On the return of Caucasian
Image by Atharva Tulsi on Unsplash
Can we talk about a C-word?
Can we talk about the word Caucasian?
As an editor specialising in inclusive language and an equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) professional, perhaps I’m unusually sensitive to the word—because I seem to be seeing it everywhere right now.
Including in content created by people I’d expect to steer clear of it.
Is it because the socials have bluntly targeted algorithms and filters such that people are applying workarounds when what they really want to say is simply ‘white’?
Is it because too few people are aware of the word’s origins or why it’s not a neutral alternative when we’re trying to engage in candid conversations about racism?
And if we’re going to avoid the word Caucasian, what might we use instead?
Let’s take a look…
A brief history of the word
Caucasian is one of five distinct ‘races’ of human that German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach first named in English in 1794.
A cursory Internet search will tell you more than I can here, if you’re interested.
You’ll be reminded that Blumenbach didn’t intend his typology to be a hierarchy and that his translators did him a disservice. That they substituted their own acutely racist words for neutral originals.
You’ll learn that Blumenbach later published papers affirming that no one of these races was biologically inferior to another. That some people have argued he was an advocate of diversity and equality before diversity and equ(al)ity were a thing.
But—
You’ll also learn, if you delve a bit deeper, that Blumenbach took the term Caucasian from Christoph Meiners—an academic peer who invented only two races. Two distinct species of human, unrelated to one another.
And that Meiners wrote of these two races in terms later adopted directly into Nazi ideology.
You’ll recognise that Blumenbach himself centred Caucasian as ‘God’s original creation’ from which all other ‘varieties’ had diverged to better suit their geographical environments—whether or not he intended to attach a value judgement to that divergence.
And, like many others have, you’ll probably draw conclusions from the subjective aesthetics that informed Blumenbach’s (in)famous annotated illustration of five skull shapes.
From his declaration of only one as the most elegant and gracefully narrowed (in the original Latin, elegantissimum, eleganter angustata), the most ‘ideally symmetrical’ (optime symmetricum) and—by association with Roman goddess Venus—the most attractive (venustissimum, venusta)…
You’ve guessed which one, haven’t you?
However well we may be told he intended it, Blumenbach’s own analysis was informed by his positionality: a middle-class, well-educated, white man writing in 18th-century Germany.
It was rooted—both implicitly and explicitly—in racist thought.
And it’s the foundation on which deep racial wounds have been perpetuated into the present day.
Race as social construct
Here, in these typologies, is where we first find race as pseudoscientific, and then social, construct—a system of categorising people in which our skin colour has been used as a decisive marker of privilege or exclusion.
When we talk about race as a ‘social construct’, we don’t mean that it’s imaginary as such.
We mean that it’s a system imagined by two white German men that’s both given rise to and been used to justify very real lived experiences.
We’re talking about both the overt and insidious, systemic and individual, effects of white supremacy and colonisation.
About historic and ongoing discrimination and hate.
The modern language of race
For Meiners, race was a stark division between Tartar-Caucasian (ie white) and Mongolian (ie not white); Blumenbach’s spectrum was wider, spanning Caucasian (white), Ethiopian (Black), Mongolian (‘yellow’), Malay (‘brown’) and American (‘red’).
So—if the other terms these men used have fallen out of favour, recognised for what they represent and their effect—why does Caucasian still hold sway?
And if we continue to use this one uncritically, don’t we silently echo all of the others—unconsciously validating the foundational racist framework?
Indeed, there’s a rich and nuanced discourse in the spaces I frequent around the modern language of race: about phrases such as Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME), and people of colour (POC) or Black [people], Indigenous [people] and people of colour (BIPOC).
It’s a conversation that centres whether these phrases capture the broad demographics to which they purport to refer and the wide range of identities within them.
About how these phrases can homogenise diverse groups and emphasise their position on the margins of whiteness—the imagined absence of colour still centred.
Still the norm.
It’s a rich discourse because it’s taking aim at our assumptions and it seeks to shift harmful norms.
Norms the word Caucasian perpetuates, even if we might mean well when we use it.
Alternatives to Caucasian
Simply say ‘white’
I can understand why those seeking to seed change might be inclined to substitute for ‘white’ a word they imagine to be gentler, more polite…
I can understand it—even though I’m going to gently challenge whose comfort you’re prioritising, why and at what cost.
Because, sure, there are sharper words in the world than Caucasian. And—like any step towards more inclusive language—blunting this one word won’t itself deliver systemic change.
But this one word is emblematic of something bigger.
Only when we can talk candidly about whiteness as it is socially constructed can we effectively challenge the harmful norms attached to it.
By this point, then, it should be clear that I believe the simplest alternative to Caucasian is ‘white’.
Use one of Black LinkedIn’s workarounds
Unfortunately, things do become a bit more complicated if you’re creating content for social media.
Even as I tap out this blog, I’m wondering how I’ll effectively share it—how to frame a post about words for whiteness without falling afoul of insensitively targeted (allegedly antiracist) social media algorithms.
