Quick: what does “caucasian” mean? Almost everyone will answer “a white person.” But that’s weird, isn’t it? We already have a name for white people– “white people.”
And, yes, before you start with the “white people aren’t actually white; they’re actually pinkish-brownish,” yes– “white skin” is not actually a thing, unless you’re a ghost or a vampire (although perhaps albino people get close). But Black people don’t actually have black skin either.
We all accept that when we use color words to describe a race, it is a relative, and somewhat arbitrary, descriptor. In reality, everyone’s skin tone is some combination of pinkish-brown.
Franchesca Ramsey and MTV News decided to dig into the history of the term “caucasian” as it is used in North America, in the video below. Ramsey notes that “caucasian” is not used to mean “white people” in Europe– it literally means “Caucasian” (folks from the Caucasus region in northwest Asia).
Irony alert: most Caucasian people wouldn’t read as “white people”– there are more than 50 ethnic groups in this region. So why do we still use this wildly inaccurate (and geographically ignorant) term for white people today?
Here’s how it started: In the 1700’s, German philosopher Christoph Meiners was a big proponent of “scientific racism,” which ascribed varying levels of moral character, beauty, and intelligence to the races. Of course, this “theory” was generally only practiced by white people. So… guess which race they all figured was the best one? Meiners thought that folks in Caucasus had the most beautiful, whitest skin, starting the connection between the term “caucasian” meaning “white people.”
Decades later, Johann Blumenbach (also German, and FTR, disagreed with Meiners’ ideas about race) studied skulls from different regions. Although he wasn’t the raging racist that Meiners was, he thought that white was the “natural state” for humans, and that other skin colors were a result of “degenerative conditions” like environment and nutrition. Thus, Blumenbach theorized that the Caucasus region was the site of the origin of human life– thus, the ideal “Caucasian race” came to be.
Blumenbach divided the world into five races. Caucasian, the white race; Mongolian, the yellow race (east-central Asia); Malayan, the brown race (southeast Asia and Pacific islands); Ethiopian, the black race (Africa); and American, the red race. Because the white race was the most “natural,” Blumenbach’s division of races stipulated that all other races were inferior.
It is clear that the Founding Fathers bought in to the idea of non-white races being inferior to folks of European ancestry, especially the “red” and “black” races.
Fast forward to 1919, when Bhagat Singh Thind (an Indian man) applied for naturalized citizenship in the U.S. (at the time, only available to white people and decendants of slaves). Because of a previous lawsuit which classified a “white person” as a “member of the Caucasian race,” Thind argued that he fits into that definition, being from the Caucasus region. The judge upheld the common understanding of “Caucasian” and denied Thind’s claim.
The use of “Caucasian” as a term for a person of European descent has always been exclusionary. It has always implied superiority to non-Caucasians. Ramsey rightly points out that it sounds more scientific than names for other races, and makes it sound like there is something connecting all white people other than skin color.
Thus, it conveys power. The term “caucasian” is racist AF. It would be great if this racist term could die a quick death in our modern American usage.
Featured image is by Scott Barbour/Getty.
