SUBMISSION

I thought both the anon post and comments about the term caucasian were interesting. The people who said the anon was wrong are actually the incorrect ones. The term caucasian is a misappropriated term. According to Carol C. Mukhopadhyay’s “Getting Rid of the Word ‘Caucasian,’”

The term Caucasian originated in the eighteenth century as part of the developing European science of racial classification. After visiting the region of the Caucasus Mountains, between the Caspian and Black seas, German anatomist Johann Blumenbach declared its inhabitants the most beautiful in the world, the ideal type of humans created in ‘God’s image,” and deemed the area the likely site where humans originated. (Humans actually originated in Africa). He decided that all light-skinned peoples from this region, along with Europeans, belonged to the same race, which he labeled Caucasian (p.13). 

See the foreshadowing anybody? The history of the term caucasian is often unaddressed but is incredibly significant. It may sound clumsy to say European American, but it is a more accurate, and certainly less racist term. The works of Theodore Allen, both called “The Invention of the White Race” also support Mukhopadhyays’ thesis and expand on it to describe race a socially constructed rather than a biologically/scientifically supported one.