Yiorgo Topalidis
The Souls of Greek American Folk: The Racial Reckoning of Helladic
and Ottoman Greeks in the 20th Century
In response to Ergon’s call for a narrative that features “histories of marginalized and stigmatized Greek American demographics,” I ask its readers to reassess the Greek American assimilationist narrative as a racial reckoning. This narrative erroneously asserts the establishment, development, and perpetuation of Greek American identity as a monolith that has adhered to the tenets of ancient Greek and Byzantine cultural continuity to the present. This rendition of Greek American history, however, hides the fact that a cohort of Greek Americans has marginalized a particular migrant demography, namely, US Ottoman Greeks.1 To understand the marginalization of Ottoman Greeks in the United States and facilitate my request, it is important to examine the differing trajectories of racialization to which these two groups were subjected. To that end, I will employ the voices of second- and third-generation descendants of Ottoman Greek migrants in the United States who share experiences about their ancestors and themselves as both victims of racial prejudice and agents of resistance against it.2
Racialization depends upon the deployment of racial identity labels. When Ottoman Greeks arrived in the United States during the first quarter of the 20th century, the identity label assigned to their nationality was racial––not ethnic in the manner we understand the category today.3 Through the process of racialization, their cultural attributes such as religious affiliation and language carried negative racial connotations. Not only did they designate racial belonging and lack of social capital, but they also placed migrants within US racial hierarchies.4
We see the process of racialization reflected in the memories of second and third-generation descendants of Ottoman Greek migrants. According to Gus, a third-generation descendant of Pontic Greek refugees, his Greek Orthodox community in the Midwest gives us a glimpse of the racialization of Ottoman Greeks in 1917, and how his community became a battleground for the racial reckoning between Helladic and Ottoman Greek migrants.
They were [Turkophones]. They could only speak Turkish. So they came [to the Midwest]. They go to the church, but they’re speaking Turkish. And people are saying, what are they doing here? Shouldn't they be in a mosque? Well, they understood what they were saying, you know, that offended some people. There was a guy in [our community] called Big John. He was like the president of [our community] and he was a big man, too. And whenever there was a problem, people always went to Big John, and they said, Big John pointed to everybody and called them out and said, we’re going on the other side of town, and we’re going to start our own congregation. Now is that written anywhere? No, but these are oral stories that, of course, through time, people might add a little bit more to it. But when you look at our charter, all five signing members were all from Asia Minor. They're all Pontian, and they went to the … Coffee House… on Easter Sunday, and there was a lot of heated debate there. Two days later, the charter was signed, and [the church was] established.5
This community was one of many of its kind, and while some have been studied as sites of political antagonism (Royalist/Venizelist), the dominant social forces at the time privileged a racial hierarchy in the United States.6 This racial hierarchy initially placed Helladic Greek migrants below Central and Western Europeans, and it was through the interventions of Greek cultural agents and Greek cultural organizations that the boundary of American Whiteness expanded to include Helladic Greeks.7 Concurrently, the acceptance of Helladic Greek migrants led to the homogenization of Ottoman Greek migrants as Greeks at best, or to their marginalization as inferior Turks at worst by their Helladic counterparts.8 It is in this racially charged atmosphere that what we know as Greek American identity was forged.
The assimilationist narrative between the 1940s and 1960s would have us believe that Greek American identity was settled and that the racism between Helladic and Ottoman Greeks was a relic of the past. But the second-generation descendants of Ottoman Greek migrants, like Olga, offer an alternative view.
They’re Greeks that came from Greece. We’re the Greeks who came from Turkey. There was a difference. [In their eyes], we weren’t as good as them. And also, like, I married this Greek man whose mother would say to me—I didn’t realize that when my mother was teaching me in Greek, she was also . . . There were words that . . . were taught to me. . . . I didn’t know they were Turkish . . . and I would say, let’s say a fousta (dress): to me that was a slip—“but it’s actually the skirt,” and I would be corrected. And I didn’t realize that my mother was, you know, teaching me Turkish, not deliberately, but that’s how she referred to—well, she was taught that way. You know what I mean? So that there were differences that I saw that people would say to me, “Oh! [pejoratively] Oh, you’re from Turkey.”9
As Olga’s recollection indicates, the second generation’s experience challenges the assimilationist narrative in its mid-twentieth-century presentation of Greek American identity. However, the same assimilationist narrative assures us that, certainly by the last three decades of the twentieth century, the Greek American identity was thoroughly homogenized. In contrast, the experiences of third-generation descendants of Ottoman Greeks in the United States and descendants of Ottoman Greek migrants who settled in the country during that time indicate otherwise.
Refugee, yeah, that was used to describe the Pontians of North City. They considered us to be low-class people. The Peloponnesians of South City were high-class people. One time, a young lady who was my tenant told me that. I said to her, “I am Pontian too!” [In a state of shock] she said, “What!? What are you talking about?” and quickly followed with, “You are not like them!” To which I replied, “Now you changed your mind!? Now you think I am different!? You shut your mouth next time!” North City and South City never got along in the seventies and eighties. I was also called a Turk in 1975-80 in State City by the Peloponnesians. We had soccer teams, and when we played them, they would call the Pontian players “Turks” and “Turkospores.” We would respond by calling them Palioelladites.10
This essay used anecdotal evidence in the form of oral histories to trace a persistent racial prejudice between US Helladic and Ottoman Greek migrants and their descendants throughout the 20th century. I presented this evidence to encourage readers to reassess the Greek American assimilationist narrative. My rationale is that the racialization which was at work during the 20th century is similarly asserting itself today. The assimilationist narrative is marching into the early 21st century.
