The Caucasian People

[Thumpalumpacus]

Seems fitting here ... a bunch of fat white guys throwing down ...

[Jackalope]

Who cares, except as a historical curiosity? The term has ceased to have any objective meaning whatsoever, if it ever did, the same as any other racial classifiers.

[Catholic_Lady]

What most ppl dont understand is that race is much more a matter of bone structure than it is about skin color. Caucasoids can be any variation of very white, to dark brown. Arabs are caucasoids. http://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/essay/...ups/41834/

[RozKek]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race

[Jackalope]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race

From that link:

Among the proponents of the concept there was never any consensus on the delineation between the Caucasoid race, including the populations of Europe, and the Mongoloid race, including the populations of East Asia.

As such, it seems a fairly useless distinction.

[Secular Elf]

Who cares, except as a historical curiosity?  The term has ceased to have any objective meaning whatsoever, if it ever did, the same as any other racial classifiers.

Good point, yet in most forms you have to sign in the United States by the government, all the usual racial classification terms are there: "Caucasian" or White (Non-Hispanic) White Hispanic, or just Hispanic, Black or African-American, etc., etc.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race

From that link:

Among the proponents of the concept there was never any consensus on the delineation between the Caucasoid race, including the populations of Europe, and the Mongoloid race, including the populations of East Asia.

As such, it seems a fairly useless distinction.
[/q]

Yes, especially since it was originally based on subjective, non-scientific criteria, and was soon after grafted on to notions of race based on skin color:

Origin of the concept

The skull Blumenbach discovered in Georgia (1795), which he used to hypothesize origination of Europeans from the Caucasus.
The term "Caucasian race" was coined by the German philosopher Christoph Meiners in his The Outline of History of Mankind (1785).[page needed] Meiners' term was given wider circulation in the 1790s by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German professor of medicine and member of the British Royal Society, who is considered one of the founders of the discipline of anthropology.[8]

Meiners' treatise was widely read in the German intellectual circles of its day, despite muted criticism of its scholarship. Meiners proposed a taxonomy of human beings based on two races (Rassen): Caucasians and Mongolians. He considered Caucasians to be more physically attractive than Mongolians, notably because they had paler skin; he claimed Caucasians were also more sensitive and more morally virtuous than Mongolians. Later he would make similar distinctions within the Caucasian group, concluding that the Germans were the most attractive and virtuous people on earth. The name "Caucasian" derived from the Southern Caucasus/Transcaucasia region (or what are now the countries of Georgia , Azerbaijan and Armenia ) because he considered the people of this region to be the archetype (cf. taxonomical "neotype") for the grouping.

Meiners' classification was not grounded on any scientific criteria. It was Blumenbach who gave it scientific credibility and a wider audience, by grounding it in the new quantitative method of craniometry. Blumenbach did not credit Meiners with his taxonomy, however, claiming to have developed it himself — although his justification clearly points to Meiners' aesthetic viewpoint of Caucasus origins:

Caucasian variety—I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones (original members) of mankind.[9]

Relation to skin color
Further information: White people and Brown people

Distribution of the races after the Pleistocene according to Carleton Coon.
Caucasoid race
Congoid race
Capoid race
Mongoloid race
Australoid race
In his earlier racial typology, Meiners put forth that Caucasians had the "whitest, most blooming and most delicate skin".[10] In a series of articles, Meiners boasts about the superiority of Germans among Europeans, and describes non-German Europeans' color as "dirty whites", in an unfavorable comparison with Germans.[11] Such views were typical of early scientific attempts at racial classification, where skin pigmentation was regarded as the main difference between races.[citation needed] This view was shared by the French naturalist Julien-Joseph Virey, who believed that the Caucasians were only the palest-skinned Europeans.[12]

[Regina]

Who cares, except as a historical curiosity?  The term has ceased to have any objective meaning whatsoever, if it ever did, the same as any other racial classifiers.

Good point, yet in most forms you have to sign in the United States by the government, all the usual racial classification terms are there: "Caucasian" or White (Non-Hispanic) White Hispanic, or just Hispanic, Black or African-American, etc., etc.

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I think the American concept of a "Hispanic race" is ridiculous, and confuses a lot of people from elsewhere. It's literally the only country in the world where two people can look identical, but be "different races", because one speaks Spanish and the other doesn't.
Not knocking "Hispanic" or "Latino" as cultural identities, that's legitimate, it's just not a race.

[Tonus]

When you think of Caucasian, what do you think of?

A crow who cooks creole?

[Jackalope]

Who cares, except as a historical curiosity?  The term has ceased to have any objective meaning whatsoever, if it ever did, the same as any other racial classifiers.

Good point, yet in most forms you have to sign in the United States by the government, all the usual racial classification terms are there: "Caucasian" or White (Non-Hispanic) White Hispanic, or just Hispanic, Black or African-American, etc., etc.

"Other" is what I've always checked, unless not required to, and then I leave it blank.

[LastPoet]

Other as in tentacled horror. Got it.