Caucasian race

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For the peoples actually from the Caucasus, see Caucasian peoples.

The term Caucasian race is sometimes used to refer to people whose ancestry can be traced back to Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Russia, and in certain areas of Central Asia.

In Europe (especially in Russia and the surrounding area), Caucasian usually refers exclusively to people who are from the Caucasus region or speak the Caucasian languages.

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[edit] Origins of the term and concept

The term Caucasian originated as one of the racial categories recognised by 19th century craniology — and is derived from the region of the Caucasus mountains, where the Biblical figure Japheth, ancestor of Europeans, is believed to have established his tribe prior to its migration into Western Europe[1].

Caucasoid race is a term used in physical anthropology to refer to people falling within a certain range of anthropometric measurements. The concept of a "Caucasian race" or Varietas Caucasia was first proposed under those names by the German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840).[2] His studies based the classification of the Caucasian race primarily on skull features, which Blumenbach claimed were optimized by the Caucasian Peoples.[3] Blumenbach writes:

Caucasian variety - I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighbourhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones of mankind.[4]

Populations, formerly called "varieties," are no longer distinguished by Latin names, according to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.

The Caucasus historically were a fascination for Europeans. Prometheus and Jason and the Argonauts were myths featured in the Caucasus. Greek mythology considered women from the Caucasus to have magical powers.[5]

The reason the Caucasus had such an attraction to Blumenbach and other contemporaries was because of its proximity to Mount Ararat, the tallest peak in Turkey, where according to the Biblical account, Noah's Ark, eventually landed after the flood and the famed beauty of Caucasian women. The tribe of Japheth was supposed to have originated in the Caucasus, then spread north and westwards. Historically, the Russian borderlands of the Caucasus and Georgia were a source of sex slaves for Middle Eastern and Mediterranean peoples.[6]

The beauty associated with these slave women from the Caucasus associated the word Caucasian with "enslaved embodiments of vulnerability" for Blumenbach. Blumenbach was enthralled by the beauty he claimed to see in exemplarary Georgian skulls, so he named his racial type after the famed beauty of the Caucasian peoples. After Blumenbach's time, the term Caucasian no longer was associated with peoples from the Caucasus but continued to be used as a racial indicator.[7]

Another 19th century anthropologist, Thomas Huxley, considered the scope of Caucasian to be inaccurate and "absurd", claiming darker Caucasians such as Southern Europeans & Middle Easterns were actually hybrids of light-skinned Northern European Caucasians and indigenous dark-skinned Australians.[8] The term Caucasoid (Caucasian-like) also came into use to encompass a larger grouping of populations with similar skull-shapes, including many North African, South Asian and Middle Eastern peoples.[9] Carleton Coon did not use the term Caucasian and Caucasoid interchangeably. He used the term "Caucasian" or "caucasic" to reference the subrace of Caucasoids located around the Caucasus.[10]

[edit] Later uses of the term

Usage of the term Caucasian as a racial classification declined in Europe in the 19th century because it did not allow for enough distinctions as required by the new forms of nationalism that were emerging. In The United Kingdom, Caucasian refers to people from the Caucasus.[11] In Canada, the term Caucasian is known, but rarely used as a description of white people. In Australia and New Zealand, the term Caucasian is mainly used in police offender descriptions. In New Zealand, the terms more commonly used to describe white people are Pākehā, European New Zealander, or simply New Zealander (although in theory this should include all citizens or residents of the country).

[edit] United States

In the United States, Caucasian has primarily been used as a distinction based on skin color, for a group commonly referred to as White Americans, as defined by the government and Census Bureau.[12]

In contemporary U.S. parlance, Caucasian and white are slowly being replaced with European-American as a racial identifier. Like African-American, the term has the advantage of describing two characteristics: both the ancestry of the person and his or her more immediate nationality and culture. In addition, older identifiers do not as accurately describe some populations. A large segment of the Hispanic community in the United States can be scientifically categorized as Caucasoid, but may not be labelled as white (by themselves or others).

