"John Knight" <jwknight at polbox.com> wrote:
>The reason the White Race in the US is referred to as "Caucasians" is
>because they were the Israelites who were dispersed to the Caucasus
>Mountains, who went from there throughout Europe.
>>You didn't know that?
Because it isn't true. Here is the history of why whites are called
"Caucasians":
http://grove.ufl.edu/~feagin/ch1.htm
>Immanuel Kant's use of the German phrase for races of mankind in the
> 1770s was one of the first explicit uses of the term in the sense of
> biologically distinct categories of human beings. In 1795 Johann
> Blumenbach, a German anatomist, established a racial classification
> system that became an influential typology. At the top of his racial
> hierarchy were the Caucasians (Europeans), followed in order by the
> Mongolians (Asians), the Ethiopians (Africans), the Americans (Native
> Americans), and the Malays (Polynesians). Blumenbach was the first to
> use the term Caucasian; he felt that the Europeans in the Caucasus
> mountains of Russia were the most beautiful race of men. Ever since,
> Europeans have been called by a term that originally applied only to
> a small and unrepresentative area of Europe. Blumenbach also chose
> the term Caucasian because he believed the earliest human beings came
> from there. (Twentieth-century archaeologists have found the earliest
> human remains in Africa.)
And to confirm:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~hist32/History/White.htm
>A German physiologist named Johann Blumenbach is sometimes called the
> father of physical anthropology. He proposed one of the earliest
> classifications of the races of mankind. Blumenbach created the term
> CAUCASIAN to describe members of the white race, basing the choice of
> his term upon the race residing in Georgia on the southern slope of
> the Caucasus Mountains, who at the time enjoyed a remarkable
> reputation for beauty. To Blumenbach, Caucasian was coined for
> aesthetic not biological reasons because the Caucasus region of Asia
> Minor he said produced "the most beautiful race of men" While
> Americans like to think of racial labels as having to do with
> descent, no one believes that the origins of White Americans is from
> the Caucus mountains. [Bendyshe T, ed. The Anthropological Treatises
> of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. London: Anthropological Society;
> 1865:99;269]
"Caucasian" as a term for whites is used ONLY in the US
http://www.xrefer.com/entry.jsp?xrefid=591886&secid=.-
>Caucasian
>>The normal word in American English (but rarely elsewhere) for a white
> person (as distinct from an African-American, a Japanese, etc.). It
> is also, as adjective and noun, the normal word used in all
> English-speaking countries for the people, language, etc., of the
> Caucasus.
Oh, and here is some more about the concept of "race" and how it
developed from the first reference:
>The concept of race as a biologically distinctive category was
> developed by northern Europeans who, for much of their histories, had
> been largely isolated from contact with people who differed from them
> physically or culturally. Before the development of large sailing
> ships in the late 1400s, they had little contact with people from
> Asia, Africa, or the Americas. Soon, however, it was these northern
> Europeans who established slave systems in the Americas. The slave
> colonies were legitimated and rationalized by the northern Europeans,
> including the English, who classified African slaves as a lesser
> race. The idea of race was not developed from close scientific
> observations of all human beings. Rather, race was, from its
> inception, a folk classification, a product of popular beliefs about
> human differences that evolved from the sixteenth through the
> nineteenth centuries.
...
>This singling out of people within the human species in terms of a
> biologized race hierarchy is a distinctively European and
> Euro-American idea.
Thus it can be seen that whatever the Holy Bible talks about when it
talks about differing peoples, it is NOT talking about "race" as the
nincompoop understands the term, because that concept is a purely
modern northern European concept.
So the idea that whites came from the Caucasian area is a modern
(American-only, since the word doesn't mean "whites" elsewhere) folk
tale derived from a misperception as to why whites were first called
"Caucasians", which was not until 200 odd years ago.
Isn't it fun to find out that you've been believing in modern day
fairy tales, nincompoop?
lojbab
