‘We’re Not Them’: Armenian Americans, Race, and Ottoman Legacies

• In Event: Race, Gender, Class in the Arab World

Abstract

Armenians have been living in the United States since the late 1800s, yet little sociological scholarship exists addressing Armenian American racialization and self-perceived racial identity, including within post-9/11 literature on racialization of Middle Easterners and despite the recent introduction of a Middle Eastern category for incorporation in the 2030 Census.
This ongoing qualitative study examines the racial self-perception and racialization of Armenians in the United States, seeking to make legible Armenian American meaning-making and lived experience around race, with special attention to diasporic embodiment as a minoritized indigenous population from the Southwest Asia North Africa (SWANA) region (an alternate term for the Middle East).
Using in-depth interviews of fifteen self-identified Armenian Americans ages 20-30 years old (with more interviews ongoing), my research suggests that while the majority of my interviewees did not identity as White and did not describe a lived experience of Whiteness, many understood the label “Middle Eastern” to symbolically refer to Turkey, their perceived historical oppressor. This overarching symbolic association drove my interviewees’ dissonance with being labeled as Middle Eastern, as perceived conflation with their perceived oppressor would contribute to a kind of erasure specific to Armenian-Turkish historiography. Moreover, Ottoman modes of societal organization, particularly the Ottoman millet system, strongly influenced what my Armenian respondents understood race or racial identity to mean, especially in relation to other regional groups. My interviewees supplanted contemporary American understandings of race and ethnicity with inherited Ottoman social structures, maintaining the boundaries of historical Armenian identity in a transnational diasporic context.

Author

• Haley Zovickian, University of Southern California