What is the origin of the word caucasian

inventing whiteness 59

xv Thomas Jefferson, Essay on the Anglo-Saxon Language , in Andrew A. Lipscomb, ed. Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson . Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1903–1904. Vol. XVIII, 1904:365–366.

xvi Hauer, “Thomas Jefferson and the Anglo-Saxon Language”: 883–886, 891.

This is a significantly revised version of an earlier article, see Mukhopadhyay 2008.

Carol C. Mukhopadhyay

“Caucasian” Language reflects and shapes how we perceive and experience the world around us. The “race” concept is a particularly powerful example, referencing an elabo- rate U.S. “worldview” rooted in colonialism and slavery and a “race”-based system of inequality. As we go about dismantling this ideology, especially scientific racism and the false notion that races are naturally occurring, biologically-rooted, ranked subdivisions of the human species, we must also critically examine the language historically associated with these outmoded systems of racial classification, the labels we use for “races.”

One of the most pernicious, and surprisingly persistent, remnants of the old ideology is the term “Caucasian.” 1 Over the past decades many labels associated with racial science have been challenged. Terms such as “Mongoloid” and Negroid, along with

Carol C. Mukhopadhyay is Professor of Anthropology at San Jose State University and a member of the RACE Project Scholarly Advisory Board. A cultural anthropologist, her research interests include gendered activities in house- holds, politics, and particularly in science and engineering. She has 40 years of experience in teaching, research, consulting, and publishing in the area of race–gender– education–culture. Here, Mukhopadhyay recounts the 18th-century origins of the word “Caucasian” as a reference to white or European Americans. She explains how the term ’ s continued use, often under the mistaken belief that it conveys scientific precision, perpetuates the belief that only whites are authentic Americans. Photograph courtesy of Carol Mukhopadhyay .

1 [There are many others, including the persistence of “color” linked terminology, such as white and black ; the collapse of multiple, complex world of U.S. ethnicity/race/communities into the familiar dualistic, oppositional frame (white–others) even if it takes new forms (People of Color-White); the continuation of a race/ethnicity distinction, despite the tortuous and confusing definitions that result ; and the persistence of language inconsistent with what we know to be continuous, gradations of biological traits like skin color (“darker” v. “dark,” “lighter” v. “light” (aka “fair”!) skin.]

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Goodman, Alan H., Yolanda T. Moses, Joseph L. Jones. 2012. Race: Are We So Different? Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. [eBook]

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“The Red Man” and “The Yellow Race” have essentially disappeared from our vocabulary. Today, employing such linguistic fossils would immediately mark the user as seriously out of touch with modern understandings of race. Yet the word “Caucasian” is surprisingly alive and well in both scientific and popular usage.

Isn ’ t it time we got rid of the word Caucasian? Some would argue that it ’ s “only a label” and we shouldn ’ t quibble over mere semantics!

Language is one of the most systematic, subtle, and significant vehicles for transmitting cultural knowl- edge, including racial ideology. The word “Caucasian” encapsulates the old racial science, carries a misplaced scientific “cache” and precision, and evokes a different and problematic set of images than other racial labels. Caucasian also conveys broader messages about who has “culture” and “ethnicity” and what constitutes real “Americaness.” Every time we use “Caucasian,” I would argue, we are reinforcing – rather than unraveling – the old U.S. racial worldview.

Caucasians and 18th–20th century racial science

The term Caucasian originated in the 18th century as part of the developing European science of racial classification (Mukhopadhyay et al. 2007 , with especial reference to part 2). After visiting the Caucasus Mountains region, between the Caspian and Black Seas, German anatomist Johann Blumenbach declared its inhabitants the most beautiful in the world, created in “God ’ s Image,” and deemed this area the likely site of human origins (wrong – it was Africa). He decided all light-skinned peoples from this region, plus Europeans, belonged to the same race, which he labeled Caucasian.

Blumenbach proposed four other races, all consid- ered physically and morally “degenerate” forms of “God ’ s original creation.” He classified Africans (excepting lighter-skinned North Africans) as “Ethiopians” (black). He split non-Caucasus Asians into two separate races: the “Mongoloid” or “yellow” race of China and Japan and the “Malayan” or “brown” race which included Aboriginal Australians and Pacific Islanders. Native Americans were the fifth or “red” race.

