Belonging in a Risky World: The White Turks Phenomenon After September 11.

• In Event: Risk-Taking, Boundary-Breaking and Edgework in the Study of Deviance and Crime

Abstract

Risk and uncertainty are two related yet different phenomena. To put it very simply, uncertainty is existential, it is a “human condition”. Even Keynes wrote about “a residue of genuine uncertainty that defines our existence in the world and that made disaster of any kind an ever-present possibility”. Risk, on the other hand, refers to a more contemporary situation, exacerbated with neoliberal precariousness. It can be calculated, and, I suggest, manipulated. Indeed, the manipulation of an ever present risk is a technique of governing- as can be seen in discourses on terror, war on terror, states on emergency and so on.

Anxiety is one of the results of uncertainty and risk, between the existential, financial and socio-psychological insecurities. We try to cope with this anxiety through what I call “acts of belonging”. In trying to repair our insecurities with belonging, or, our anxiety with acts of belonging, however, we risk violating our “inner pluralities”. We risk following a ghost or a shadow of what does not exist. By focusing on the “white Turkish” phenomenon of the last two decades of Turkey and by taking “whiteness” as an act of belonging, I will suggest the following:
1. More integration, or more belonging, is not the answer to our precariousness. This is because the imagined whole we are trying to belong to does not in fact exist. What is more, this imagination itself depends on the normalization of our precariousness.
2. As ‘orientalized’ or ‘essentialized’ subjects, it should not be enough to demand our acceptance by the so-called “West”. We should benefit from this moment to turn our collective precariousness into acts of belonging to “the community of those who have nothing in common”. Only this awareness will help change the very structures that produce insecurity as a condition of life.

Author

• Ilgin Yorukoglu, CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College