# Origin of "Caucasian"



## Outsider

JazzByChas said:
			
		

> _Cultural note: "Caucasians" are not White Europeans, but Asians from the Caucasus mountain region, i.e. Arabs. See __here__, and __here_


As you know, Jazz, the word "Caucasian" has several different meanings. But I must take issue with what you wrote.

1) It is arguable whether Caucasians are Asians. The Caucasus mountains are often regarded as the southeastern edge of Europe.
2) Caucasians are definitely not ethnic Arabs.

*MOD NOTE:*  This thread is an off-shoot from discussion that was started in the "Is America a Melting Pot?" thread.


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## JazzByChas

Well, you raise a good point when you say they are not arabs, but the Caucasus mountains, according to the map displayed in Wikipedia) do extend a great deal through what are central asian countries, touching only a small part of SouthEastern Europe.  So "Caucasians" may not be arabs, but they are certainly from the middle east.



			
				Outsider said:
			
		

> As you know, Jazz, the word "Caucasian" has several different meanings. But I must take issue with what you wrote.
> 
> 1) It is arguable whether Caucasians are Asians. The Caucasus mountains are often regarded as the southeastern edge of Europe.
> 2) Caucasians are definitely not ethnic Arabs.


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## Outsider

JazzByChas said:
			
		

> Well, you raise a good point when you say they are not arabs, but the Caucasus mountains, according to the map displayed in Wikipedia) do extend a great deal through what are central asian countries, touching only a small part of SouthEastern Europe.  So "Caucasians" may not be arabs, but they are certainly from the middle east.


Chas, and how do you define "Middle Eastern Country"?...

For some people, Western Russia is a part of Europe, for others it isn't. It's the same with the Caucasus. The truth of the matter is that there is no clearcut, natural  border between the two continents. (Can you pinpoint where North America ends and Central America begins?...) It's arbitrary.

Just out of curiosity, though, here's what I found in the Wikipedia's entry on "Middle East":



> Middle East defines a cultural area, so it does not have precise borders. The most common and highly arbitrary definition includes: Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran (Persia), Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
> 
> [...]
> 
> The Caucasus region, Cyprus, and Turkey, although often grouped into Southwest Asia based upon geographic proximity and continuity, are generally considered culturally and politically European due to their various historic and recent political ties to that region. For example, Armenia and Cyprus, although both exist in close geographic proximity to the Middle East, possess two important criteria that links them more to Europe than to the Middle East: their national identity that combines an Indo-European linguistic background and majority populations that adhere to Christianity [...]


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## vince

Looks like we should break this subject away from the main thread.

Caucasus is the region between the Black and Caspian Seas that marked the southern border of the USSR with Turkey and Iran. A couple of unique languages are spoken there, the Caucasian languages. In addition, Turkic (e.g. Azeri) and Indo-European languages (Armenian and Russian) are spoken in the region.

The current "Caucasian countries" are Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The dominant religion in the area is Islam though I believe there is an Orthodox Christian minority.

I don't know why white people are called "Caucasians". It must be derived from some discredited racial theory that white people originated from there. Or maybe these racist theorists thought that the purest Whites were from that area.


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## Outsider

vince said:
			
		

> The current "Caucasian countries" are Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The dominant religion in the area is Islam though I believe there is an Orthodox Christian minority.


I don't know about the region in general, but Armenia and Georgia are traditionally Christian countries.



			
				vince said:
			
		

> I don't know why white people are called "Caucasians". It must be derived from some discredited racial theory that white people originated from there. Or maybe these racist theorists thought that the purest Whites were from that area.


Exactly. See Chas' links.


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## vince

You are right, Georgia and Armenia are majority Orthodox. I guess I was thinking about Chechnya, Dagestan, and Azerbaijan.


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## Hakro

vince said:
			
		

> I don't know why white people are called "Caucasians". It must be derived from some discredited racial theory that white people originated from there. Or maybe these racist theorists thought that the purest Whites were from that area.


 The reason is that Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), a German medical doctor, in his thesis _De generis humani variatate nativa_ divided the mankind into five races, where Caucasian meant European, Ethiopian meant African etc. Why did he choose these names, it's not sure. See THIS.


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## maxiogee

It's just a name, not an geographical identity. Just as not all Neanderthals lived in the Neander Valley, just as not all "African-Americans" have any connection to Africa - it's a coding.


