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Caucasian race

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For the peoples actually from the Caucasus, see Caucasian peoples.
The 4th edition of Meyers Konversationslexikon (1885-1890) shows the "Caucasian race" (in blue) as comprising "Aryans", "Semites" and "Hamites".

The term Caucasian (may also be referred to as the Caucasoid) is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as, "relating to a broad division of humankind covering peoples from Europe, western Asia, and parts of India and North Africa." or "white-skinned; of European origin" or "relating to the region of the Caucasus in SE Europe."[1]

Hence, the term may be used in a racial sense or an ethnic sense such as the US Census usage or another ethnic sense, which 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.

Origins of the term and concept

File:SvanetiKids.JPG
Kids from Mountainous Svaneti region of Georgia

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[2].

Caucasoid race is a term used in physical anthropology to refer to people of a certain range of anthropometric measurements [3]. The concept of a "Caucasian race" or Varietas Caucasia was first proposed under those names by the German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840).[4] His studies based the classification of the Caucasian race primarily on skull features, which Blumenbach claimed were optimized by the Caucasian Peoples.[5] 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(birth place) of mankind.[5]

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

The Caucasus was historically an area of 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.[6]

File:Kalashg.jpg
A Kalash girl with Caucasian physique.

The reason the Caucasus had such an attraction to Blumenbach and other contemporaries was because of its proximity to theMount Ararat, today, 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.[6]

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.[7] 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.[6] 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.[8]

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[citation needed]. In The United Kingdom, Caucasian is more likely than in the United States to refer to people from the Caucasus, although may still be used as a racial classification. [9]

In Canada, the term Caucasian is known, but rarely used as a description of white people.[citation needed] In Australia and New Zealand, the term Caucasian is mainly used in police offender descriptions[citation needed]. 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).

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.[6]

In contemporary U.S. parlance, Caucasian and white are slowly being replaced with European American as a racial identifier. As with 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. Some Latinos 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). The court ruled that a person 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.

Later Reseach and Classifications

File:Skullcauc.gif
Typical Caucasoid skull

In 1934, Carleton S. Coon redefined Caucasian race as Caucasoid race as one five racial categories. The other four races that Coon defined were the Mongoloid race, the Australoid race, the Negroid race, sometimes referred as Congoid and the Capoid race. These racial classifications were made on the basis of physical features.[10]

According to Leonard Lieberman, Rodney C. Kirk, and Alice Littlefield, the concept of race has all but been completely rejected by modern mainstream anthropology.[11] Sarah A Tishkoff and Kenneth K Kidd state, "Despite disagreement among anthropologists, this classification remains in use by many researchers, as well as lay people."[12]

The European Bioinformatics Institute defines Caucasoid as an ethnic group (rather than a race) which has "historical origins in Europe, North Africa or Southwestern Asia, including India". The Institute identifies eight ethnic groups: American Indian, Australian Aboriginal, Black, Caucasoid, Hispanic, Mixed, Oriental and Pacific Islander.[13].

The Oxford English Dictionary defines Caucasoid as as noun or adjective meaning Of, pertaining to, or resembling the Caucasian race.[14] The suffix -oid can indicate "a similarity, not necessarily exact, to something else"[15], so Caucasoid can mean "resembling" the Caucasian race, itself a term with an inexact definition. Likewise, it can mean pertaining to or belonging to the Caucasian race.

In the past, the United States National Library of Medicine used the term Caucasoid as a "racial stock" term (the other "racial stocks" were Australoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid). The "racial stock" categorization scheme was replaced in 2004 with Continental Population Groups which focuses on geographic origins.[16]

Distribution of genetic variation

Further information: [[:Genetic views on race]]

Although there is no defined genetic definition of race, let alone a Caucasian race, some biomedical studies have claimed that the global human population can be divided into non-discrete overlapping sub populations. In one such study the authors identify six such sub-populations, while also finding that "Within-population differences among individuals account for 93 to 95% of genetic variation".[17][18] This percentage is close to the findings of some other scientists. [19].

A. W. F. Edwards claimed in 2003 that such conclusions are unwarranted because the argument ignores the fact that most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the correlation structure of the data and not simply in the variation of the individual factors.[20] While it makes Lewontin's argument unwarranted, Edward's paper does not address the existence or absence of human race, see Lewontin's Fallacy.

