​Difference and Otherness

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I would like to start my article with a narration about two of my own experienced events.Both of them happens at foreign countries inside of the other and different people. And the main point here is, both of these two events are about meeting people from different races for the first time. Approximately three years ago i was on a journey from Bosnia-Hersigova to Serbia. When i was about to cross the Serbian border i was taken out of the bus by the Serbian border patrol. Just like any other border threatment me and my belongings had searched. And i thought i was a ordinary check-up. But later on i realized that i was the only one that were taken out of the bus. And when i asked for a reason, they told me its because of that i have a Turkish passport and i was gone to Kosovo before and for that i have a mark on my passport that comes from an autonomous reigon that Serbia ignores (UN-MIK). They said that they can’t take me to Serbia in this situation and basically they can even arrest me. My explainings about my identity that i am simply just a student and tourist, didn’t worked. The people which were in the bus probably got bored of waiting there and so on they left. After two hours of waiting they set me free. After a while they told me that if i agree they can get me in Serbia without marking my passport but if i had problems while getting out of the country it wont be their problem. And i agreed, but i was deffinetly very nervous about what happened. All of this events happened because of i am a Turk and there were Serbians on the opposite side.



 

The second event happened when i was in France. One night we gone out for fun and luckly at a Latin bar i got an invite from a black person for dance. And at that time i realized that besides dancing or touching i was just talking with a black person fort he first time of my life. It was not important where he was from, only his skin color made him one of the others.



When i consider about these two events now, i just think about one concept. Isolation. In our national states, in spite of the people we never don’t get in touch with, we are living in an artificial racism. Even when we see people talking with an eastern accent on streets, we think that they are different people but they can speak Turkish. Personally we are not racists but we are living in a state version of racialism. We are in racialism but we think we are outside of the circle. We are walking around the mountain of racism.



 

We began to see the others in the books about the kid bairam at 23th of april, we have learned about the yellow, black, white and chinese had existed by the figures that took each others by the hand. But before or after we never did that. We entertained our guests at 23th april by the best way we could but we couden’t stopped them to be seen as E.T.’s when we took them out to the streets and try to meet them with our friends.



In the cities and districts that greeks and turks live together, we knew that our friends fathers didn’t joined our own ritual worships but they looked just like us, we were talking the same language and they didn’t showed different attributes. To figure out internal otherness depends on our own experiences.



 

For all these reasons we didn’t grow up with raicism counsciously. We have been believed the discourse about that Turkey isn’t a racist country. With the politics of a country that never make concessions about its own isolation and its interferences that considered as necessary and right timed, we didn’t listen any radio, watched any tv channels or read newspapers published with Kurdish, Armenian or Grek. We have lived with a racism that is blocked, isolated and purified from discourse.



To speak clearly i have to say i didn’t had any awareness about the differences and the lack of communications between us and the others before i experienced those two events. I think most of the people in Turkey lives un awared too. We found ourselfs in a different way of racism in this environment. We are acting appropriated to a differentiation that decides where we stand. We are playing a game that we created on our own which is played between us and the others. We are trying to evaluate them by imputing them into the concepts like luxury, expensive, ordinary, filty or poor. We wont go to a restaurant which we know its expensive or in a shop we act by knowing which reactions we will get. And we sincerely call it differentiation, discrimination or otherness but we can’t consider a thougt structure that can slip us off from it. We make our organic bounds stronger with ontological ones and we entwine to racism with our brains and feelings.



 

We have thoughts like an unraced identity has an unformed structure. I think that this is just like an imitation of a human being which wants to know his location geographically requires, references like mountains or seas and maps. We have references like religion or language but races is being therated like maps.

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However “The race” no longer is the best way to describe our structure but after exposing Radhakrishnan’s linguistic turn it became an ethnicite. And at this point the identity matter starts to turn into a problem. On what matter are we suppose to discourse our new identities? At the beginning of Turkey’s creation progress, can the answers for the question that “Who is the Turkish citizen?” includes us today? Before or after are we the same? We have the chance to say that “i am Turk”, if being a Turk includes our subjecs in our self individualties. An Armenian that says “I am a Turk as much as the Armenian definition is in it” still needs to arrange which definition comes first. However in all big discourses like globalization, localization, liberalization, modernism and post-modernism etc. will put our identities into different platforms. What i am trying to tell here is, it’s the individualism that is interpretted here with the changes and broke into pieces of identities. Can the form that took a little bit from all of them be compressed into the race or ethnicite discourse? If it can, how stable its geometrical structure would be? And how necessary for them to be stabilized?