What Does the Word 'Caucasian' Really Mean?

Caucasian' is sometimes used to mean 'white', but the word comes from an old, incorrect scientific hypothesis and has been used to perpetuate prejudice. Learn why it would be better left in the past in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
brain Stuff, Lauren vogl Bam here. If you've ever watched
a police procedural, you've probably heard a description of a
suspect that goes something like this. The suspect is a
six ft pound Caucasian male wearing a white T shirt, jeans,
and so on. But what does Caucasian really mean. It's easy,

(00:24):
of course, to equit Caucasian with white, but that one
word Caucasian touches on issues much deeper than skin color.
It kindles questions of race and the very origin of humans.
It even exposes the topic of whether race exists outside
of our own weird minds. Spoiler, in humans, no genetic
basis exists to separate our species into races. We spoke

(00:45):
with Joseph Graves, a professor of nanoengineering and the intern
dean at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering in Greensboro,
North Carolina. He said, there's no scientific justification for use
of the term Caucasian. It's actually a nineteenth century anthropological
idea that was based around a false conception that the
origin of the human species was in the Caucus Mountains.

(01:07):
The Caucus Mountains run from the Black Sea to the
west to the Caspian Sea on the east, in an
area that's considered by many as the crossroads between Eastern
Europe and Western Asia. These mountain ranges, two of them,
the Greater and Lesser, are due east of Italy, due
north of Iraq, and due west of India. The southern
tip of Russia lies to the north of the Caucus Mountains.
To the immediate south as Georgia, a former Soviet republic,

(01:30):
This is where Caucasians, true Caucasians call home. People from Georgia, Russia, Azerbaijan,
and Armenia hail from that area. But Caucasians, as first
identified by German anthropologist Jonan Frederick Blumenbach, and as some
still think of the group today, lay claim to a
lot more real estate than that. In sevente in the

(01:51):
third edition of his book titled On the Natural Varieties
of Mankind, Blumenbach, building on work by Swedish scientist Carolus
Linnaeus and others, used the word Caucasian to describe one
of his five races of man. He determined each through
scientific methods like the measuring of skulls, and tied each
to distinct geographic regions. Caucasians were, as Bloombach presented them,

(02:11):
the white race, and included people not only from the
Caucus region, but also those from Europe, Northern India, and
parts of northern Africa. The other groups Bloombach identified tied
loosely to skin color were Malaysian, Ethiopian, Native American, and Mongolian.
Though Bloommbuch found that the quote many varieties of man
are as present known to be one and the same species,

(02:34):
his work nonetheless was seen as giving scientific credence to
the concept of biological race. Over the years, that notion
has been abused in order to separate groups of people,
often by skin color, and to declare, through some bastardization
of science, the superiority of one race over others. Also,
years after bloom Back, scientists found that the earliest humans
didn't come from the Caucus, but from Africa in modern

(02:56):
day Ethiopia. Classifying humans into races, whatever blooming Box intentions,
continues today. The term Caucasian is still rolled out occasionally,
and not only on TV police dramas. The Graves said,
I was just at a conference here in Minnesota where
a researcher from South Africa kept referring to herself and
others in her country as Caucasians. I think it is

(03:17):
very very much a white supremacist, racist ideology. I think
it has to do with euro Centric racial ideology. People
wish to hold onto the special designation exemplified by this
term Caucasian beyond Caucasian. The U. S Census Bureau has
its own definition of race quote a person's self identification
with one or more social groups, and it asks respondents

(03:38):
to choose from its own categories white, Black, or African American, Asian, American, Indian,
and Alaska Native, Native, Hawaiian, and other Pacific islander. The
census allows those survey to choose some other race as well.
The Census bureaus definition of race that it's self identified
and based on social groups is different than blooming box
and that it's notably social, not sig sientific, and it

(04:01):
supports the now widely accepted finding that race is not
something that's supported by science. Genetically speaking, someone can't be
of the white race, or the Caucasian race, or the
Mongolian race. We are of one species, according to the
National Human Genome Research Institute, humans are identical in genetic makeup.

(04:21):
Gordon Hodson, a professor of psychology at Canada's Brock University,
explained in psychology today, scientists generally do not recognize races
as biologically meaningful. Yet scientists, including me, discuss race and
describe the racial composition of our samples. To be clear,
I am not advocating that we ignore race. In fact,
there are many dangers in ignoring races a social topic.

(04:43):
Race is real, but race is socially real, not biologically real.
Yet the term Caucasian, despite its problems, has proven stubbornly resilient.
Some people perceive it as being more scientific or dispassionate
than saying white, even though the exact opposite is true.
Based on the words origin from a provenly incorrect hypothesis
and later used to perpetuate prejudice. In two thousand four,

(05:06):
Graves wrote a book called The Race Myth. Why we
pretend race exists in America? From the introduction quote, we
must recognize that the underlying biological diversity of the human
species cannot be artificially apportioned into races because races are
simply not biologically justified. If we can understand that all
allegiance to racism is ideological, not scientific. Then we may

(05:28):
be able to silence the bigots once and for all.
Today's episode was written by John Donovan and produced by
Tyler Clang. The brain Stuff is a production of iHeart
Radio as how Stuff Works. For more on this and
lots of other social topics, visit our home planet has
Stuff Works dot com and for more podcasts. For my
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(05:50):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.