Caucasian race

This article is about the outdated race concept. For the peoples of the Caucasus Mountains, see Ethnic groups in the Caucasus. For the US racial classification "White" or "Caucasian", see White Americans.

The Caucasian race (also Caucasoid,[a] Europid, or Europoid)[2] is an obsolete racial classification of humans based on a now-disproven theory of biological race.[3][4][5] The Caucasian race was historically regarded as a biological taxon which, depending on which of the historical race classifications was being used, usually included ancient and modern populations from all or parts of Europe, Western Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.[6][7]

Introduced in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history,[b] the term denoted one of three purported major races of humankind (those three being Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid).[12] In biological anthropology, Caucasoid has been used as an umbrella term for phenotypically similar groups from these different regions, with a focus on skeletal anatomy, and especially cranial morphology, without regard to skin tone.[13] Ancient and modern "Caucasoid" populations were thus not exclusively "white", but ranged in complexion from white-skinned to dark brown.[14]

Since the second half of the 20th century, physical anthropologists have switched from a typological understanding of human biological diversity towards a genomic and population-based perspective, and have tended to understand race as a social classification of humans based on phenotype and ancestry as well as cultural factors, as the concept is also understood in the social sciences.[15]

In the United States, the root term Caucasian is still in use as a synonym for white or of European, Middle Eastern, or North African ancestry,[16][17][18] a usage that has been criticized.[19][20][21]

