Castlevania Dungeon Forums
Off Topic => Off Topic => Topic started by: Mooning Freddy on December 28, 2013, 01:52:19 PM
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I wonder how many of you people know this, but I often wondered why in America white-skinned people are referred to as "Caucasians".
The Caucasus is a geographical area located in West-middle Asia, between Russia, Turkey and Iran, bordering the Black and Caspian seas. Several states compose the region, including Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and parts of South-West Russia.
The people who live in those areas are referred to as Caucasians, especially by Russians.
Caucasians are not white. At least not as white as Northern European peoples, such as Brits, Germans, French, and other peoples referred to as Caucasians in the USA. Caucasians are mostly darker-skinned and more Asian or Turkish looking. Plus, many of them are Muslims.
So why are white people in the USA referred to as "Caucasian"? Apparently it has to do with some 18th century racial classifications:
It goes back to German anthropologist Friedrich Blumenbach. In his work in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Blumenbach divided Homo sapiens into five distinct races based on their physical characteristics. There was the Mongolian, or “yellow,” race, the red American race, the brown Malayan race, the black Ethiopian race, and the white Caucasian race.
While he looked at a lot of physical traits to carve out his categories, Blumenbach thought characteristics of the skull—the size and angle of the forehead, jawbone, teeth, eye sockets, etc.—were especially important. He thought that the skulls of Georgians were exemplary of the characteristics of his white race and named the group after the Caucasus Mountain Range that runs along Georgia’s northern border.
Blumenbach’s Caucasians weren’t even strictly white or European, as the term is commonly used today. He described this “variety” as “Colour white, cheeks rosy; hair brown or chestnut-colored; head subglobular; face oval, straight, its parts moderately defined, forehead smooth, nose narrow, slightly hooked, mouth small…To this first variety belong the inhabitants of Europe (except the Lapps and the remaining descendants of the Finns) and those of Eastern Asia, as far as the river Obi, the Caspian Sea and the Ganges; and lastly, those of Northern Africa.”
http://mentalfloss.com/article/50202/why-are-white-people-called-caucasian (http://mentalfloss.com/article/50202/why-are-white-people-called-caucasian)
... And once again you are proven how racial classification completely distort reality and geography.
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The terminologies I've heard for the descriptions of the '3' main types of peoples are thus;
Caucasoid 'White'
Negroid 'Black'
Mongoloid 'Asian/yellow'
Since the Native Americans are descendant of the Asians I feel they belong to the Mongoloid category. I've also heard that the peoples of the middle east are descendant of early European migrants so both them and the white peoples of the world would be in the Caucasoid group. I watched a video about the history of the Iranian/Persian peoples and it tells us of their being descendant of early Europeans.
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Very interesting, but not so surprising. Anthropology (several branches of social science I dearly love, sociology's more ambitious cousin) had its roots as a colonial tool.
A way for empires to better understand the people they were trying to subjugate (and thereby be that much better at controlling them) while simultaneously justifying this behavior through institutionalized pseudo-scientific racism. It also found terrible use early on by giving an air of academic credit to absurd ideas such as the belief that criminals were "throwbacks" to a lower order of humans, "Social Darwinism" and race based eugenics. All of the above have been discredited by modern Anthropology.