Black, transient, migrant: claiming the NGO in Istanbul

This article follows a Ghanaian man who lives in Istanbul with the moniker Coach. While he takes actually existing NGOs as symptoms of structural problems ‘created by white men’, in his own words, he also employs the NGO (and its rough Turkish equivalent, dernek) as forms to make demands for African migrant communities in Turkey. Despite his critical attitude, why is it that he puts the NGO and dernek to political work? The answer is rooted in and revelatory of the racialized conditions Coach is navigating: the label of ‘transit migrants’ often attached to African migrants constitutes an alibi to disavow anti-Blackness in Turkey, I argue. Claiming Black migrancy is transient, that African migrants will ‘soon be gone anyway’, portrays anti-Blackness as an impossibility in Turkey, while constituting a specific way in which anti-Blackness operates. At stake in this essay, then, is the racialized and temporalized disavowal through which the NGO form (Bernal and Inderpal 2014) gains purchase for people like Coach. I offer transience and disavowal as important analytical lenses to understand how Black life is cast out of history and the present, within and beyond Turkey.