Caucasian race

See Caucasian for other uses of the term.

The term Caucasian race is used almost exclusively in the United States to refer to people whose ancestry can be traced back to Europe and parts of Central Asia. It was once considered a useful taxonomical categorization of human racial groups based on a presumed common geographic, linguistic, and/or genetic origin.

In the United States, it is currently used primarily as a distinction loosely based on skin color alone for a group commonly refered to as Whites, as defined by the American government and census bureau. In the British Isles, "Caucasian" follows the North American definition, but in continental Europe, "Caucasian" currently refers almost exclusively to people who are from the Caucasus.

The term itself derives from measurements in craniology from the 19th century, and its name stems from the region of the Caucasus mountains, itself imagined to be the location from which Noah's son Japheth, traditional Biblical ancestor of the Europeans, established his tribe prior to its supposed migration into Europe.

Caucasoid is a term used in physical anthropology to refer to people falling within a certain range of anthropometric measurements.

In New Zealand the term Caucasian is the most prevalent term for white people other than Pākehā. Caucasian is most often used in official forms or in news articles, whereas pākehā is more common in general language.

History of the concept

The concept of a "Caucasian race" or Varietas Caucasia (sic) was first proposed under those names by the German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840). His studies based the classification of the Caucasian race primarily on skull features, which Blumenbach claimed were optimized by the Georgians, a people living in the Southern Caucasus. Populations, formerly called "varieties," are no longer distinguished by Latin names, according to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.

The reason the Caucasus had such an attraction to Blumenbach and other contemporaries was because of its proximity to Mount Ararat, where according to Biblical legend Noah's Ark eventually landed after the Deluge. Blumenbach believed that the original humans were light-skinned, that the Caucasians had retained this whiteness as a constant, and that darkness of skin was a sign of change from the original. The tribe of Japheth was supposed to have originated in the Caucasus, then spread north and westwards.

Later anthropologists, including William Z. Ripley in 1899 and Carleton Coon in 1957, further expanded upon the classification of the Caucasian race proposed by Blumenbach, and subdivided the group into Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean, and at times Dinaric and Baltic subdivisions. Nordicism, the belief that the blond Nordic sub-division constitutes a "master race", was influential in Northern Europe and the United States during the early twentieth century, eventually becoming the official ideology of the Nazi state. It was used to justify eugenics programs and the persecution and extermination of so-called "inferior" races then living in Europe, such as Jews and Roma.

The concept of Caucasian race and its stated or implied superiority over other races was often used as a moral excuse for colonialism by Western European countries, in the 19th and 20th centuries. In Europe, usage of the term declined in the 19th century as it did not allow for enough distinctions as required by the new forms of nationalism which were emerging, but in the United States it enjoyed a use which continues to the present. It has been (and is still) used to justify social discrimination in many other places of the world, such as against descendants of Native Americans, African slaves, and immigrants in the Americas and South Africa, non-anglosaxon Australians and many more.

Nevertheless it is currently often used in the US as a more "scientific sounding" term for "white", and even used by many anthropologists and geneticists to refer generically to people of European origin.

U.S. Supreme Court rulings

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 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 Court conceded that anthropologists had classified Indians as "Caucasians", and thus the same race as "whites" as defined in Ozawa, but concluded that "the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences", and denied citizenship.

Current views

Nowadays, however, views have changed, and large numbers of people do not wish to identify themselves as a particular race. Relatively recent advances in biochemistry have revealed that racial genetic divisions are much smaller than had been previously thought. In places such as Europe, racial censuses are highly controversial and in some cases not used. Some have argued that due to the civil-rights and political-correctness movements, many white people feel a certain guilt or shame when acknowledging their race in a positive manner, although others have dismissed such arguments as racist.

The relevance of the term Caucasian to cultural identity and socio-economic patterns is still being debated in the scientific and cultural groups of America. Within strict anthropological discourse the term is useful in identifying a very large group of people who present certain general physical characteristics. They may be very dark south Indians; olive-skined people of the Middle East and Mediteranean region; fair-skinned, light-haired natives of Northern Europe; or immigrant populations from any of these groups in the Americas or Australia. Surprisingly, they are the largest racial population group collectively in the world. The population is about equally split between between the darker-skinned people originating in the Indian sub-continent and the lighter-skinned people originating in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

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.

History of the concept

U.S. Supreme Court rulings

Current views

See also

Books