Fighting racism in Turkey: Kurdish homeownership as an anti-racist practice

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the housing experiences of Kurdish migrants/working classes in a Turkish-dominated working-class district of Zeytinburnu in Istanbul since the 1990s. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article argues that Kurds experienced housing discrimination predominantly in the forms of refusal of tenancy and the threat of removal from their homes by their Turkish neighbours and landlords. To struggle against this form of racism, they developed homeownership as a form of everyday anti-racist practice. For them, owned home rather than rented home emerged as a space of resistance where they can restore their dignity and integrity in a place polluted by racialized power relations with a long colonial history. The article also argues that the reproduction of the space in the form of apartmentalization since the 1980s and the crisis of the housing industry in the 2000s played important roles in Kurds’ development of homeownership as an anti-racist practice.