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## Jhorer Brishti

Actually according to (what I thought was) an outdated theory, a very broad classification of the human species divides it into three major races. Caucasians, Mongoloids, and Negroids. Basically almost the entire world is grouped as Caucasian(stretching from Europe, through the middle east and making up the dominant "category" in India where it mixes with Mongoloid and Australoid elements) while Mongoloids include the Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean,Indonesian,etc. as well as the Native American populations(presumably since the ancestors of the "Native" population of the Americas crossed the Bering Strait from Eastern Asia). Furthermore, this theory posits that Caucasians and Mongoloids are much more related to each other than the Negroid populations which are the "furthest removed" from the gene pool. It's a very sketchy and racist theory since these broad categorizations are(were?) used in anthropology where only head shape and other anatomical features were analyzed. I mean seriously Caucasians, according to this theory, include South Indians who can have skin as black or blacker than most Africans. Supposedly there is a debate over whether Ethiopans are Caucasians since there is mixed heritage in that area. In all due respects, I find this to be a ridiculously outrageous and racist theory and I wonder why anyone would lend credence to it in this day and age....Here's a Wikipedia link for more information on the subject:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasoid,_Negroid,_Mongoloid


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## Outsider

Jhorer Brishti said:
			
		

> In all due respects, I find this to be a ridiculously outrageous and racist theory and I wonder why anyone would lend credence to it in this day and age....


Do you mean in the Wikipedia article you linked to? Because I don't think anyone here was trying to lend credence to those outdated theories.


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## Jhorer Brishti

Outsider said:
			
		

> Do you mean in the Wikipedia article you linked to? Because I don't think anyone here was trying to lend credence to those outdated theories.


 
Well, I thought the issue concerned what "Caucasian" actually means. If we do follow what these outdated theories state, Arabs would be Caucasians.. Oh and about lending credence, I was referring to the current policy of the US government(in its infinite wisdom to ensure that everyone is classified into some group or another) when one poster(maybe JazzbyChas) who once wrote that according to the branch of the US government that keeps tabs on the various races in America, Arabs are Caucasian. Sorry for any confusion. My train of thought tends to zoom from one obscure topic to another...


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## Outsider

I took it for granted that *JazzByChas* did not believe in those old anthropological theories, so I was only interested in discussing the other meaning of "Caucasian" -- the original meaning -- i.e., the peoples of the Caucasus region. Chas stated that they were Asian and Arab. I think that is arguable at best.


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## Hakro

Blumenbach's theories of the five races are of course outdated but the term Caucasian, meaning white (European) people, is still today used in many medical connexions.


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## maxiogee

The whole concept of "race" is proven wrong, as far as I know.

The *Oxford American Dictionary* widget on my Macintosh has a note on "race" which ends with…
"Scientifically it is accepted as obvious that there are subdivisions of the human species, 
but it is also clear that genetic variation between individuals of the same race can be as 
great as that between members of different races."


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## diegodbs

"Caucasian" = "caucásico" in Spanish.

*



caucásico, ca.1. adj. Se dice de la raza blanca o indoeuropea, por suponerla oriunda del Cáucaso.
		
Click to expand...

* 

(..related to the white or indoeuropean race, supposedly coming from the Caucasus)

I wonder why those 19th century misconceptions are still in use. They are senseless.


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## Pivra

To me, its a more polite way of saying "whites", sometimes its hard for me to identify people by their skin colors. It seems very rude and I am not comfortable with it.


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## Fernando

Agreed. Caucasian is no more than a euphemism for "white" or "North Europe white".

Being or not an euphemism it does not intend to refer to current Caucasians (as Outsider has remarked, in the frontier of Europe and Asia) but to some former "Aryan" Caucasian whose suppossed offspring is the white race.


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## panjabigator

What is very confusing to me is what do I put as a Indian on the census info that we have to fill in on tests...ie "what is your race/ethnicity?"

I always put Asian because thats the continent I'm decendent from, but for some reason Asia only seems to refer to the Eastern areas.


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## Fernando

As widely commented in other threads the census classification is very weird since:

- It uses no-sense euphemisms (Caucasian) 

- It mixes both ethnicity and culture.

Spaniards use to be confused: Are we Hispanics (cultural), Caucasians (most of us)...?


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## Brioche

Pivra said:
			
		

> To me, its a more polite way of saying "whites", sometimes its hard for me to identify people by their skin colors. It seems very rude and I am not comfortable with it.


 
Apparently, in Russia it would be insulting to call a Russian "Caucasian".

I think it is a silly word. If you mean white, say white.
No-one would say "mongoloid" or "negroid" these days.

Since they say "African-American", "Asian-American" &c in the US, then to be consistent, they should also say "European-American".

I'm not a cork-asian.


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## Fernando

I assume that questioning about your ethnicity has only one reason: To detect discrimination. E.g.: If 40% of black people is below poverty line and only 20% of whites we can say that there is a problem. (Data are invented).

If so, only appearance is a basis for discrimination. Therefore, I would say "white", "black", brown-haired, and so on.


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## maxiogee

panjabigator said:
			
		

> What is very confusing to me is what do I put as a Indian on the census info that we have to fill in on tests...ie "what is your race/ethnicity?"
> 
> I always put Asian because thats the continent I'm decendent from, but for some reason Asia only seems to refer to the Eastern areas.



Do you have room for "Indian sub-continent" - or is there a phone number/email address which you can contact for guidance?


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## panjabigator

I never thought of that...the only thing I fit is Asian...there is other but I dont know why the test makers would want to ostrazise an entire community with the term "other"


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