Blumenbach ’ s system of racial classification was adopted in the United States. The RACE exhibit ’ s Scientific Racism section shows how American

scientists measured skull size to try to prove that Caucasians had larger brains and were smarter than other races (see chapter 4 ). Racial science dovetailed with 19th-century evolutionary theories, which ranked races from more “primitive” (“savages”) to more “advanced” (“civilized”), with Caucasians on top. Racial hierarchies were used to justify slavery and other forms of racial discrimination.

The U.S. legal system drew upon Blumenbach ’ s definitions to decide who was eligible to be a natural- ized citizen, a privilege the 1790 Naturalization Act restricted to “whites.” This created dilemmas. The courts and other powerful U.S. elites had hoped that racial science could provide a “scientific” basis for racism, including a racially restrictive citizenship policy. Yet Blumenbach ’ s Caucasians included groups like Armenians, Persians, North Indians, and some North Africans. Clearly these were not the “whites” envisioned by lawmakers in 1790 – that is, Europeans, especially northern and western European Christians. White and Caucasian had to be reinterpreted! In 1923, the Court rejected the naturalization petition of an immigrant from North India, saying he was Caucasian but not white, citing, among other things, his skin color and his non-Christian religion. 2

This constant reinvention of what was meant by “white” and “Caucasian” for political goals continued in the 20th century, as millions of new immigrants threatened to change the face (and religion) of the United States. How were newcomers to fit into a racialized, unequal social system? Once again, racial science came to the rescue. By the 1920s, U.S. eugenicists had divided Caucasians into four ranked sub-races: Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean, and Jew (Semitic), with Nordics ranked highest intellectually and morally. 3 These allegedly scientific subdivisions (which still left “Caucasians” superior to the other four races) were used to justify discriminatory immigration laws that preserved the U.S. ethnic dominance of Nordics (and Protestant Christians).

2 See also Race Exhibit section, “The Invention of Whiteness.” 3 Eugenics sought to “improve” the human species, including through race-related breeding practices such as sterilizing women from “inferior” races and preventing “superior” race women from gaining access to contraception and other methods of birth reduction.

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It was not until after World War II, and the horrors of Nazi racism, that racial science and eugenics were discredited. Distinctions among European Americans gradually dissolved, at least legally, in housing, educa- tion, occupations; and even Jews became “White Folks.” Caucasian, rather than disappearing, replaced the thoroughly tainted, Nazi-linked “Aryan” race label, becoming equivalent to “white,” that is to say, European-Americans.

The U.S. racial classification system continues to shift in response to historical, economic, and political events. Surprisingly, Blumenbach ’ s conceptual frame- work of five major macro-racial categories remains today (cf. U.S. Census). Yet the labels, definitions, and overall discourse surrounding most contemporary racial categories have altered to reflect new understandings of race (and its fuzzy boundary with “ethnicity”). Most “color” labels, such as the Yellow Race, or pseudo-scientific remnants of racial science, like “Mongoloid,” have been replaced by labels that more appropriately reference geographic region, political entities, language, and cultural features, rather than biological traits (e.g. African American, Asian American, Pacific Islanders, etc.).

Yet the word Caucasian persists despite being embedded in discredited racial science. Indeed, it seems to carry a scientific, authoritative weight not associated with other racial labels, nor with the increasingly popular “white.” A sampling of major government websites (Department of Education, Census Bureau, NIH) produced an astonishing number of formal reports that employed the term Caucasian, sometimes along with “white.” I found Education-related performance and accountability reports, NCLB applications, school-district and state- wide documents, and research studies which used Caucasian, especially in “formal” contexts and data summaries. The Census Bureau website contained a major focus group study which used Caucasian [and only Caucasian] throughout. Most striking were the results from the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Over 56,000 scientific articles included Caucasian in the title or abstract, referring to European-ancestry populations, mainly European Americans. The vast majority were published between 2000 and 2010, in major scientific, medical, and health-related journals, and were reporting research results by ethnicity/race,

sometimes also using the term “white.” 4 Even my own culturally diverse and “aware” university uses “Caucasian” regularly, in the campus newspaper, student theses, and major administrative/department reports (e.g. 2004 WASC report, a 2008 Department Planning Document, Counseling Center presen- tations), especially in race/ethnic statistics (e.g. Caucasian/White, 74%).

