Caucasian race

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This article is about the outdated race concept.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

The Caucasian race (also Caucasoid,

Western Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.[6][7]

Introduced in the 1780s by members of the

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]

History of the concept

The Caucasus as the origin of humanity and the peak of beauty

In the eighteenth century, the prevalent view among European scholars was that the human species had its origin in the region of the Caucasus Mountains.[22] This view was based upon the Caucasus being the location for the purported landing point of Noah's Ark – from whom the Bible states that humanity is descended – and the location for the suffering of Prometheus, who in Hesiod's myth had crafted humankind from clay.[22]

In addition,

Circassian beauties" and the Georgian people; both Georgia and Circassia are in the Caucasus region.[23][22] The "Circassian beauty" stereotype had its roots in the Middle Ages, while the reputation for the attractiveness of the Georgian people was developed by early modern travellers to the region such as Jean Chardin.[22][24]

Göttingen school of history

Christoph Meiners' 1785 treatise The Outline of History of Mankind was the first work to use the term Caucasian (Kaukasisch) in its wider racial sense. (click on image for English translation of the text)

The term Caucasian as a racial category was introduced in the 1780s by members of the

native inhabitants of the Caucasus region.[25]

In his The Outline of History of Mankind (1785), the German philosopher Christoph Meiners first used the concept of a "Caucasian" (Kaukasisch) race in its wider racial sense.

autochthones of Northern Africa (Berbers, Egyptians, Abyssinians and neighboring groups), the Indians, and the ancient Guanches.[36]

Drawing of the skull of a Georgian female by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, used as an archetype for the Caucasian racial characteristics in his 1795 De Generis Humani Varietate

It was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a colleague of Meiners', who later came to be considered one of the founders of the discipline of

Linnean taxonomy.[37] Blumenbach did not credit Meiners with his taxonomy, although his justification clearly points to Meiners' aesthetic viewpoint of Caucasus origins.[38] In contrast to Meiners, however, Blumenbach was a monogenist—he considered all humans to have a shared origin and to be a single species. Blumenbach, like Meiners, did rank his Caucasian grouping higher than other groups in terms of mental faculties or potential for achievement[37] despite pointing out that the transition from one race to another is so gradual that the distinctions between the races presented by him are "very arbitrary".[39]

Alongside the anthropologist Georges Cuvier, Blumenbach classified the Caucasian race by cranial measurements and bone morphology in addition to skin pigmentation.[40] Following Meiners, Blumenbach described the Caucasian race as consisting of the native inhabitants of Europe, West Asia, the Indian peninsula, and North Africa.[citation needed] This usage later grew into the widely used color terminology for race, contrasting with the terms Negroid, Mongoloid, and Australoid.[41]

Carleton Coon

There was never consensus among the proponents of the "Caucasoid race" concept regarding how it would be delineated from other groups such as the proposed Mongoloid race. Carleton S. Coon (1939) included the populations native to all of Central and Northern Asia, including the Ainu people, under the Caucasoid label. However, many scientists maintained the racial categorizations of color established by Meiners' and Blumenbach's works, along with many other early steps of anthropology, well into the late 19th and mid-to-late 20th centuries, increasingly used to justify political policies, such as segregation and immigration restrictions, and other opinions based in prejudice. For example, Thomas Henry Huxley (1870) classified all populations of Asian nations as Mongoloid. Lothrop Stoddard (1920) in turn classified as "brown" most of the populations of the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Central Asia and South Asia. He counted as "white" only European peoples and their descendants, as well as a few populations in areas adjacent to or opposite southern Europe, in parts of Anatolia and parts of the Rif and Atlas mountains.

In 1939, Coon argued that the Caucasian race had originated through admixture between Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens of the "Mediterranean type" which he considered to be distinct from Caucasians, rather than a subtype of it as others had done.[42] While Blumenbach had erroneously thought that light skin color was ancestral to all humans and the dark skin of southern populations was due to sun, Coon thought that Caucasians had lost their original pigmentation as they moved North.[42] Coon used the term "Caucasoid" and "White race" synonymously.[43]

In 1962, Coon published The Origin of Races, wherein he proposed a

polygenist view, that human races had evolved separately from local varieties of Homo erectus. Dividing humans into five main races, and argued that each evolved in parallel but at different rates, so that some races had reached higher levels of evolution than others.[15] He argued that the Caucasoid race had evolved 200,000 years prior to the "Congoid race", and hence represented a higher evolutionary stage.[44]

