Having spent one’s life thinking within the boundaries drawn by the state or by the majority is not merely a matter of political preference or ideological affiliation. At a deeper level, it points to a regime of knowledge: how knowledge is constructed, which propositions are considered natural, reasonable, and objective, and which are marked from the outset as dangerous, suspicious, or extreme.
This regime operates in ways individuals are often not even aware of; it offers people not so much what to think as the limits of what can be thought. In Turkey, the Kurdish question is one of the areas where these limits function most visibly and most harshly.
The systematic coding of Kurds as a problem, a threat, or a potential source of crime has occurred not through crude and overt racism, but through a more refined, more institutionalized—and therefore more effective—mechanism of exclusion. This coding is not simply the sum of individual prejudices; it has emerged through the seepage of the state’s long-standing security discourse, the logic of emergency rule, and regimes of exception into everyday modes of thinking.
As a result, the Kurdish question has ceased to be treated as a political issue framed in terms of equal citizenship, justice, or rights; it has been reduced to a technical file that must constantly be managed, suppressed, and kept under control. At this point, what matters is not what Kurds actually do or do not do, but the conceptual framework within which the majority has been trained to think about them.
The boundary between the language of the state and the language of everyday life has gradually blurred; concepts used in official reports have circulated into media discourse and ordinary conversations. In the end, the language used when speaking about Kurds has become less a product of individual judgment and more a repetition of ready-made categories. This repetition presents itself as common sense; in reality, it is the automated form of a historically constructed way of seeing.
One of the most functional aspects of this knowledge framework is that objections directed at it are rendered illegitimate from the outset. Those who draw attention to the structural inequalities faced by Kurds are judged very quickly not on the basis of their arguments, but on the basis of their intentions.
The question “What are you saying?” is replaced by “Whom are you serving?” This reflex is widespread not only among openly nationalist or pro-state segments, but also among circles that define themselves as liberal, democratic, or oppositional. Because the issue is not ideological identities, but the limits of thinking itself. As long as the framework drawn by the state is not questioned, any statement that falls outside it loses its perceived reasonableness.
This makes political debate structurally impossible. Discussion proceeds not on the axis of truth and falsehood, but on that of loyalty and betrayal. Knowledge gains meaning not through its verifiability, but through who articulates it.
The same demand is evaluated entirely differently when voiced by a different subject. The issue of the mother tongue is a striking example: a demand that could universally be seen as a cultural right is, when it concerns Kurds, directly associated with fears of division and security threats. This association is less the product of conscious reasoning than the result of a learned reflex.
In this context, it is not surprising that individuals positioned within the majority see themselves as free-thinking, critical, or even oppositional. Opposition often targets not the system’s core assumptions, but the surface-level practices built upon them. The fact that the penguin metaphor—recently circulating to symbolize the individual who steps outside the system and breaks away from the herd—has also been appropriated by nationalist discourse is an ironic manifestation of this mental structure.
An individual who places themselves at the center of the majority, who has internalized the state’s basic assumptions without questioning them, may also see themselves as a penguin—and it must be said that they are not that penguin. You are not that penguin.
Because those who truly step outside the system experience it not as a romantic gesture, but by paying heavy costs.
