Turks are 15% Central Asian
Printable View
I have never seen myself as colored too. Whitness is very debatable if we're talking about Turks, because it's not only a racial classification but also a cultural one. I mean "Whites vs Muslims" is mentioned often, where do Turks fall? I'm not a Muslim but i'm from muslim parents with muslim name, did i change race when i stopped believing in Islam?
Turks don't fall into white category in many ways, but sometimes we do. Sometimes i might actually experience the "white privilege". Regardless Turks are white or not, we were categorized with whites in many places. Such as in USA and South Africa Turks were classified white and had the rights whites had, but Turks would also not expect to be categorized otherwise.
So we're "White-ish".
Normally, we never claim to be not white, but it's very rare for Turks to claim being white. Even for Turks who claim to be white, Turks aren't westerners and we never call whites as whites but as "Westerners". So we aren't "westerners" and aren't related with Americans more than we're related to, Pakistanis for instance. from Turkish perspective this is not a discussion of race but history and culture.
Long story short, this is very confusing and we approach to this subject from a different perspective.
A Turk would call himself white if he is being compared with Africans, East Asians, Indians or Amerindians.
I would definitely consider Turks "white" given their physical appearance and geographic proximity to Europe. I feel like "white" is such a blanket statement though.