Coon argued that Caucasoid traits emerged prior to the Cro-Magnons, and were present in the

Homo sapiens (e.g. Muge, Long Barrow, Corded), as well as Neanderthal-influenced brachycephalic Homo sapiens dating to the Mesolithic and Neolithic (e.g. Afalou, Hvellinge, Fjelkinge).[46]

Coon's theories on race were much disputed in his lifetime,

pseudoscientific in modern anthropology.[47][48][49][50][51]

Criticism based on modern genetics

See also: Race and genetics

After discussing various criteria used in biology to define subspecies or races,

Alan R. Templeton concludes in 2016: "[T]he answer to the question whether races exist in humans is clear and unambiguous: no."[52]
: 360 

Racial anthropology

Catalan man of Iberian type
Illustrations of "Caucasoid subraces" from Man, Past and Present by Augustus Henry Keane
(1899)

Physical traits

Skull and teeth

Drawing from

William Clouser Boyd, Reginald Ruggles Gates, Carleton S. Coon, Sonia Mary Cole, Alice Mossie Brues and Grover Krantz replacing the earlier term "Caucasian" as it had fallen out of usage.[56]

Classification

Dravida & Sinhalese
Mongoloid:
  North Mongol
  Chinese & Indochinese
  Korean & Japanese
  Tibetan & Burmese
  Malay
  Polynesian
  Maori
  Micronesian
  Eskimo & Inuit
  American

In the 19th century

Hamitic (Hamitic languages i.e. Berber-Cushitic-Egyptian).[57]

19th century

Dravidians and the Sinhalese were Caucasoid or a separate Dravida race, but by and in the 20th century, anthropologists predominantly declared Dravidians to be Caucasoid.[58][59][60]

Historically, the

Turanid". Turanid racial type or "minor race", subtype of the Europid (Caucasian) race with Mongoloid admixtures, situated at the boundary of the distribution of the Mongoloid and Europid "great races".[61][62]

There was no universal consensus of the validity of the "Caucasoid" grouping within those who attempted to categorize human variation.

Xanthochroi (Nordic) and Melanochroi (Mediterranean) types.[63]

Subraces

The postulated subraces vary depending on the author, including but not limited to

Hamitic.[64]

H.G. Wells argued that across Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Asia, Central Asia and South Asia, a Caucasian physical stock existed. He divided this racial element into two main groups: a shorter and darker Mediterranean or Iberian race and a taller and lighter Nordic race. Wells asserted that Semitic and Hamitic populations were mainly of Mediterranean type, and Aryan populations were originally of Nordic type. He regarded the Basques as descendants of early Mediterranean peoples, who inhabited western Europe before the arrival of Aryan Celts from the direction of central Europe.[65]

The "Northcaucasian race" is a sub-race proposed by

Ingushs).[67][68]

An introduction to anthropology, published in 1953,[69] gives a more complex classification scheme:

Usage in the United States

Further information:
Race in the United States

Besides its use in anthropology and related fields, the term "Caucasian" has often been used in the United States in a different, social context to describe a group commonly called "

Spanish speaking countries
. In other countries, the term Hispanic is rarely used.

The United States National Library of Medicine often used the term "Caucasian" as a race in the past. However, it later discontinued such usage in favor of the more narrow geographical term European, which traditionally only applied to a subset of Caucasoids.[75]

See also

Notes

  1. OCLC 800915872
    .
  2. ^ a b c Cited by contributing editor to a group of four works by Baum,[8] Woodward,[9] Rupke,[10] and Simon.[11]
  3. ^ Cited by contributing editor to a group of nine works by Mario,[27] Isaac,[28] Schiebinger,[29] Rupp-Eisenreich,[30] Dougherty,[31] Hochman,[32] Mikkelsen,[33] Painter,[34] and Binden.[35]

