11. Becoming White?

Abstract

In this autobiographical essay, I explore two parallel processes that are somehow interconnected: the first is the shift in my own understanding of race throughout my life, from my formative years in Greece until my recent years in the Netherlands, where I began an academic career as an anthropologist. The second is my own racialization as ‘white’ since I moved to the Netherlands and became an academic. After I outline what were the relevant categories of difference in the small city of Greece where I grew up., I ask how appropriate it is to apply the category of ‘white’ to migrant scholars whose pathway to academia started in contexts in which whiteness had different meanings or was less significant as a marker of privilege.