In the absence of longitudinal statistical evidence, it is reasonably plausible that a portion, but not the totality, of Greek Americans ideologically align with the contemporary application of the assimilationist narrative. Their belief that migrants are stealing jobs and social capital from “real Americans” enables them to justify the categorization of today’s migrants as inferior. They pair this belief with claims of Greek cultural continuity (ancient, Byzantine, modern) and superiority to entrench their proximity to American Whiteness. It is at this juncture that “histories of marginalized and stigmatized Greek American demographics” such as the racial reckoning between Helladic and Ottoman Greek migrants and their descendants pose a formidable challenge to the Greek American assimilationist narrative. The challenge is important given that this narrative also fosters prejudice, dehumanization, and results in discrimination against historically marginalized communities in the United States.
This challenge is not new. It has been the subject of many scholarly works, which reflect a cry voiced in the early 20th century by none other than W.E.B. DuBois (1920), a pioneer of the Sociological discipline, in his essay The Souls of White Folks.
If I cry amid this roar of elemental forces, must my cry be in vain, because it is but a cry, – a small and human cry amid Promethean gloom? Back beyond the world and swept by these wild, white faces of the awful dead, why will this Soul of White Folk, – this modern Prometheus, – hang bound by his own binding, tethered by a fable of the past? I hear his mighty cry reverberating through the world, ‘I am white!’ Well and good, O Prometheus, divine thief! Is not the world wide enough for two colors, for many little shin[n]ings of the sun? Why, then, devour your own vitals if I answer even as proudly, ‘I am black!’ (52).
In my view, Du Bois’s request of Prometheus is a charge against American Whiteness and its assimilationist narrative to accept Blacks as equals. But as I have argued herein, I believe the Greek American assimilationist narrative adopted a similar racialization from the American assimilationist narrative to target Ottoman Greek migrants and their descendants. Therefore, I close my request for the reassessment of the Greek American assimilationist narrative as a racial reckoning by borrowing from Du Bois to ask readers, “Is not the world wide enough for two colors, for many little shin[n]ings of the sun?” From the position that my White privilege affords, I believe it is. I believe the Souls of Greek American Folks should reassess their place in American society by embracing their own racialized pasts and not “devour [their] own vitals,” as the Greek American assimilationist narrative demands.
March 14, 2026
Dr. Yiorgo Topalidis is a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Flagler College. Dr. Topalidis earned a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Florida in 2022. Yiorgo’s research interests include emigration from the Ottoman Empire to the U.S. and the construction, contestation, and transgenerational transfer of White identity. His most recent publications appear in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, the Journal of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and the Journal of Urban History. He is working on a monograph that explores the social construction of Ottoman Greek migrant identity in an early-20th-century U.S. context as a case study for decoupling Whiteness from White supremacist Whiteness.
Works Cited
Anagnostou, Yiorgos. 2004. "Forget the Past, Remember the Ancestors!
Modernity, 'Whiteness,' American Hellenism, and the Politics of Memory in
Early
Greek America." Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 22(1): 25–71.
Anagnostou, Yiorgos. 2009. Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America. Ohio University Press.
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1920. Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. AMS Press. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/004386405.
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. 1998. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Harvard University Press.
OGUS97. 2017 (May 19). Interview with "Gus. " Samuel Proctor Oral History Program.
OGUS204. 2020 (June 25). Interview with "Noah. " Samuel Proctor Oral History Program.
Papadopoulos, Yannis G. S. 2011. "The Role of Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Class in Shaping Greek American Identity, 1890-1927: A Historical Analysis." In Identity and Participation in Culturally Diverse Societies: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, edited by Assaad Elia Azzi, pp. 9–31. Chichester: Willey-Blackwell.
Topalidis, Yiorgo. 2025. "Ottoman Greek Immigrant Women: Negotiating Identity within the Greek American Community during the Early Twentieth Century." Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 43(2): 283–305.
Topalidis, Yiorgo. 2026 [forthcoming]. "The Social Construction of Ottoman Greek Identity in an Early 20th-Century US Context." In Across the Aegean: A Century of Forced Migrations between Greece and Turkey, 1922-2022, edited by Violetta Hionidou and Dimitris Skleparis. Abingdon: Routledge.
1 For a brief overview of the origins of the Ottoman Greek label see, https://www.facebook.com/ogus0424/ posts/pfbid0yfCY46vYqXZFkUddett2DKzs4e7CidXxWHP8jwjkRFR8dfJ1LFXfoUkeYjumLmzrl
2 Names and locations have been coded to protect interviewees’ identities.
3 See (Topalidis, 2025).
4 See (Jacobson, 1998).
5 Excerpt from (OGUS97, 2017).
6 See (Anagnostou, 2004; Papadopoulos, 2011).
7 See (Anagnostou, 2004, 2009). Also, I intentionally capitalize the words White and Whiteness here, and in all of my scholarship because my view aligns with that of scholars such as Eve L. Ewing, see Ewing, E. L. (2020, July 2). “I’m a Black Scholar Who Studies Race. Here’s Why I Capitalize ‘White.’” https://zora.medium.com/im-a-black-scholar-who-studies-race-here-s-why-i-capitalize-white-f94883aa2dd3
8 See (Topalidis, 2026).
9 See (Topalidis, 2025, 296).
10 Excerpt from (OGUS204, 2020).