Hasan, Me & Racial Ambiguity
Case Study 1: Me
Before we start let's clarify my background, I am of Turkish Cypriot descent, a third generation product of the diaspora following the attempted ethnic cleansing of Turkish Cypriots from the island. My Dad's side of the family are often mistaken for being Indian or South Asian as they are darker than other Turks, and we think this is where our surname comes from, as it is not traditionally Turkish.
My mum's side of the family (also Turkish Cypriot) have paler skin and look more Eastern Mediterranean, which in some parts of the UK had it's own issues. My mum has been mistaken for Moroccan recently and faced her fair share of discrimination early on in life, predominantly white British schools in the 70's & 80's may have been worse for my Dad but they are pretty hostile to anyone they deem "foreign".
On my end, I've been told I look West Asian mostly, although some people have mistaken me for Indian in the past, and on the first day of my current job a child asked "who the Mexican was". It's hard to tell if people assume you're white because whiteness is largely unspoken, although it has definitely happened to me in the past, particularly online, where the subtler differences in skin tones feel more like a product of lighting and colour grading.
What does this mean?
Being a bit more ambiguous racially obviously has it's perks but it also has drawbacks. I think the best summary I can give is the time a friend of mine got sloshed and called me a racial slur (beginning with p) I'm not dark enough to say.
It's weird.
I experience moments and fragments of that oppression (a fair amount in my lifetime because of the shittiness of my surroundings) but it's difficult because I'm probably not getting the whole thing. There is an unquantifiable collection of moments that could have been worse had it been more obvious.
Because of that it's hard to feel that shared connection. It's a privilege obviously, to be in a position where it's not as obvious, but it comes at a cost.
My own experience growing up, (the accents made at my uncles, the constant othering and the endless terrorist "jokes") is why I reject the idea of being white, but the fact it's even in question means I probably could have experienced more no? It's hard to put a finger on what that really means, and even harder when examining it and embracing it can lead to opposition from people who insist that they know more about your race than you do.
It's also worth mentioning just how exclusionary British racism is. The kind of claims that Trump makes about Haitian and Hispanics immigrants, Farage makes about Eastern European ones, espousing that they eat Swans and fearmongering about a "Romanian Crime Wave". Indeed, British racism is so intrinsically tied to a general jingoism in favour of "the west" that one could genuinely argue eastern Europeans are white passing in the UK rather than just white.
This creates a large cultural disconnect between American and British racism that the online world has made extremely apparent to me. It creates an odd situation in which I have to basically spill out about my own (often unpleasant to say the least) encounters with race in the UK in order to sort of "prove" that I fit the description.
Case Study 2: Lineker
Gary Lineker is an Irish-English white man who played for Barcelona and England in the 80's. He was tan at a time when racism was still effecting Italians and other Mediterranean white people, and on his podcast he spoke on the colourism he faced at that time, highlighting that this is a long-standing issue and that if even he as a white man received such abuse it must be awful for the actually marginalised people trying to play for the team. There is obviously nothing wrong with this.
It was lied about constantly though, the tabloids removed all context from the headline as you would expect, and so it became "Gary Lineker opens up about racism" which in turn became jokes about he identified as black etc etc. The same ambiguity that led to him being abused for "darkish" skin as a kid in school was also a bludgeon to silence him for daring to talk about it.
Case Study 3: Hasan
Hasan Piker is a Turkish man and streamer "hasanabi" born to two parents who look Eastern Mediterranean/ West Asian. Unlike me, Hasan considers himself white.
Hasan grew up in Turkey, (where he's obviously a member of the dominant ethnic group) and the US, which has a very different perception of race altogether.
The presence of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans always meant race in the US had much clearer visual lines. The Irish diaspora may have experienced it's own discrimination in the US, but there were no "no blacks no dogs no Irish" signs in the 60's across it's windows. If you looked white enough on a first pass, you're white. If you don't, you're coloured.
Indeed, in an interview with FD Signifier on the topic, Hasan says that he knew he was white when people were comfortable being racist around him, as if he were part of a club. In other words, in most contexts Hasan is white passing.
There is a exception though, whenever hasan attempts to talk about the Muslim world or indeed any brown or West Asian country, he is immediately an "islamic fundamentalist", "barbaric" and a "terrorist". FD actually says this is part of why Hasan isn't white, to paraphrase slightly: "to be white means all slurs are funny, if there's any (racial) slur that might make you slap a motherfucker in the face then you aren't white".
But unlike me, Hasan has the white experience in most situations, the kind of looks I receive when I walk into a pub aren't the kind Hasan has received. The neighbours of white people in the States have always been visually distinct, Hispanic, black, native, and so race is drawn cleanly (or not so cleanly) along those lines. In the states the ambiguous are assumed white, in the UK they are still the other.
This benefits Hasan rhetorically, as he speaks to a mostly American audience, the fact he passes as white means his race does not hamper how likely people are to click on his content. It also means that he's able to more accurately relate to the disenfranchised young white men in America, and his conventionally masculine appearance also helps him pull them out of the world of the manosphere.
The truth about racial ambiguity is also largely the truth about race, it is almost entirely about the perception of the onlooker. Lineker probably wouldn't have been perceived in the same way had he grown up a few decades later, and yet nothing about him changed.
Hasan may have faced more direct opposition with issues outside of the Muslim world had he existed in a nation where his own racial differences were considered more important.
Likewise, if I had grown up in an area less exclusionary than the uniquely insane world of White British suburbia I might have a different perspective on my own race. What is "white" or "white passing" is not just different historically, but geographically. Whiteness is a social in group after all, not a biological category.