The Social Construction of Ottoman Greek Identity in an Early 20th-Century US Context

In the first three decades of the 20th century, Ottoman Greek migrants arrived in the United States due to the political and socio-economic instability caused by consecutive wars and the exchange of populations between the emerging Turkish Republic and Greece. This chapter explores the social construction of their identity in the USA. The chapter will employ content analysis of 29 in-depth semi-structured interviews with second and third-generation descendants of Ottoman Greek migrants to explore how they presented their identity to their peer groups in a US context. The analysis reveals that the national identity labels used by both Greek and Ottoman Greek migrants carried racial meanings. These labels formed an anti-Ottoman Greek White supremacist narrative that the migrants rejected using an Ottoman Greek destigmatisation narrative. Higham's (2002) concept of racial nativism will be used to contextualise the labels and narratives. Finally, the chapter proposes that Ottoman Greek migrants and their descendants employed destigmatisation-narrative stacking to increase their proximity to Greek identity and American Whiteness.