A Twitter post claims that the phrase “white people” to refer to Caucasians generally is a relatively modern American invention. It feels at least sensible to me, but do we know either way?
It goes back at least as far as 1899 Britain, with Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden”. And probably a lot further.
The better question is when did “Caucasian” come to mean “white”? Most white people are from far from the Caucasus mountains.
The (true or false) story that the word “Caucasus” means “white” or “white like snow” goes back to at least Pliny the Elder, though. Kipling did not make that up.
I know some actual Caucasians, but I am not comfortable with asking them whether they think of themselves as “white”. That seems like a pretty American thing to ask or even contemplate.
The term was first introduced by the German anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. In his book De generis humani varietate nativa, or On the Natural Varieties of Mankind (1795), Blumenbach divided humanity into five varieties, or types: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay. He gave the name Caucasian to the European type because he believed that the ancestors of the Europeans originated in the Caucasus Mountains on the border of Europe and Asia, from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. He argued that the people of that area were the most beautiful humans, and because they were the ideal humans, they must have been the first ones created. Blumenbach then asserted that the Europeans were the ancestors of all the other types.
Caucasian | Social Sciences and Humanities | Research Starters | EBSCO Research
Then popularized by Ernst Haeckel.
Wikipedia suggests the descriptor “white” (to differentiate from Black or indigenous people) originated in the Americas in the 17th century.
By the mid-seventeenth century, the novel term español (“Spaniard”) was being equated in written documents with blanco, or “White”.
In 1680, Morgan Godwyn “found it necessary to explain” to English readers that “in Barbados, ‘white’ was ‘the general name for Europeans.’”
Blumenbach was way ahead of his time. It’s now believed that modern Europeans along with the Indo-European languages emerged from the Yamnaya culture which lived in the Caucasus.
“The question of where the Yamnaya come from has been something of a mystery up to now…we can now answer that as we’ve found that their genetic make-up is a mix of Eastern European hunter-gatherers and a population from this pocket of Caucasus hunter-gatherers who weathered much of the last Ice Age in apparent isolation.”
you could also question how Aryan came to be associated with Nordic White, when the term Aryan originally referred to Indo-Iran people
Other way round. White, as a term for light-sklnned people as a racial group, is much older than Caucasian. The OED has citations for white in this sense going back to 1400, while Caucasian for a division of humanity doesn’t turn up until 1794. It’s an enlightenment-era attempt to put a scientific, rational veneer on cultural attitudes to race and ethnicity.
Which isn’t surprising, given that color is the most obvious difference between the races, and while the color of “white” people isn’t actually white, and the color of “black” people isn’t actually black, they’re easy shorthands for “light color” and “dark color”.
Blame Arthur de Gobineau. His racial theories putting Europeans - the white race - at the top of humanity lead in a straight line to Hitler.