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The Caucasian race (also Caucasoid, [a] Europid, or Europoid) [2] is an obsolete racial classification of humans based on a now-disproven theory of biological race. [3] [4] [5] The Caucasian race was historically regarded as a biological taxon which, depending on which of the historical race classifications was being used, usually included ancient and modern populations from all or parts of ...
Blumenbach does not name his five groups in 1779 but gives their geographic distribution. The color adjectives used in 1779 are weiss "white" (Caucasian race), gelbbraun "yellow-brown" (Mongolian race), schwarz "black" (Aethiopian race), kupferrot "copper-red" (American race) and schwarzbraun "black-brown" (Malayan race). [11]
the Caucasian or white race. Blumenbach was the first to use this term for Europeans, and he also included Middle Easterners and South Asians in the same category. [17] the Mongolian or yellow race, including all East Asians. the Malayan or brown race, including Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders.
It was only in relatively modern times that slavery became associated with race. In 1790, U.S. citizens were defined as "free white men"; this excluded white men who were indentured servants. By the mid 19th century in America, white people (as then defined) were all free; slaves were of African or part-African descent. [3]
The word "race", interpreted to mean an identifiable group of people who share a common descent, was introduced into English in the 16th century from the Old French rasse (1512), from Italian razza: the Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest example around the mid-16th century and defines its early meaning as a "group of people belonging to the same family and descended from a common ...
Coloured terminology is occasionally found in Graeco-Roman ethnography [2] [3] and other ancient and medieval sources, but these societies did not have any notion of a white or pan-European race. [4] In Graeco-Roman society whiteness was a somatic norm , although this norm could be rejected and it did not coincide with any system of ...
The term "White race" or "White people", defined by their light skin among other physical characteristics, entered the major European languages in the later seventeenth century, when the concept of a "unified White" achieved greater acceptance in Europe, in the context of racialized slavery and social status in the European colonies.
White Americans (sometimes also called Caucasian Americans) are Americans who identify as white people. In a more official sense, the United States Census Bureau , which collects demographic data on Americans , defines "white" as "[a] person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe , the Middle East , or North Africa ".