References

  1. PMID 6421437
    .
  2. ISBN 9780898745108
    . Retrieved July 21, 2015.
  3. doi:10.2307/j.ctv7h0s6j.26
    . ... the answer to the question whether races exist in humans is clear and unambiguous: no.
  4. 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. 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. 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. 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. ISBN 978-1-4200-6877-1
    .
  13. ISBN 978-1-4200-6877-1
    .
  14. ISBN 9780878211241
    .
  15. ^
    hdl:2027.42/65890
    .
  16. ^ "Race".
  17. PMID 9736867
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  18. ^ Baum 2006, p. 3,18.
  19. 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. 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.'
  22. ^ a b c d Baum 2006, p. 82.
  23. ^ Figal 2010, pp. 81–84.
  24. ^ Chardin, 1686, Journal du voyage du chevalier Chardin en Perse et aux Indes Orientales par la Mer Noire et par la Colchide, p.204, "Le sang de Géorgie est le plus beau d'Orient, et je puis dire du monde, je n'ai pas remarqué un laid visage en ce païs la, parmi l'un et l'autre sexe: mais j'y en ay vû d'Angeliques."
  25. ^ For example, such as in the Allgemeine Erdbeschreibung published by Meyer in 1777: Allgemeine Erdbeschreibung: Asien - Volume 3. Meyer. 1777. p. 1435.
  26. ^ Meiners, Christoph (1785). Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit. Im Verlage der Meyerschen Buchhandlung. pp. 25–.
  27. OCLC 34194206
  28. OCLC 51942570
  29. Eighteenth-Century Studies
    , Vol. 23, No. 4, Special Issue: The Politics of Difference, Summer, 1990, pp. 387–405
  30. ^ B. Rupp-Eisenreich, "Des Choses Occultes en Histoire des Sciences Humaines: le Destin de la 'Science Nouvelle' de Christoph Meiners", L'Ethnographie v.2 (1983), p. 151
  31. ^ F. Dougherty, "Christoph Meiners und Johann Friedrich Blumenbach im Streit um den Begriff der Menschenrasse," in G. Mann and F. Dumont, eds., Die Natur des Menschen , pp. 103–04
  32. ISBN 978-1-317-66997-5
    .
  33. ISBN 978-1-4384-4363-8
    .
  34. ^ Painter, N. "Why White People are Called Caucasian?" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on October 20, 2013. Retrieved October 9, 2006.
  35. ^ Another online document reviews the early history of race theory.18th and 19th Century Views of Human Variation Archived October 21, 2013, at the Wayback Machine The treatises of Blumenbach can be found online here.
  36. ^ The New American Cyclopaedia: A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge, Volume 4. Appleton. 1870. p. 588.
  37. ^
    PMID 18156242
    .
  38. ^ Baum 2006, p. 88: "The connection between Meiners's ideas about a Caucasian branch of humanity and Blumenbach's later conception of a Caucasian variety (eventually, a Caucasian race) is not completely clear. What is clear is that the two editions of Meiners's Outline were published between the second edition of Blumenbach's On the Natural Variety of Mankind and the third edition, where Blumenbach first used the term Caucasian. Blumenbach cited Meiners once in 1795, but only to include Meiners's 1793 division of humanity into "handsome and white" and "ugly and dark" peoples among several alternative "divisions of the varieties of mankind." Yet Blumenbach must have been aware of Meiners's earlier designation of Caucasian and Mongolian branches of humanity, as the two men knew each other as colleagues at the University of Göttingen. The way that Blumenbach embraced the term Caucasian suggests that he worked to distance his own anthropological thinking from that of Meiners while recovering the term Caucasian for his own more refined racial classification: he made no mention of Meiners's 1785 usage and gave the term a new meaning.
  39. ^ German: "sehr willkürlich": Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1797). Handbuch der Naturgeschichte. p. 61. Retrieved May 24, 2020. Alle diese Verschiedenheiten fließen aber durch so mancherley Abstufungen und Uebergänge so unvermerkt zusammen, daß sich keine andre, als sehr willkürliche Grenzen zwischen ihnen festsetzen lassen.
  40. ^ On the Natural Variety of Mankind, 3rd ed. (1795) in Bendyshe: 264–65; "racial face," 229.
  41. PMID 6421437
    .
  42. ^
    The Races of Europe. The Macmillan Company
    . p. 51.
  43. ^ The Races of Europe, Chapter XIII, Section 2 Archived May 11, 2006, at archive.today
  44. ^
    S2CID 86739986
    .
  45. ^ The Origin of Races. Random House Inc., 1962, p. 570.
  46. ^ Coon, Carleton Stevens (1939). The Races of Europe. The Macmillan Company. pp. 26–28, 50–55.
  47. PMID 25950769
    .