An empty category

Beyond its association with racial science, Caucasian, as a word and concept, conveys a false scientific preci- sion and scientific authority. It is esoteric, a complex three-syllable word whose meaning is not obvious or easily inferred. Other contemporary racial labels, like Asian American, describe a geographic region from which people originated. But Caucasian, as used in the United States, bears virtually no resemblance to the ancestry or national origins of those designated Caucasian. There are, of course, “real” Caucasians … people from the Caucasus, although that includes a myriad of languages, cultures, diverse histories. But few U.S. Americans could locate the Caucasus on a map nor specify its countries, regions, or linguistic groups (e.g. Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, parts of North Iran, and central southern Russia, including Chechnya).

So … what associations does Caucasian invoke? Virtually none … not national origins, ancestral home, language. Indeed, it does not suggest anything cultural, anything learned, shared, invented by humans. U.S. Caucasians do not speak Caucasian, there is no (in the U.S.) Caucasian music or Caucasian dancing. Caucasian is a rather empty category, at least culturally. As a consequence, it is easy to infer that it ’ s biologically “real” rather than a cultural invention. The old fallacy of racial categories as biologically rooted and “ natural” is reinforced.

4 Compare Methotrexate (MTX) Pathway Gene Polymorphisms and Their Effects on MTX Toxicity in Caucasian and African American Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis. (J Rheumatol. 2008); Changes in Caucasian Eyes after Laser Peripheral Iridotomy: An Anterior Segment Optical Coherence Tomography. Clin Experiment Ophthalmol. 2010 Jun 21. (Epub ahead of print).

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Of course, there is no single language, food, religion, or unitary culture for “Asians,” “Africans,” “Pacific Islanders,” or “Native Americans.” All U.S. macro-racial categories, even if linked to geographically or historically politically contiguous regions, are artificial, human-made classifications that lack clear boundaries and contain enormous diversity. No clearly demar- cated, unambiguous land masses constitute “Asia,” “Europe,” or even “Africa”. Where is the western boundary of Asia, the eastern or southern boundary of Africa?

Similarly, macro-racial categories mask enormous cultural and historical complexity. Consider the racial category “Asian” or “Asian American,” or “Pacific Islander,” with hundreds of languages, ethnic groups, nations, cultures. Fortunately, this diversity is becoming acknowledged. The 2010 census question on race offered many options for “Asians”: “Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese along with Other Asian,” a write-in section for Thai, Pakistani, etc. Pacific Islanders could be Hawaiians, Samoans, Guamanian or Chamorro, or “Other” with a write-in space. And American Indians or Alaska Natives were asked to specify their tribe. Only two macro-racial categories lacked sub-groups: “Black, African American or Negro” and “White.” Implicitly, these are homogenous racial groups/identities (except “Latino,” an “ethnicity”) although Irish, Norwegian, Nigerian, and Haitian Americans might feel otherwise.

Significantly, white, alone, has a single color-based label with no geographic reference (versus “ African American”). All other U.S. macro-racial group labels evoke a geographic–cultural–political reference point and a set of diverse culture-bearing entities within Asia or Africa or the Pacific Islands.

Like “white,” the term “Caucasian” (versus European American) does not evoke geography– culture–history. It masks the arbitrary and culturally invented history of this racial category. It renders invisible the diverse ethnic, linguistic, religious, and political groups that make up Europe. Such subdivi- sions probably constituted the significant identities of most European Americans until the past half century. Caucasian implies that the European-descended population is a coherent, stable, fixed, homogenous, biologically distinct entity, reinforcing obsolete biological notions of “race.”

