{"id":32138,"date":"2013-07-07T01:09:41","date_gmt":"2013-07-07T01:09:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=32138"},"modified":"2015-09-27T18:03:45","modified_gmt":"2015-09-27T18:03:45","slug":"has-%e2%80%98caucasian%e2%80%99-lost-its-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=32138","title":{"rendered":"Has \u2018Caucasian\u2019 Lost Its Meaning?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Has \u2018Caucasian\u2019 Lost Its Meaning?<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2013-07-06<\/p>\n

Shaila Dewan<\/a><\/strong>, Economics Reporter<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\ngray318<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

As a racial classification, the term Caucasian has many flaws, dating as it does from a time when the study of race was based on skull measurements and travel diaries. It has long been entirely unmoored from its geographical reference point, the Caucasus region. Its equivalents from that era are obsolete \u2014 nobody refers to Asians as \u201cMongolian\u201d or blacks as \u201cNegroid.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet, there it was in the recent Supreme Court decision<\/a> on affirmative action. The plaintiff, noted Justice Anthony M. Kennedy<\/a> in his majority opinion, was Caucasian.<\/p>\n

To me, having covered the South for many years, the term seems like one of those polite euphemisms that hides more than it reveals. There is no legal reason to use it. It rarely appears in federal statutes, and the Census Bureau has never put a checkbox by the word Caucasian. (White is an option.)…<\/p>\n

…The use of Caucasian to mean white was popularized in the late 18th century by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach<\/a>, a German anthropologist, who decreed that it encompassed Europeans and the inhabitants of a region reaching from the Obi River<\/a> in Russia to the Ganges<\/a> to the Caspian Sea<\/a>, plus northern Africans. He chose it because the Caucasus<\/a> was home to \u201cthe most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgians<\/a>,\u201d and because among his collection of 245 human skulls, the Georgian one was his favorite wrote Nell Irvin Painter<\/a>, a historian who explored the term\u2019s origins in her book \u201cThe History of White People<\/a>.\u201d…<\/p>\n

…Susan Glisson<\/a>, who as the executive director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation<\/a> in Oxford, Miss.<\/a>, regularly witnesses Southerners sorting through their racial vocabulary, said she rarely hears \u201cCaucasian.\u201d \u201cMost of the folks who work in this field know that it\u2019s a completely ridiculous term to assign to whites,\u201d she said. \u201cI think it\u2019s a term of last resort for people who are really uncomfortable talking about race. They use the term that\u2019s going to make them be as distant from it as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is another reason to use it, said Jennifer L. Hochschild<\/a>, a professor of government and African-American studies at Harvard. \u201cThe court, or some clever clerk, doesn\u2019t really want to use the word white in part because roughly half of Hispanics consider themselves white.\u201d She added, \u201cWhite turns out to be a much more ambiguous term now than we used to think it was.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are a number of terms that refer to various degrees of blackness, both current and out of favor: African-American, mulatto<\/a>, Negro, colored, octaroon<\/a>. There are not a lot of options for whites.<\/strong> In Texas, they say Anglo. And there is the pejorative we were so pithily reminded of when a witness in the racially charged George Zimmerman trial<\/a> said the victim, Trayvon Martin, had called Mr. Zimmerman a \u201ccreepy-ass cracker.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Has \u2018Caucasian\u2019 Lost Its Meaning? The New York Times 2013-07-06 Shaila Dewan, Economics Reporter gray318 As a racial classification, the term Caucasian has many flaws, dating as it does from a time when the study of race was based on skull measurements and travel diaries. It has long been entirely unmoored from its geographical reference […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,459,8,394,20],"tags":[98,97,1404,1231,2640,15113,15114,2327],"class_list":["post-32138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-history","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-jennifer-hochschild","tag-jennifer-l-hochschild","tag-johann-friedrich-blumenbach","tag-nell-irvin-painter","tag-new-york-times","tag-shaila-dewan","tag-susan-glisson","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32138","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=32138"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42939,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32138\/revisions\/42939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}