  48. JSTOR j.ctvpj76k0.11
    . For more than four decades beginning in the late 1930s, the Harvard anthropologist Carleton Coon wrote a series of big books for an ever shrinking audience in which he pushed a pseudoscientific racial angle of analysis.
  49. S2CID 146652143
    . Most disturbingly for liberal anthropologists, the new generation of racist "pseudoscience" threatened to return to mainstream respectability in 1962 with the publication of Carleton Coon's The Origin of Races (Coon 1962).
  50. ISBN 9781565848870
    . Carleton Coon, whose The Origin of Races [...] claimed that Homo sapiens evolved five different times, blacks last. Its poor reception by anthropologists, followed by evidence from archaeology and paleontology that mankind evolved once, and in Africa, finally put an end to such pseudoscience.
  51. ISBN 978-0-230-11829-4
    . Carleton Coon fully embraced typology as a way to determine the basis of racial and ethnic difference [...] Unfortunately for him, American anthropology increasingly equated typology with pseudoscience.
  52. doi:10.2307/j.ctv7h0s6j.26
    .
  53. ^ "Miriam Claude Meijer, Race and Aesthetics in the Anthropology of Petrus Camper", 1722–1789, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999, pp. 169–74.
  54. ^ Bertoletti, Stefano Fabbri. 1994. The anthropological theory of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. In Romanticism in science, science in Europe, 1790–1840.
  55. ^ See individual literature for such Caucasoid identifications, while the following article gives a brief overview: How "Caucasoids" Got Such Big Crania and Why They Shrank: From Morton to Rushton, Leonard Lieberman, Current Anthropology, Vol. 42, No. 1, February 2001, pp. 69–95.
  56. ^ "People and races", Alice Mossie Brues, Waveland Press, 1990, notes how the term Caucasoid replaced Caucasian.
  57. ^ Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, 4th edition, 1885–90, T11, p. 476.
  58. ^ Wright, Arnold (1915). Southern India, Its History, People, Commerce, and Industrial Resources. Foreign and Colonial Compiling and Publishing Company. p. 69.
  59. ISBN 978-81-7156-673-0
    .
  60. ISBN 978-93-86102-08-9
    .
  61. ISBN 978-0-306-41777-1
    .
  62. ^ American anthropologist, American Anthropological Association, Anthropological Society of Washington (Washington, D.C,), 1984 v. 86, nos. 3–4, p. 741.
  63. ^ T. H. Huxley, "On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind", Journal of the Ethnological Society of London (1870).
  64. ISBN 978-0-7172-0134-1
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  65. ^ Wells, H. G. (1921). The outline of history, being a plain history of life and mankind. The Macmillan Company. pp. 119–123, 236–238. Retrieved August 8, 2017.
  66. ^ Carleton S. Coon, The Races of Europe (1930)[page needed] Race and Racism: An Introduction (see also) by Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, pp 127–133, December 8, 2005,
    ISBN 0759107955
    Dmitry Bogatenkov; Stanislav Drobyshev. "Anthropology and Ethnic History" (in Russian).
    Peoples' Friendship University of Russia
    .
  67. Peoples' Friendship University of Russia. Archived from the original
    on July 19, 2011. Retrieved April 21, 2020.
  68. ^ School Bakai - Ethnogenesis the North Caucasus indigenous population
  69. ^ Beals, Ralph L.; Hoijer, Harry (1953). An Introduction to Anthropology. New York: The Macmillan Company.
  70. ^ Listed according to: Nida, Eugene Albert (1954). Customs and Cultures: Anthropology for Christian Missions. New York: Harper and Brothers. p. 283.
  71. ^ Painter, Nell Irvin (2003). "Collective Degradation: Slavery and the Construction of Race. Why White People are Called Caucasian" (PDF). Yale University. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 20, 2013. Retrieved October 9, 2006.
  72. ^ Karen R. Humes; Nicholas A. Jones; Roberto R. Ramirez, eds. (March 2011). "Definition of Race Categories Used in the 2010 Census" (PDF). United States Census Bureau. p. 3. Retrieved April 25, 2014.
  73. SSRN 2610266
    .
  74. ^ "Not All Caucasians Are White: The Supreme Court Rejects Citizenship for Asian Indians", History Matters
  75. ^ Tybaert, Sara; Rosov, Jane (November–December 2003). "MEDLINE Data Changes - 2004". NLM Technical Bulletin (335): e6. The MeSH term Racial Stocks and its four children (Australoid Race, Caucasoid Race, Mongoloid Race, and Negroid Race) have been deleted from MeSH in 2004. A new heading, Continental Population Groups, has been created with new identification that emphasize geography.

Bibliography

Literature
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