“Real” versus hyphenated Americans

“Caucasian” (versus European American) also sug- gests a different and unique relationship to “America” and “Americaness.” European Americans, like most other Americans, originally came from some other place. Today, they are no more authentically “American” than any other race/ethnic group. Compared to Native Americans, all European Americans are recent immigrants. Most African Americans’ ancestors were brought to these shores before the ancestors of most European Americans arrived. Indeed, the majority of “Caucasians” in the United States today probably had no ancestors in the country before the 20th century! Yet the term Caucasian subtly masks this group ’ s foreign ancestry while other labels, like Asian American or African American, highlight these groups’ foreign roots.

The word Caucasian in other ways exacerbates the U.S. tendency to equate “American” with those of European descent (e.g. “American” food). As a one-word designa- tion, it reinforces the “hyphenated” or marginal status of other American groups. Linguistically, adding a modifier to a generic term (e.g. adding Asian or African to American) signifies that the modified form is less “normal”, more marginal. The more fundamental, typical, “normal” form is left unmarked. (For example, we add the gender modifier “male” to mark the unusual, abnormal category of “male” nurses. “Nurse” refers to the typical, taken- for-granted, “normal” nurse who is female nurse.)

Most standard U.S. racial category labels today other than Caucasian (or “white”) add a modifier, such as Asian- or African- or Native, to “American.” Why the asymmetry? Why are immigrant origins of Caucasians (or whites) hidden while other groups are high- lighted? Such modifiers, unless used for all racial–eth- nic groups, subtly marginalize the “marked” groups, implying they are not fully Americans. Some groups remain framed, through language, as eternal immi- grants, regardless of how many generations they have been in the United States.

Who has “ethnicity,” “culture,” and an “ethnic identity”?

Finally, for those designated Caucasian, the term subtly erases their ethnicity, ancestry, and cultural

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traditions. Ironically, we are starting to talk as if “ ethnicity” and “culture” are attributes of only some racial–ethnic groups, usually traditionally mar- ginalized groups. Many campuses have “cultural” organizations on campus – or events to celebrate “cultural” diversity. But such events usually do not include European American ethno-cultural groups. But then, what is “Caucasian” culture? The category is empty.

In a world where ethnic identities are a significant and often positive dimension of personal identity, where does this leave Caucasians? Of course, the dom- inant institutionalized culture in the United States remains overwhelmingly of European (northwestern, Christian) origin. But … we don ’ t call these cultural traditions “Caucasian.” And it makes no sense to do so. They should be explicitly labeled European, or prefer- ably, linked to specific cultural or linguistic regions, such as English, German, Italian, and so forth. This situates them as one among many cultural traditions brought to the United States by immigrants. At the same time, being more specific about origins allows European Americans to explore their ethnic identities and ancestries.

How can we eradicate Caucasian, this pernicious remnant of the past? Fortunately, the term is becoming less prevalent, although the usual substitute, white, has its own problems. Labels like “white,” “black,” and “people of color” linguistically (and thus perceptually) reinforce race as biology and false notions of homogeneous, distinctly bounded groups. They also preserve the long-standing white/not-white (colored) racial frame.

European American is a more precise substitute for Caucasian than white. It parallels the language for other macro-racial U.S. groups, highlighting national origins rather than biology, allowing for diverse experiences while not ignoring privileges historically accorded those of European ancestry. The label European American may sound too bulky or formal at first (versus, for example, “white” or “black”), but we have managed to cope with African American, Asian American, Mexican American, Pacific Islanders, and other multi- syllabic labels. And we can easily come up with shorter versions, such as Euro. We humans are able to accommodate new terminology rather quickly, especially if we make a conscious effort or are around others using it.

Whiteness A Conversation

john a. powell : America is a country made up of immigrants. And part of creating a national identity was to decide, first of all, who comes, but [also] how those immigrants are going to be stitched together. And it really was stitched together along the concept of whiteness that really emanated from Anglo-Saxons.

robin kelley : And that ’ s why what happens in the 18th and early 19th century, with the invention of whiteness, is that suddenly all these people who were considered hybrid – the Portuguese and the Spanish, the Germans, the Italians, people from Eastern Europe – suddenly gets, get crushed together in this grouping we call white.

