From what I understand Caucasus historically comprised the border between Europe and Asia and must have been very ethnically diverse. So why is the Caucasian considered the eponymous white man?
This term originated with late 18-century philosophers/anthropologists in a theory that would nowadays be considered very, very racist.
The creator of the term, Christoph Meiners, divided humankind into several races, Caucasoids being one of them. The name is derived from the Caucasus region, which is a mountanous region between Russia, Iran, and Turkey, and includes the territory of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Meiners thought that people from this region were the archetype of the Caucasoid race. Funnily enough, in today's world they might not be considered white at all - although this region's ethnic groups are many and they vary in physical appearance, the majority of the population has a more Middle-Eastern look, with dark hair and eyes. A striking difference to today's idea of a "Caucasian archetype", which would probably be a tall blue-eyed blonde Scandinavian.
In modern times, the usage of this term is more or less restricted to the US, but its relation to ethnicity is pretty much arbitrary and can change: in the past, people of Irish or Italian descent weren't considered white or Caucasian, but they are now.
So the US is using the term "Caucasian", which quite ironically has roots in racial supremacist ideology, as a more politically correct way of referring to people it classifies as "white".
Edit: I should learn how to spell "considered".
In school I was taught that there are following human races: europeoid, negroid and mongoloid .. and maybe a couple of others I can't remember. Is this kind of categorization still accepted in science? I'm never sure if I can bring up this information in public for fear of sounding horribly racist.
Hiya folks!
We're unfortunately seeing a very large number of low-quality, inadequate responses in this thread. Please keep in mind that here on /r/AskHistorians, we have very strict rules regarding our expectations for responses on this Subreddit, which can be found here. When answering a question here, please ask yourself the following:
Please also keep in mind that this Subreddit has a zero-tolerance policy for racism or bigotry of any form, and posts containing such will be purged with prejudice.
To head off the inevitable slew of posts I'd otherwise receive (and probably will anyway), I'd also like to take a quick moment to discuss two types of posts that end up in large quantities in a big, fast-rising thread like this: The 'What's with all the deleted comments?' post and the 'We're seeing this mod top-level warning more and more nowadays' post. Having watched this thread since it was posted, I could pretty much pinpoint the moment it started turning up on peoples' front pages - its upvotes take off, and large numbers of comments from people who aren't regulars to /r/AskHistorians and aren't familiar with our rules begin to appear. This results in the deletion of large numbers of comments that fail to meet our standards. As the thread grows, more unfamiliar users appear, are confused by the deleted comments and then post to ask about them. These comments are, of course, deleted, adding to the pile. So to avoid this, your friendly neighbourhood slavedriver mod turns up and posts a top-level response like this one to remind people who are finding this thread on their front pages about our rules.
This leads to response type two: "We're seeing this in every thread nowadays! Why are you censoring things more/becoming stricter/ruining the Subreddit?" Nope, you're not, and no, we aren't. We post maybe one top-level like this every two or three days, or perhaps in one out of every 200-300 threads. This complaint is inevitably made by people who aren't regulars here and only see threads on their front page - these threads are by definition large and on the front page of many users, and are thus more likely to have one of these top levels. They rarely view the large number of questions and answers we receive every day that don't end up on their front pages, and thus don't see all the threads without top level warnings.
In addition, since Reddit introduced the super handy 'sticky' feature, I can now stick my grandstanding mod-reminder at the top of the thread and force all you chumps to read it ensure it's highly visible. So people who aren't regulars here are seeing them disproportionately often, but they're no more common than they ever have been.
^^^Alternatively, ^^^we're ^^^a ^^^bunch ^^^of ^^^censorship-loving ^^^fascist ^^^shills, ^^^but ^^^what ^^^would ^^^I ^^^know? ^^^I ^^^just ^^^post ^^^what ^^^the ^^^Cabal ^^^tells ^^^me ^^^to.
