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The term Caucasian race has in time acquired somewhat different meanings in different contexts. It is popularly used in North America to describe whites of northern, eastern and western European descent, usually excluding southern Europeans (often called "Latins") and peoples of Asian, African, Slavic, Semitic, and Turkish origin. In North America, Caucasian is also used in the broader meaning of "white" especially in government and census forms; see Caucasian type. Another, earlier use of the term, originally based on cranology, refers to various ethnic groups living in the Caucasus region.
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.
Later anthropologists such as Carleton Coon have further expanded upon the classification of the Caucasian race proposed by Blumenbach, and have subdivided the group into Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean, and at times Dinaric and Baltic subdivisions.
The concept of Caucasian race and its stated or implied superiority over other races was often used as a moral excuse for colonialism by Western European countries, in the 19th and 20th centuries. It was also taken seriously under Nazism (and sizeable groups of people in most western countries) in the decades before World War II, and used to justify eugenics programs and the persecution and extermination of so-called "inferior" races then living in Europe, such as Jews and Roma; see also Aryan race. It has been (and is still) used to justify social discrimination in many other places of the world, such as against descendants of Native Americans, African slaves, and immigrants in the Americas and South Africa, and many more.
Current views
It is clearly observable that many people do not correspond easily to one racial/subracial type or another. There is currently extensive debate on the scientific validity of racial classifications, and many people reject systems of racial classification as inherently arbitrary and subject to wide divergences in most populations. Indeed, the advances in biochemistry over the past 30-40 years have revealed that the traditional racial divisions have extremely little genetic basis. Its relevance is debatable as a physical anthropological, ethnic/cultural or socio-political concept.
See also
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.
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