The question of a difference between the Caucasian race and white as a racial category in the United States has led to at least one set of major legal contradictions in the United States Supreme Court in the pre-Civil Rights era. In the case of Ozawa v. United States (1922), the court ruled that a law which extended U.S. citizenship only to "whites" did not apply to fair-skinned people from Japan, because:

The term "white person", as used in [the law], and in all the earlier naturalization laws, beginning in 1790, applies to such persons as were known in this country as "white," in the racial sense, when it was first adopted, and is confined to persons of the Caucasian Race... A Japanese, born in Japan, being clearly not a Caucasian, cannot be made a citizen of the United States.

However a year later, the same court was faced with the trial of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), where they ruled that someone from the Indian subcontinent could not become a naturalized United States citizen, because they were not "white". The Supreme Court conceded that anthropologists had classified Indians as Caucasians, and thus the same race as whites, as defined in Ozawa. However, it concluded that "the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences," and denied citizenship.

[edit] See also

[edit] Books

  • Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, On the Natural Varieties of Mankind (1775) — the book that introduced the concept
  • Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man — a history of the pseudoscience of race, skull measurements, and IQ inheritability
  • L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, The History and Geography of Human Genes — a major reference of modern population genetics
  • L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples, and Languages
  • H. F. Augstein, "From the Land of the Bible to the Caucasus and Beyond," in Waltraud Emst and B. Harris, Race, Science and Medicine, 1700-1960 (London: Routledge, 1999): 58-79.
  • Bruce Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2006)
  • Paul Lawrence Guthrie, The Making of the Whiteman: From the Original Man to the Whiteman (Paperback), ISBN 0-948390-49-2

[edit] References

  1. ^ University of Pennsylvania <http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/knarf/People/blumen.html>.
  2. ^ University of Pennsylvania <http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/knarf/People/blumen.html>
  3. ^ Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, The anthropological treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, translated by Thomas Bendyshe. 1865. November 2, 2006. <http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/bindon/ant275/reader/blumenbach.PDF>
  4. ^ Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, The anthropological treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, translated by Thomas Bendyshe. 1865. November 2, 2006. <http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/bindon/ant275/reader/blumenbach.PDF>
  5. ^ Painter, Nell Irvin. Yale University. Collective Degradation:Slavery and the Construction of Race. Why White People are Called Caucasian. 2003. October 9, 2006. <http://www.yale.edu/glc/events/race/Painter.pdf#search=%22%20%22light%20colored%20people%22%22>.
  6. ^ Painter, Nell Irvin. Yale University. Collective Degradation:Slavery and the Construction of Race. Why White People are Called Caucasian. 2003. October 9, 2006. <http://www.yale.edu/glc/events/race/Painter.pdf#search=%22%20%22light%20colored%20people%22%22>.
  7. ^ Painter, Nell Irvin. Yale University. Collective Degradation:Slavery and the Construction of Race. Why White People are Called Caucasian. 2003. October 9, 2006. <http://www.yale.edu/glc/events/race/Painter.pdf#search=%22%20%22light%20colored%20people%22%22>.
  8. ^ Huxley, Thomas. On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind. 1870. <http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/SM3/GeoDis.html>.
  9. ^ Painter, Nell Irvin. Yale University. Collective Degradation:Slavery and the Construction of Race. Why White People are Called Caucasian. 2003. October 9, 2006. <http://www.yale.edu/glc/events/race/Painter.pdf#search=%22%20%22light%20colored%20people%22%22>.
  10. ^ Coon, Carleton. The Races of Europe. ChapterXII. August 8, 2006. <http://www.snpa.nordish.net/chapter-XII18.htm>.
  11. ^ Katsiavriades, Kryss. Qureshi, Talaat. English Usage in the UK and USA. 1997. October 26, 2006. [1]
  12. ^ Painter, Nell Irvin. Yale University. Collective Degradation:Slavery and the Construction of Race. Why White People are Called Caucasian. 2003. October 9, 2006. <http://www.yale.edu/glc/events/race/Painter.pdf#search=%22%20%22light%20colored%20people%22%22>.
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