  1. ^ Freedman, B. J. (1984). "For debate... Caucasian". British Medical Journal. 288 (6418). Routledge: 696–98. doi:10.1136/bmj.288.6418.696. PMC 1444385. PMID 6421437.
  2. ^ Pearson, Roger (1985). Anthropological glossary. R. E. Krieger Pub. Co. p. 79. ISBN 9780898745108. Retrieved July 21, 2015.
  3. ^ Templeton, A. (2016). "Evolution and Notions of Human Race". In Losos, J.; Lenski, R. (eds.). How Evolution Shapes Our Lives: Essays on Biology and Society. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press. pp. 346–361. doi:10.2307/j.ctv7h0s6j.26. ... the answer to the question whether races exist in humans is clear and unambiguous: no.
  4. ^ Wagner, Jennifer K.; Yu, Joon-Ho; Ifekwunigwe, Jayne O.; Harrell, Tanya M.; Bamshad, Michael J.; Royal, Charmaine D. (February 2017). "Anthropologists' views on race, ancestry, and genetics". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 162 (2): 318–327. doi:10.1002/ajpa.23120. PMC 5299519. PMID 27874171.
  5. ^ American Association of Physical Anthropologists (March 27, 2019). "AAPA Statement on Race and Racism". American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Retrieved June 19, 2020.
  6. ^ Coon, Carleton Stevens (1939). The Races of Europe. New York: The Macmillan Company. pp. 400–401. This third racial zone stretches from Spain across the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco, and thence along the southern Mediterranean shores into Arabia, East Africa, Mesopotamia, and the Persian highlands; and across Afghanistan into India [...] The Mediterranean racial zone stretches unbroken from Spain across the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco, and thence eastward to India [...] A branch of it extends far southward on both sides of the Red Sea into southern Arabia, the Ethiopian highlands, and the Horn of Africa.
  7. ^ Coon, Carleton Stevens; Hunt, Edward E. (1966). The Living Races of Man. London: Jonathan Cape. p. 93. Late Capsians from North Africa are clearly Caucasoid and, more specifically, almost entirely Mediterranean.
  8. ^ Baum 2006, pp. 84–85: "Finally, Christoph Meiners (1747–1810), the University of Göttingen 'popular philosopher' and historian, first gave the term Caucasian racial meaning in his Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit (Outline of the History of Humanity; 1785) ... Meiners pursued this 'Göttingen program' of inquiry in extensive historical-anthropological writings, which included two editions of his Outline of the History of Humanity and numerous articles in Göttingisches Historisches Magazin"
  9. ^ William R. Woodward (June 9, 2015). Hermann Lotze: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge University Press. p. 260. ISBN 978-1-316-29785-8. ... the five human races identified by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach – Negroes, American Indians, Malaysians, Mongolians, and Caucasians. He chose to rely on Blumenbach, leader of the Göttingen school of comparative anatomy
  10. ^ Nicolaas A. Rupke (2002). Göttingen and the Development of the Natural Sciences. Wallstein-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-89244-611-8. For it was at Gottingen in this period that the outlines of a system of classification were laid down in a manner that still shapes the way in which we attempt to comprehend the different varieties of humankind – including usage of such terms as 'Caucasian'.
  11. ^ Charles Simon-Aaron (2008). The Atlantic Slave Trade: Empire, Enlightenment, and the Cult of the Unthinking Negro. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press. ISBN 978-0-7734-5197-1. Here, Blumenbach placed the white European at the apex of the human family; he even gave the European a new name – i.e., Caucasian. This relationship also inspired the academic labors of Karl Otfried Muller, C. Meiners and K. A. Heumann, the more important thinkers at Gottingen for our project. (This list is not intended to be exhaustive.)
  12. ^ Pickering, Robert (2009). The Use of Forensic Anthropology. CRC Press. p. 82. ISBN 978-1-4200-6877-1.
  13. ^ Pickering, Robert (2009). The Use of Forensic Anthropology. CRC Press. p. 109. ISBN 978-1-4200-6877-1.
  14. ^ Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1865). Thomas Bendyshe (ed.). The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Anthropological Society. pp. 265, 303, 367. ISBN 9780878211241.
  15. ^ Caspari, Rachel (2003). "From types to populations: A century of race, physical anthropology, and the American Anthropological Association" (PDF). American Anthropologist. 105 (1): 65–76. doi:10.1525/aa.2003.105.1.65. hdl:2027.42/65890.
  16. ^ "Race".
  17. ^ Bhopal, R.; Donaldson, L. (1998). "White, European, Western, Caucasian, or what? Inappropriate labeling in research on race, ethnicity, and health". American Journal of Public Health. 88 (9): 1303–1307. doi:10.2105/ajph.88.9.1303. PMC 1509085. PMID 9736867.
  18. ^ Baum 2006, p. 3,18.
  19. ^ Herbst, Philip (June 15, 1997). The color of words: an encyclopaedic dictionary of ethnic bias in the United States. Intercultural Press. ISBN 978-1-877864-97-1. Though discredited as an anthropological term and not recommended in most editorial guidelines, it is still heard and used, for example, as a category on forms asking for ethnic identification. It is also still used for police blotters (the abbreviated Cauc may be heard among police) and appears elsewhere as a euphemism. Its synonym, Caucasoid, also once used in anthropology but now dated and considered pejorative, is disappearing.
  20. ^ Mukhopadhyay, Carol C. (June 30, 2008). "Getting Rid of the Word 'Caucasian'". In Mica Pollock (ed.). Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School. New Press. pp. 14–. ISBN 978-1-59558-567-7. Yet there is one striking exception in our modern racial vocabulary: the term 'Caucasian'. Despite being a remnant of a discredited theory of racial classification, the term has persisted into the twenty-first century, within as well as outside of the educational community. It is high time we got rid of the word Caucasian. Some might protest that it is 'only a label'. But language is one of the most systematic, subtle, and significant vehicles for transmitting racial ideology. Terms that describe imagined groups, such as Caucasian, encapsulate those beliefs. Every time we use them and uncritically expose students to them, we are reinforcing rather than dismantling the old racialized worldview. Using the word Caucasian invokes scientific racism, the false idea that races are naturally occurring, biologically ranked subdivisions of the human species and that Caucasians are the superior race. Beyond this, the label Caucasian can even convey messages about which groups have culture and are entitled to recognition as Americans.
  21. ^ Dewanjuly, Shaila (July 6, 2013). "Has 'Caucasian' Lost Its Meaning?". The New York Times. Retrieved March 16, 2018. AS a racial classification, the term Caucasian has many flaws, dating as it does from a time when the study of race was based on skull measurements and travel diaries ... Its equivalents from that era are obsolete – nobody refers to Asians as 'Mongolian' or blacks as 'Negroid'. ... There is no legal reason to use it. It rarely appears in federal statutes, and the Census Bureau has never put a checkbox by the word Caucasian. (White is an option.) ... The Supreme Court, which can be more colloquial, has used the term in only 64 cases, including a pair from the 1920s that reveal its limitations ... In 1889, the editors of the original Oxford English Dictionary noted that the term Caucasian had been 'practically discarded'. But they spoke too soon. Blumenbach's authority had given the word a pseudoscientific sheen that preserved its appeal. Even now, the word gives discussions of race a weird technocratic gravitas, as when the police insist that you step out of your 'vehicle' instead of your car ... Susan Glisson, who as the executive director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation in Oxford, Miss., regularly witnesses Southerners sorting through their racial vocabulary, said she rarely hears 'Caucasian'. 'Most of the folks who work in this field know that it's a completely ridiculous term to assign to whites,' she said. 'I think it's a term of last resort for people who are really uncomfortable talking about race. They use the term that's going to make them be as distant from it as possible.'


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