Member-only story
It’s Getting Harder to Judge Identity by What We See
So maybe it’s time to reevaluate who gets to be called POC
I met my Turkish friend Didem last year when she offered to take my boyfriend and me out for çiğbörek, a large, deep-fried dumpling filled with savory meat and onions. We gathered at a tiny hole-in-the-wall in Aksaray, a working-class and immigrant enclave on Istanbul’s European side. Çiğbörek is from the Crimea region, she explained, referring to the Black Sea republic where her family originated. The next day she and her husband moved to Cambodia, but we stayed in touch.
Recently, I caught up with Didem, now back in Istanbul, for a piece about living overseas. I learned that her work as an award-winning international journalist had taken her all over Asia, Africa, and even into the Amazon jungle. But the most unexpected part of the interview had nothing to do with any of that. It was when Didem said that she identified as a woman of color. Wait, what?
Americans, even those of us who live overseas, can be somewhat myopic about race and identity. We are unaware of race categories, or the lack thereof, in use in other countries. We fixate on the Black-White dynamic within the United States, with occasional lip service to the Latinx community — usually in the context of immigration or “the Hispanic vote” — to…
