http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/sunday-review/has-caucasian-lost-its-meaning.html?_r=0
The Supreme Court, which can be more colloquial, has used the term in
only 64 cases, including a pair from the 1920s that reveal its
limitations. In one, the court ruled that a Japanese man could not
become a citizen because, although he may have been light-skinned, he
was not Caucasian. In the other, an Indian was told that he could not
become a citizen because, although he may have been technically
Caucasian, he was certainly not white. (A similar debate erupted more
recently when the Tsarnaev brothers, believed to be responsible for the
Boston Marathon bombing, were revealed to be Muslims from the Caucasus.)
The use of Caucasian to mean white was popularized in the late 18th
century by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German anthropologist, who
decreed that it encompassed Europeans and the inhabitants of a region
reaching from the Obi River in Russia to the Ganges to the Caspian Sea,
plus northern Africans. He chose it because the Caucasus was home to
“the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgians,” and because
among his collection of 245 human skulls, the Georgian one was his
favorite wrote Nell Irvin Painter, a historian who explored the term’s
origins in her book “The History of White People.”
In 1889, the editors of the original Oxford English Dictionary noted
that the term Caucasian had been “practically discarded.” But they spoke
too soon. Blumenbach’s authority had given the word a pseudoscientific
sheen that preserved its appeal. Even now, the word gives discussions of
race a weird technocratic gravitas, as when the police insist that you
step out of your “vehicle” instead of your car.
Susan Glisson, who as the executive director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation
in Oxford, Miss., regularly witnesses Southerners sorting through their
racial vocabulary, said she rarely hears “Caucasian.” “Most of the
folks who work in this field know that it’s a completely ridiculous term
to assign to whites,” she said. “I think it’s a term of last resort for
people who are really uncomfortable talking about race. They use the
term that’s going to make them be as distant from it as possible.”
There is another reason to use it, said Jennifer L. Hochschild, a
professor of government and African-American studies at Harvard. “The
court, or some clever clerk, doesn’t really want to use the word white
in part because roughly half of Hispanics consider themselves white.”
She added, “White turns out to be a much more ambiguous term now than we
used to think it was.”
There are a number of terms that refer to various degrees of blackness,
both current and out of favor: African-American, mulatto, Negro,
colored, octaroon. There are not a lot of options for whites. 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 said
the victim, Trayvon Martin, had called Mr. Zimmerman a “creepy-ass
cracker.”
IN the South, I was often asked about my ethnic origins, and I had a
ready answer. “My father is from India,” I would recite, phrasing it in
such a way as to avoid being mistaken for an American Indian. “And my
mom is white.” Almost invariably, if I was speaking to black people,
they would nod with understanding. If I was speaking to white people, I
would get a puzzled look. “What kind of white?” they would ask. Only
when I explained the Norwegian, Scottish and German mix of my ancestry
would I get the nod.
Such racial boundaries have increasingly been called into question in
the debate over affirmative action, once regarded as a form of
restitution to descendants of slaves, but now complicated by all sorts
of questions about who, exactly, is being helped. “What if some of them
aren’t poor, what if some of them don’t have American parentage, what if
some of them are really stupid?” Ms. Painter, the historian, asked.
“There’s all kinds of characteristics that we stuff into race without
looking, and then they pop out and we think, ‘I can’t deal with that.’ ”
Doubtless, this society will continue to classify people by race for
some time to come. And as we lumber toward justice, some of those
classifications remain useful, even separate from other factors like
economic class. Caucasian, though? Not so much.
