My Turkish friends thought it was odd that an American would leave the land of opportunity to seek an education. My American friends were concerned about my safety. They may have asked for different reasons, but the answer was the same: Because I’m black. Being black is as American as apple pie, and to Turks, a concept as foreign as apple pie.
As the fight for racial equality in the United States has reached a turning point this year, I have been reminded of how Turkey has often been a haven for those of us who continue to resist racial injustice in the United States.
My father is African-American and my mother is Turkish. He served in the US Army and was stationed at a NATO base in Izmir, Turkey in the 1980s, where they met, fell in love, and married. I was born in 1988 at a US air base in Frankfurt, in what was then West Germany. My upbringing was an unusual intersection of race, culture, language, nationality, and religion.
It was my Turkish aunt, Yildiz (“Teize” in Turkish), who introduced me to black thought and politics. From 1996 to 1999, she lived with my family while studying in the US. She would often pick me up from elementary school and take me to great HBCU campuses. She also introduced me to both Turkish and American writings at home. It was through Yildiz Teize that I first learned about Malcolm X.
When asked why he came to Turkey, Baldwin famously replied, “I can’t breathe. I can only look at it from the outside.”
I decided to study in Istanbul, an experience that highlighted how stifled I had felt by racial tensions in the United States, and discovered that I was not the first African-American to feel this way in Turkey.
Half a century ago, James Baldwin emigrated to Istanbul for a decade to escape the civil unrest of the 1960s. When asked why he came to Turkey, he would say, “I can’t breathe. I can only see from the outside.” For him, “I can’t breathe” revealed the extent to which his trip to Turkey offered some refuge from the overt racism of the United States.
Today, the phrase is said to have been used directly in response to the late Eric Garner, George Floyd, and others who have pleaded for mercy at the hands of police. For the broader African-American community, the phrase encapsulates how suffocating life in 21st-century America was, and still is.
Baldwin lived in the neighborhood next door to me, so I began to understand why he felt that way. Being in Turkey took my mind and heart away from the division and corrosion of American politics and society.
Moreover, I have found that my friends are no exception when it comes to Turkish support for the hardships facing black people in America: they are acutely aware of what is going on and sympathetic to the cause. Muslims and civil rights advocates such as Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali are also often held in high regard.
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Turkey has a history of African immigrant communities. The Ottoman slave trade brought a large influx of Africans to the Aegean coast. When I learned that these “Afro-Turks” had their own foundation in my mother’s hometown of Izmir, I had to visit. There, I met Beyhan Turkkoru, vice president of the Afro-Turkish Foundation, and Şakir Dürer, president. I was amazed to hear about their efforts to reclaim their past and how it overlaps with the efforts of my community in the United States.
But what surprised me was how they didn’t seem to stress about being black in Turkey. Since the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, Afro-Turks have been considered full and equal citizens under the law. They didn’t have to suffer the Three-Fifths Compromise. They didn’t have to fight just to get the right to vote. They didn’t have to fight apartheid or pass civil rights laws so that, at least legally, the government couldn’t discriminate against them. They didn’t live in fear of police brutality.
This proves we need to work harder in the United States.
That’s not to say they don’t face other hardships: as black people, they have naturally had to deal with certain stereotypes and tropes, but the institutional and structural racism that is so prevalent in the United States doesn’t seem to have affected the Turkish system as much.
I’m not here to say that every country is perfect or that Turkey is a haven for black people. Turkey, like any other country, has its own social divisions and challenges regarding other factors like religion, politics, ethnicity, etc. But race is not something I feel like I have to be so wary of all the time.
While it’s true that my mixed race status attracts attention wherever I go, I can say without hesitation that I never experience the same racial hostility in Turkey as I do in the U.S. This just goes to show that I have to try harder here in the U.S. It’s sad that I feel safer in a country where I don’t have citizenship than the country where I was born.
Laurence Cenk Rose is a licensed international lawyer and attorney. His areas of expertise include international law and politics, human rights, minority rights, civil rights and freedoms, refugee and asylum law, and humanitarian issues. He is bilingual in Turkish and English.
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab.
