The definition for communities of color that I have learned in the US is about imperialism, and whether a culture has been subject to Western colonialism either through direct rule (like, say, Nigeria) or other methods (say, China during the Boxing War). Under that definition, the carving up of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI would definitely qualify Turks as POCs.
This definition comes in part from efforts to move away from genetic ideas of race, which are often linked to old racist ideas, toward more political ideas. That said, a lot of USians are used to thinking of POC as "anyone not of European descent" and defining Europe fairly narrowly. Part of this is because European people of Mediterranean descent have been thoroughly assimilated into whiteness in the US, and people from Turkey and other Muslim countries (with the possible exception of Lebanon, and maybe even not that) have not.
This is a really fraught issue in the US, because post-9/11 a lot of racial profiling has focused on people of Middle Eastern or Central Asian descent, and there have been a number of court decisions that ruled such people were "white" and thus not protected by US anti-discrimination laws, which have historically focused on other communities.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-06-11 05:21 pm (UTC)This definition comes in part from efforts to move away from genetic ideas of race, which are often linked to old racist ideas, toward more political ideas. That said, a lot of USians are used to thinking of POC as "anyone not of European descent" and defining Europe fairly narrowly. Part of this is because European people of Mediterranean descent have been thoroughly assimilated into whiteness in the US, and people from Turkey and other Muslim countries (with the possible exception of Lebanon, and maybe even not that) have not.
This is a really fraught issue in the US, because post-9/11 a lot of racial profiling has focused on people of Middle Eastern or Central Asian descent, and there have been a number of court decisions that ruled such people were "white" and thus not protected by US anti-discrimination laws, which have historically focused on other communities.