Caucasian race

Typical Caucasian skull

The term Caucasian race, Caucasian or Caucasoid is used to refer to people whose ancestry can be traced back to Europe, North Africa, West Asia, Indian subcontinent and parts of Central Asia [1], a region known as the Caucasus. It was once considered a useful taxonomical categorization of human racial groups based on a presumed common geographic and/or linguistic origin.

In anthropology, the later and more technical term Caucasoid was defined by anthropometric criteria.

Current use

Different regions of the world use the term in different ways. In the United States, Caucasian is currently used primarily as a distinction loosely based on skin color alone for a group commonly referred to as White Americans, as defined by the American government and Census Bureau. In Europe, "Caucasian" refers exclusively to people who are from the Caucasus. Many South Asian people for example Afghan, Pakistani, and some of Indian descent in Britain could be categorised as Caucasian as well.

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 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 used most frequently in police offender descriptions. Pākehā, European New Zealander, or simply New Zealander (although in theory this should include all New Zealanders) are more common in general language.

In the United States the term "caucasian" has taken on a political rather than a scientific meaning. For example a large segment of the Hispanic community in the United States can be scientifically categorized as caucasian. Caucasian Hispanics, therefore, take offense to the political use of the word caucasian to describe the non-Hispanic caucasian population in the United States.

The term Indo-European in conjunction with Caucasian race

At present still highly disputed is the use of Indo-European to describe racial and genetic human aspects. The term Indo-European has its origin in linguistics, and therefore the use was limited to this part of science. During the time, the meaning oft this term attained an extension.

There exist several different reasons for this extension; one of the most important is the difficulty with a clear neutral point of view. The term Caucasian has its origin in the religion, exactly in the Old Testament. More information can be found at Japheth son of Noah, and Noah's Ark.

In more recent times a large number of biological anthropologists have therefore started to use Indo-European as a term for “autochthonal human ethnic group” rather than for Caucasian.

It is important to mention that a racial aspect of Indo-European do not correspond completely with Caucasian race. If such an association is used, Indo-European people can for example only describe a subset of some larger human classification.

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 the Biblical account, Noah's Ark, eventually landed after the flood. 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. 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. 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.

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 is currently often used in the US as a general term for "white", and used by many physical anthropologists to refer to people of European origin. However, Caucasoids can range from light-"white"-skin (with blond hair and blue eyes) to dark-brown-skin (with black hair and black eyes).

Characteristic features

File:P7310013.JPG

Two teenage boys with Caucasian traits.

Although terms like race, caucasoid, and caucasian means different things to different people, what defines caucasian or caucasoid in forensic anthropology is far more clear. [2]

Caucasians typically have the lowest degree of projection of the, alveolar bones which contain the teeth, a notable size prominence of the cranium and forehead region, and a projection of the midfacial region. In anthropology skin color is not counted when describing Caucasians because Caucasians can be from pale (e.g. Scandinavia) to very dark brown (e.g. India).

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 Supreme 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

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. Racial classifications have begun to take on the appearance of being arbitrary, based on the politics of the time. Were "Caucasians" actually classified with as much detail as other racial groups, it would be seen that many of these new groups, in fact, are minority groups. For example, the term African-American uses a geographical location of ancestors' origins and current nationality status to describe what is commonly referred to as a "race". If this type of classification is done for those that are currently labeled Caucasian American, the result would be European American.

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. There are those who would argue that the term is synonymous with "Caucasoid" and thus identifies a very large group of people who present certain general physical characteristics, with generally sharp features and straight/wavy hair. Using this diluted definition, "Caucasians" would range from the very dark South Indians; light-Brown to olive skinned North Indians, people of the Middle East and Mediterranean region; to the fair-skinned, light-haired natives of Northern Europe; or immigrant populations from any of these groups in the Americas or Australia.

Under this broadened definition, "Caucasians" would be the largest racial population group collectively in the world. The population would about equally split between the darker-skinned people originating in the Indian subcontinent and North Africa and the lighter-skinned people originating in Europe, and Western Asia. In reality, however, although Indians may be members of the broad "Caucasoid" racial classification by this definition, very few if any Indians would identify themselves as caucasians.

In common usage in North America and some other areas, the term "Caucasians" differs from the term "Caucasoid", and "Caucasians" are taken to include only fair-skinned "whites", whose populations are historically concentrated in the Northern parts of the world, including Northern Europe, Northern Asia and North America. Through immigration, however, Caucasians have also settled in large numbers in South America, Australia, New Zealand and parts of Southern Africa. Under this more common definition of the term, Caucasians make up a relatively small minority of the world's population.

In anthropology on the other hand, the definition has remained unchanged.

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)
The Making of the Whiteman: From the Original Man to the Whiteman (Paperback) by Paul Lawrence Guthrie (ISBN 0948390492)
Yakub & The Origins Of White Supremacy: Message To The White Man & Woman In America by Dorothy Blake, Ph.D. Fardan (ISBN 193009728X)
Yakub: The Father of Mankind by Elijah Muhammad (Publisher: Secretarius Memps Publications; 1st ed edition (February 20, 2002) ISBN 1884855342)