Indigeneity and Race in the Cypriot context

The colonial idea of "indigenous" is restricted to genetic 'purity', and is a eugenicist myth. True belonging is a living, continuous relationship with the land, built on culture, spirit, and responsibility—not a DNA percentage.

In other words, I don't care what your blood ancestry is. I want to know whether you're an agent of our culture beyond the confines of made up borders.

Many Turkish Cypriots have experienced the dehumanising rhetoric of 'indigenous Turkish Cypriots', designed to ensure we are separated from Turkish 'settlers'.

While I understand this can be used against the right-wing to reaffirm our right to our home, it functions under the logic of making sure we are indeed the 'good Cypriot', the 'real Cypriot' before we are worthy of respect.

Claiming or even manufacturing an indigenous identity for political points, spiritual clout, or aesthetic fashion is a violent act. It reduces a deep, sacred responsibility to a rhetorical tool, erasing those who uphold the actual covenant with the land.

Whiteness is a political project that defines itself by what it excludes, and extracts privileges from the communities it subjugates. It requires anti-Blackness as its foundation, but also relies on other forms of oppression like Islamophobia to maintain its power. Proximity to whiteness is often offered in exchange for complicity with these systems.

Republic of Cyprus: the state is begging the West to let them in, and demonstrating the violence it can facilitate in order to be let in. Black and brown migrants, Palestinians, our entire region are sacrificed for access to whiteness.

‘TRNC’: the state exploits Black and brown migrants and then deports them in a fashion that similarly extends European and Ottoman hegemony to our island.

Race is a social construct that does not exist in the vacuum of skin tone.

In the diaspora, Greek and Turkish Cypriots are racialised differently due to Eurocentrism and Islamophobia. This creates a hierarchy where proximity to whiteness is conditional, and is constantly changing. The ways our elders were racialised in the 70s/80s at the peak of our workers’ movements is drastically different to the reality today.

Today, phenotypically white Greek Cypriots can be granted proximity to whiteness in the West, which conflicts greatly with the cultural reality on the island. Framed as the "cradle of European civilisation," Orthodox Christianity and Greek language is seen as familiar.

This acceptance is conditional on assimilating into a Eurocentric narrative and abandoning Levantine and non-European roots.

This violent erasure is what has allowed the Republic of Cyprus to become a frontline state to the West today. Whiteness comes with its privileges, AND does not exist without the violent sale of your roots as well as marginalised communities.

Turkish Cypriots face a different reality. We are often racialised as "Muslim" first—a category heavily stigmatised in the West. Our identity is frequently collapsed with that of mainland Turks, subjecting us to Islamophobia and xenophobia, regardless of personal religiosity or Cypriot origins.

This doesn't mean that a Turkish Cypriot cannot be an agent of whiteness. Assimilation and class mobility offers any -body- the capacity to oppress the community they superficially claim.

Racial capitalism, most notably articulated by sociologist Cedric Robinson in his 1983 book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, argues against the traditional Marxist view that racism is merely a functional tool to divide the working class, instead asserting that racialism is inherent to capitalism's structure from its very beginning.

Racial capitalism operates by deriving social and economic value from a person's racial identity. This can manifest in traditional exploitation, or even in contemporary dynamics where non-white individuals are used by predominantly white institutions to acquire "diversity" value, thereby commodifying racial identity itself.

In essence, racial capitalism suggests that racism is not an accident or a flaw in capitalism; it is the engine that generates capital accumulation by creating a permanent hierarchy of human value that justifies extreme exploitation and expropriation.

The foundational element is race itself, which is a social construct and determined by external factors. This means it is not a biological fact, but rather an identity that is:

- Based on perception: historically, race has been a categorisation of humans into groups based on shared physical characteristics (phenotypes) like skin colour, hair texture, and facial features, which were then linked to geographic ancestry.

- Contextual and fluid: the categories used to define races have changed significantly over time and across different societies. For example, groups once classified as separate "races" in the US (like Irish or Italian immigrants) are now often categorised under the umbrella of "White."

- Imposed/Ascribed: race is often an ascribed identity—it is a label or category imposed on an individual by the dominant group or society (e.g., through censuses, legal systems, or simply how they are seen on the street). This external classification is what determines how an individual is treated by institutions and society (e.g., in the context of racial capitalism).

Therefore, racial identity is inseparable from the power dynamics and history of a society.

By officially dividing the population and allocating power based on ethnicity, the colonial state prevents the emergence of a unified, anti-colonial working class, ensuring that opposition remains fractured along ethno-national lines rather than unifying against mutual exploitation.

The structures put in place by the colonial power (e.g., the complex constitution allocating political roles by ethnic quota) entrenched these racialised divisions. After "independence", the continued conflict essentially represented the violent culmination of a colonial policy that used ethno-national differentiation to secure its economic and strategic interests, leaving behind a divided economy and society.

In this context, while the differentiation was based on ethnicity, language, and religion rather than purely phenotype (skin colour), the process functioned identically to the concept of racial capitalism: it created unequal social categories (racial identities) to facilitate exploitation, social control, and the prevention of unified resistance to capital accumulation.

The key takeaway from the concept of racial capitalism is that "whiteness" is not a fixed description but a shifting status of power and privilege, and most potent form of identity-based exploitation was rooted in ethno-national racialisation.

Our internal ethnic division functioned as a racialising tool to ensure that economic exploitation and political control could be maintained, regardless of whether a Cypriot would be considered "white" in London or New York.