Why is it that "white" and "Caucasian" have become synonyms?
I realize that if you just want to describe a person's skin color, that there's not many people that are more "white" than I am. However, if what you want to describe is a person's ethnicity, then I could be Dutch or Irish or English or Danish or Spanish, but none of those people are from the Caucasus mountains. Just because my ancestry is European and my skin color is white, does not make me belong to this invented ethnic group.
I think the real reason that term gets used is because the people that ask the question aren't interested in ethnicity or culture or heritage or anything like it, but are actually only concerned with skin color, and have discovered that ethnicity is a way to disguise that interest to people who don't like being categorized by their color.
2 comments:
term Caucasian to describe whites is a racist term. It was coined by German physiologist and anthropologist Johann Blumenbach in the late 19tgh century. Hia reasoning was that he believe the mostg beautiful example of white people came from the Caucasus, and he further concluded that the Caucasus mountains were the birthplace of man.
He also used for other terms for the four other races he believed there were:
Negroid, blacks
Mongoloids, yellow (asian)
Malayan, brown
and American (red), Indians
I am thoroughly offended when somebody calls me caucasian.. I'm
I'm Indo-European
Cool, thanks for your comment Gryphon.
I think it's interesting that those other terms have all been thrown out now and are generally considered racist, but Caucasian remains. Of course, people don't really worry about sounding racist unless they're referring to a minority race.
I think the thing that bothers me about it isn't the term so much as the realization that the term is just an attempt at hiding an interest in skin color.
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