Another study has stated:

it is not surprising that numerous human population genetic studies have come to the identical conclusion - that genetic differentiation is greatest when defined on a continental basis........the greatest genetic structure that exists in the human population occurs at the racial level. [21]

While geographical origin can be inferred from genetics, observed geographically distributed human genetic variation does not amount to the sort of discontinuous distribution that would be expected if the human population were descended from distinct lineages, neither is the variation great enough for human populations to be considered subspecies, the usual biological synonym for race.[22]

Back to the biomedical study, they stated that five of those six regions correspond to "Africa, Europe and the part of Asia south and west of the Himalayas, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas."[18] One of the regions that emerge is similar to the area defined by European Bioinformatics Institute about Caucasoids and various other definitions about Caucasoid and/or Caucasian throughout this page.

It has been noted by the developmental biologist Armand Marie Leroi that these five population clusters "more or less [correspond to] the major races of traditional anthropology", although this fails to address the sixth population identified by the report.[23] The region described as "Europe and the part of Asia south and west of the Himalayas" is similar but not the same as the region that defines Caucasians, except that North Africans are usually considered Caucasians. It should be noted however that the authors of the paper do not make any claims that their results support the concept of a Caucasian race, indeed the paper refers only to geographic region of origin and makes not claims for human subspecific or racial classification. In this sense they do not claim to support the concept of race, but are simply observing the geographically distributed human genetic variation:

Our evidence for clustering should not be taken as evidence of our support of any particular concept of “biological race.” In general, representations of human genetic diversity are evaluated based on their ability to facilitate further research into such topics as human evolutionary history and the identification of medically important genotypes that vary in frequency across populations.[18]

See also

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

Footnotes

  1. ^ http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/caucasian?view=uk
  2. ^ University of Pennsylvania [1]
  3. ^ Reinhard, K.J., & Hastings, D. (Annual 2003)Learning from the ancestors: the value of skeletal study.(study of ancestors of Omaha Tribe of Nebraska). In American Journal of Physical Anthropology, p177(1).
  4. ^ University of Pennsylvania [2]
  5. ^ a b Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, The anthropological treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, translated by Thomas Bendyshe. 1865. November 2, 2006. [3]
  6. ^ a b c d e Painter, Nell Irvin. Yale University. Collective Degradation:Slavery and the Construction of Race. Why White People are Called Caucasian. 2003. October 9, 2006. [4]
  7. ^ Huxley, Thomas. On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind. 1870. [5]
  8. ^ Coon, Carleton. The Races of Europe. ChapterXII. August 8, 2006. [6]
  9. ^ Katsiavriades, Kryss. Qureshi, Talaat. English Usage in the UK and USA. 1997. October 26, 2006. [7]; see also Pearsell, Judy and Trumble, Bill (Eds) Oxford English Reference Dictionary. 2002.
  10. ^ Tishkoff, S. A., and Kidd, K. K. Implications of biogeography of human populations for 'race' and medicine: Nature Genetics, 36, S21 - S27 (2004) [8] 
  11. ^ Leonard Lieberman, Rodney C. Kirk, and Alice Littlefield, "Perishing Paradigm: Race—1931-99," American Anthropologist 105, no. 1 (2003): 110-13
  12. ^ http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n11s/full/ng1438.html
  13. ^ http://www.ebi.ac.uk/imgt/hla/help/ethnic_help.html
  14. ^ http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50034773?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=Caucasoid&first=1&max_to_show=10
  15. ^ http://www.bartleby.com/64/C008/037.html
  16. ^ http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/nd03/nd03_med_data_changes.html
  17. ^ Rosenberg (2002)
  18. ^ a b c Roseberg (2005)
  19. ^ Lewontin (2005)
  20. ^ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12879450&dopt=Abstract
  21. ^ Risch et al. (2002)
  22. ^ Templeton (1998)
  23. ^ Leroi (2005)

References

  • Leroi A., M. (2005) A Family Tree in Every Gene. The New York Times,, 14 March, p.A23.reproduced in Race and Genomics.
  • Lewonin, R. C. (2005). Confusions About Human Races from Race and Genomics, Social Sciences Research Council. Retreived 28 December 2006.
  • Risch, N., Burchard, E., Ziv, E. and Tang, H. (2002). "Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease". Genome Biology. 3 (7): comment2007.2001 - comment2007.2012. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |month= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  • Rosenberg NA, Pritchard JK, Weber JL, Cann HM, Kidd KK, et al. (2002) Genetic structure of human populations. Science 298: 2381–2385.Abstract
  • Rosenberg NA, Mahajan S, Ramachandran S, Zhao C, Pritchard JK, et al. (2005) Clines, Clusters, and the Effect of Study Design on the Inference of Human Population Structure. PLoS Genet 1(6): e70 doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0010070
  • Templeton, A.R. (1998). Human races: A genetic and evolutionary perspective. Am. Anthropol. 100, 632–650.Partial access to article. Retrieved 01 January 2007.
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