How did Caucasian come to equal only european?

[k5125]

In America I mean. How did this happen? Whats the history behind it? If you were to tell the average joe out there that some dark skinned Azeri or Armenian was caucasian they would laugh at you would they not?

[Mike the Jedi]

My countrymen can be really stupid people, but it's not their fault. Our politically-correct media and popular culture promotes these kinds of racial inaccuracies.

Anyway, the history of the white race being called Caucasian can be traced back to the Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German scientist, who claimed that Georgians represented the ideal optimized "white" type.

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. In Europe, usage of the term declined in the 19th century as it did not allow for enough distinctions as required by the new forms of nationalism which were emerging, but in the United States it enjoyed a use which continues to the present. 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.

Nevertheless it is currently often used in the US as a more "scientific sounding" term for "white", and even used by many anthropologists and geneticists to refer generically to people of European origin.

Because Middle Easterners and North Africans did not make up a large chunk of the United States, equating Caucasian with equalling only European resulted. Most Middle Easterners and North Africans are excluded because they do not measure up to what Americans think of when they think Caucasian. They're too exotic and different to be included in the same group, in other words, which I believe is total shite, but that's xenophobia for you.

[k5125]

Well if geneticists and anthropologists refer only to europeans as caucasian, what do they refer to Armenians or Azeris as?

[Mike the Jedi]

Actually, I think most geneticists and anthropologists don't do that.

Reserving Caucasian to mean European is a social construction. I would not expect scientists to cater to that inaccurate definition of the term. If they do, they must not be very bright.

[k5125]

Why were Irish people not "white" in the the 19th century days of America?

[Drooperdoo]

K5125,
Maybe the Irish that the British dealt with were the dark Colin Farrel-type of Irish and they considered them "non-white"? --Who knows. . . . But even as recently as the early 20th Century, the British considered Italians and other Europeans less-than-white.
So "whiteness" contracted from not only meaning "European," but closed further to exclude 7/10ths of Europeans . . . ironically, the very Europeans who created European culture: The swarthy Southerners from Rome and Greece.
I always find it galling that the pink Germanic types that Rome built walls to keep out [since they were barbarians] now claim Western culture for themselves (even though they had little to do with it).

P.S.--I will never get over the Ku Klux Klan paying a visit to a family friend named Sirgonakis. [Perhaps they thought he was a Jew. Who knows?] He was a black-haired, olive-skinned Greek with a prominent Levantine nose. These morons threatened him and told him to open his business elsewhere. The irony: The very name Ku Klux Klan is a corruption of the Greek word for circle "kuklos". So the founders of the Klan had such respect for Western Culture and Greece that they named their organization by using Greek--unknowing that, in a hundred years, subliterate apes would attack Greeks themselves.

[Toasty]

Caucasian = European is not the only extent of this phallacy.

Don't forget that Spanish names =/= Caucasian

I go around telling people that Alexis Bledel is mexican all the time, they never believe me. It really destroys the concepts they have of race. Fools.

[Mike the Jedi]

To the typical American, Caucasian = pink-skinned honkey.

Of course, actual people from the Caucasus mountains are anything but pink-skinned Cromagnoids.

Some Georgians for your viewing pleasure:














































This girl would be called a Latina in the states. In fact she is Salome Chikviladze, or Miss Georgia 2004:

[Toasty]

this one is cute

[Educate Me]

You forgot probably the most famous georgian nowadays, Kasparov the chess god

[Educate Me]

mmmh, kasparov kinda looks like berter

[aeon]

Kasparov is no Georgian. He is an Armenian-Jewish mix born in Azerbaijan.

[Charlie Bass]

I think 'caucasian' should apply to whites only. I can never see Arabs and Northwest Europeans being the same but both are still 'Caucasoids'.

[Mike the Jedi]

hobotraveler said:

I think 'caucasian' should apply to whites only. I can never see Arabs and Northwest Europeans being the same but both are still 'Caucasoids'.

What about actual Caucasians from the Caucasus (Georgians, Armenians, Azeris, etc.)? Many of them are more similar to Arabs than they are to northwest Europeans.

[Charlie Bass]

xcalator1 said:

hobotraveler said:

I think 'caucasian' should apply to whites only. I can never see Arabs and Northwest Europeans being the same but both are still 'Caucasoids'.

What about actual Caucasians from the Caucasus (Georgians, Armenians, Azeris, etc.)? Many of them are more similar to Arabs than they are to northwest Europeans.

Well the simple thing to do would be to eliminate the term 'Caucasian altogether. Imprecise terms give confusing classifications.