{"id":30567,"date":"2013-04-21T16:52:35","date_gmt":"2013-04-21T16:52:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=30567"},"modified":"2015-10-27T20:21:08","modified_gmt":"2015-10-27T20:21:08","slug":"the-changing-face-of-%e2%80%9ccaucasian%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=30567","title":{"rendered":"the changing face of \u201ccaucasian\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thestate.ae\/the-changing-face-of-caucasian\/\" target=\"_blank\">the changing face of \u201ccaucasian\u201d<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thestate.ae\" target=\"_blank\">The State<\/a><br \/>\n2013-04-21<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/interdome\" target=\"_blank\">Adam Rothstein<\/a><\/strong>, Insurgent Archivist and Researcher<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s been widely mentioned among a certain set on social media networks that the suspect in the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Boston_Marathon_bombings\" target=\"_blank\">Boston bombings<\/a> is <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Chechnya\" target=\"_blank\">Chechen<\/a>, and therefore, \u201cCaucasian.\u201d The good-natured purpose of this being to foil the usual insipid bigotry let loose in similar situations, which assumes that all terrorists are non-White, that Muslims are of a separate, lesser race, and\/or that any particular terrorist act is part of some larger, epochal war of \u201cus versus them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>All of these racist conclusions are ridiculous, and would be easily refuted with the most basic and widely-accepted social and scientific data of contemporary times. However, stating that because the suspect is from the region of the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Caucasus_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\">Caucasus Mountains<\/a> he \u201cis White\u201d is a troubling statement. Most readily, this reifies a notion of Whiteness. But additionally, this overlooks the history of the term \u201cCaucasian,\u201d and how the racial history of anthropology brought this term into common parlance. To a person from the United States, where \u201cCaucasian\u201d is a synonym for racial Whiteness, there is an etymological connection that would allow you to say this, and think you are correct. <strong>But \u201cWhiteness\u201d has always only ever been exactly what \u201cWhite people\u201d want it to be. What part of the world a person is from has little to no affect on whether anyone thinks s\/he is actually \u201cWhite\u201d, because \u201cWhite\u201d is a social class, not a place.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u201cCaucasian\u201d was first identified as a race by <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Johann_Friedrich_Blumenbach\" target=\"_blank\">Johann Friedrich Blumenbach<\/a> in 1779, as one of five: the others being Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian, and American. These categories were based upon the measurement of the human skull. While he was a proponent of \u201cDegreneration Theory,\u201d that theorized that all humans were originally Caucasian before having their appearance change due to poor living conditions, he was able to note what is now widely known\u2014<strong>that phenotypical differences within races are as large as those between races<\/strong>. In other words, in any measureable characteristic, there is as great a difference between individual Africans, and as great a difference between individual Europeans, as there is between Africans and Europeans compared&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thestate.ae\/the-changing-face-of-caucasian\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>the changing face of \u201ccaucasian\u201d The State 2013-04-21 Adam Rothstein, Insurgent Archivist and Researcher It\u2019s been widely mentioned among a certain set on social media networks that the suspect in the Boston bombings is Chechen, and therefore, \u201cCaucasian.\u201d The good-natured purpose of this being to foil the usual insipid bigotry let loose in similar situations, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8,394,20],"tags":[14487,14228],"class_list":["post-30567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-adam-rothstein","tag-the-state"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30567"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43548,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30567\/revisions\/43548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}