he called the "origin and evolution of the Turkish race."  In fact, Mokarzel deemed the New York Times's racial theories "correct and authentic."   

Rather, what Mokarzel found vexing was the editorial's apparent ignorance of the nature of the Ottoman Empire as a polyglot political entity.  "The main point at issue in this question," he reasoned, "is not the practicability of considering the Turk a white man, but the possibility of considering every Turkish subject a Turk."  This question of how to categorize someone hailing from a diverse empire has plagued many migrant communities, and Ottoman diasporas particularly.  It's even evident in some parts of Latin America today, where Arabs are still sometimes referred to as turcos, since the community's first members - mostly Christians from greater Syria - hailed from the Ottoman Empire.  For Mokarzel, the  categorization of all Ottomans as Turks clearly flattened the tremendous diversity of the state's citizens, former and current, in the empire and outside.  Mokarzel concluded, "In light of these facts it would appear to be sheer prejudice and absolute injustice to bar all Turkish subjects from the right of American citizenship."  American conceptions of citizenship based on black and white elided the shades of grey that accompanied differentiation and inclusion in any state, but perhaps in multiethnic domains like the Ottoman Empire especially.

                            

"Is the Turk a White Man?" New York Times, Sep. 30, 1909, p. 8.

"Turkish Subjects." New York Times, Oct. 3, 1909, p. 12. 

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