Black users have coined a whole swathe of workarounds: whyte, wh*te, wh.te, yt—and many more.
Black professionals—especially those working in the equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI, or DEI) space—are compelled to do additional labour because of suppression that I, a white woman posting, might escape.
And if these are the only way of getting a message out, then it seems to me that these workarounds are more candid than the mealy-mouthed Caucasian.
Speak with specificity
One alternative I heard suggested recently was to consider speaking with specificity—to speak of nationality and/or ethnicity rather than race as such.
That’s sometimes good advice when we’re talking about individuals and if it’s relevant.
It’s not always going to work when we’re talking about group experiences of racialisation or commenting on the social construct itself.
When I talk about my own positionality—the effect of my identities on my perspective—is it enough to say only that I’m British?
For example, might there be differences between my lived experience as a white British woman and those of a Black British woman whose parents were of the Windrush generation?
Quote source material critically
We encounter another difficulty if we’re reproducing or referring to source material—including historical source material—that uses the word…
In those instances, here’s a tip you might not expect: check your sources carefully, because sometimes our memories can fail us!
For example, I can’t find any evidence that the US Census has ever included Caucasian as a category—even though it was still adding a deeply problematic word alongside ‘Black or African American’ as recently as 2010.
Next—and this is a tip that works for all words that can have harmful effect—ask yourself: do I need to reproduce the word?
Might it risk distracting—distancing—someone I really want to engage with my message?
Notice, for example, that I alluded a couple of sentences ago to the inclusion in the US Census of a word I know can be triggering without actually reproducing that word.
I’m not talking about that word here and so I had no need to startle you with it—even as I have repeated throughout this piece the outdated word that is my focus.
Finally, if you’re quoting material, consider whether you can visibly edit it: might the word Caucasian be inessential to the point you’re spotlighting?
Let’s see what that might look like in practice:
In the early 20th century, there was a significant influx of European immigrants, including Italians, Germans, and [other white Europeans] from various regions, who contributed to the cultural diversity of the United States. These [white immigrants] often faced challenges as they assimilated into American society, but they also brought with them their rich traditions and values.
Here, we’ve visibly edited out the plural Caucasians twice, substituting more meaningful phrasing into this AI-generated, generic ‘quote’.
Another approach would be to explicitly problematise the word in your own commentary, whether in the main body or by adding a note:
In the early 20th century, there was a significant influx of European immigrants, including Italians, Germans, and Caucasians from various regions, who contributed to the cultural diversity of the United States. These Caucasians often faced challenges as they assimilated into American society, but they also brought with them their rich traditions and values.1
1 The language of this passage is both outdated and potentially ambiguous. I understand the author to be using ‘Caucasian’ in this context to mean white Europeans, not specifically immigrants from the Caucasus region.
A final thought
Of course, if we were to take a closer look at that AI-generated example through the human-centred, trauma-informed lens of inclusive language, we might problematise far more than the one word, Caucasian.
The United States—like Canada, where I currently live—is a recent construct. Its cultural diversity is a consequence of colonisation and forced immigration: enslavement.
What’s more, its assimilationist policies have seen Indigenous families torn apart—with ongoing effect: Indigenous and Black children are over-represented in the US (and the Canadian) welfare systems.
So, giving these reasons, I might ask my client:
Who do you hope your audience will be—ie who might be reading this passage?
How might this passage land with a reader who carries with them the epigenetic trauma of enslavement?
What can we do to mitigate that impact on someone who bears the very recent scars of the Sixties Scoop?
In this case, I’d likely question whether the passage itself is worth quoting directly—whether the author might hold space for those readers with less positive experiences of immigration and assimilation by instead making the point more clearly and concisely, in their own words, still referencing the source if appropriate.
I’ll likely lighten the author’s cognitive load by offering them a suggestion.
A suggestion that’s sensitive to the broader context of their work and to the issues we’ve already discussed—which means I can’t offer it here.
In this way, then, the word Caucasian can be a stop sign—and if we’re alert to it, we might just uncover other ways of proceeding with caution and care.
Notes
Much of what’s been written about Blumenbach’s typology over the years apparently has its roots in mistranslation. A 2017 paper has given me a lot of food for thought in preparing this post and you can read it for yourself here: John S. Michael, ‘Nuance lost in translation: Interpretations of J.F. Blumenbach’s anthropology in the English-speaking world’ (2017) NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin, 25: 281–309.
If you’re interested in learning more about the workarounds developed by Black LinkedIn, take a look at Dana Brownlee’s 2022 piece for Forbes, ‘Has Black LinkedIn resorted to intentionally misspelling white to avoid online suppression?’
For more on the ongoing separation of Black and Indigenous children from their parents in the modern US child welfare systems, see the 2022 Human Rights Watch report, ‘”If I wasn’t poor, I wouldn’t be unfit”: the family separation crisis in the US child welfare system’.