eduardo bonilla-silva : The idea of the melting pot … really was a notion that was extended exclusively to white immigrants, whether they ’ re white Italian, Irish, Polish, etc. Because they didn ’ t have the language skills, etc., they were, they didn ’ t … Well, the idea was you will assimilate or melt into the American pot, but that pot never included people of color. Blacks, Chinese, Puerto Ricans, etc., could not melt into the pot. They could be

Here, our panel of experts discusses the implications, struc- tural and personal, of being “raced” as white or nonwhite. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is Professor of Sociology at Duke University. Dalton Conley is Senior Vice Provost and Dean for the Social Sciences and University Professor at New York University. Alan Goodman is Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty and Professor of Biological Anthropology at Hampshire College. Evelyn Hammonds is Dean of Harvard College and Barbara Gutman Rosenkrantz Professor of History of Science and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Pilar Ossorio is Associate Professor of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. john a. powell is Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University .

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used as wood to produce the fire for the pot, but they could not be used as material to be melted into the pot.

john a. powell : So I think that that question of how whites think about race … First of all, they don ’ t think about it in terms of themselves. They think about race as something that belongs to somebody else. The blacks have race. Maybe Latinos have race. Maybe Asians have race. They ’ re just white. They ’ re just people.

dalton conley : And that ’ s part of what whiteness is. It ’ s not having to think about being in the normative or dominant group. It is also, beyond that, a sense of privilege, a sense that this society is stacked in your favor, and that you can do anything because the American society, the American economy, is sort of like a banquet, and you can keep going up for more helpings. That ’ s your system. It belongs to you. So that there is a sense of entitlement that comes with whiteness as well.

alan goodman : And personally I ’ d have to say that I ’ m not very aware of my skin color, and I think that ’ s probably typical of a lot of white people who have grown up amongst white people. That it becomes less salient to them.

evelynn hammonds : When I was a child, certainly growing up in Atlanta in the black community, there certainly was to some extent a value placed on people who were lighter-skinned versus people who were darker-skinned in the African American community. And I saw, as a child, the ways in which some people felt very hurt by those kinds of assessments, that lighter-skinned black people were somehow better than darker-skinned black peoples. I grew up reading Ebony magazine, seeing the ads for skin lighteners. I grew up watching people, women in my family, go through all kinds of contortions to make sure that their hair was always straight and appropriate. Of course, you can see I rebelled very much against that notion. But I think the idea that African Americans were being subjected to a kind of pressure on this social and cultural level to be more white, and that white was somehow valued, it makes perfect sense in a society structured around race as the way ours is.

alan goodman : This is not an individual thing as much as it simply is we live in racial smog. This is a world of racial smog. We can ’ t help it, we can ’ t help but breath that smog. Everybody breathes it. But what ’ s nice to know is that you are breathing that smog, to recognize it, and that ’ s the first step.

evelynn hammonds : And I think everybody probably has a kind of Crayola crayon story. But when I was a kid, it was really troubling that you had white crayon, you had a flesh-tone, and you had various shades of brown. And flesh was not what the color that people were in my life. And it was very troubling to draw a picture, and I ’ d say, “But you know, mom, this is you.” And, you know, color her in with the flesh-tone, of course, or then change it and color it in with the brown. And none of the browns ever quite fit. And so I was very disturbed that the color of flesh was not a color I recognized among the people I loved.

pilar ossario : If people can ’ t tell what race you are, they feel very uncomfortable. And I know, because I get that all the time. People ask me all the time, because I ’ m a little bit indeterminate. And I ask people sometimes, “Why do you need to know?” And I think they need to know because they feel uncomfortable, and they don ’ t realize that the way they treat people is partially based on race.

evelynn hammonds : I can remember when I was watching, say, something like Father Knows Best or Leave It To Beaver when I was a child, thinking that they were people just like me, that I lived in a neighborhood like that. My parents went off to work, except that my mother went to work every day. But those are the kinds of things I thought about as different.

But I didn ’ t realize that the fact that I was brown and not pink – and my sister and I used to have very long conversations about that white people really weren ’ t white, they were pink – is that, we were con- fused about it, but it was, but we really still, I think I really saw myself as the same. I really thought color was simply the surface.

Reproduced courtesy of California Newsreel.

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