How Caucasians Became White: The Eurasian Origins of American Racial Politics
On June 30, 2021, CERES hosted an event featuring Charles King, Professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. In his fascinating hour-long lecture, titled How Caucasians Became White: The Eurasian Origins of American Racial Politics, Prof. King reviewed history of racial politics, starting from the 18th century thinkers to Barnum’s American Museum and the modelling of Nazi Germany.
First, Prof. King explained how racial theories emerged and developed in the late 18th and 19th centuries. A prominent role in this process played German scholar Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) who studied human skulls from all around the world to allocate mankind into different racial categories: Americans (people native to North and South America), Ethiopians (people of African descent), Malays (Pacific Islanders), Mongolians (Asians), and Caucasians. According to Prof. King, Blumenbach was the first to use the label Caucasian to describe what we now call white people. This labeling was based on Faminae Georgianae – a skull of a woman from the country of Georgia – which was “the closest thing that he [Blumenbach] had seen to perfection.” Later, Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882) would legitimize racism by the use of racial demography, maintaining that white race possessed a monopoly on beauty, intelligence, and power.
Prof. King then explained how these theories penetrated the United States from the very beginning. For instance, the first U.S. census, conducted in 1790, placed Americans into two major categories: white/Caucasian and colored/Ethiopian, the latter regarded as slaves. “The slave category does not have a color attached to it, because, by 1790, it was very clear that the only people who would be in that category were those who fit in the Blumenbachian category of Ethiopian or black,” King stated. He also discussed museums of great wonders that were prevalent in the U.S. in the 1860s, including Barnum’s American Museum, which would display native (or allegedly native) Caucasians – Circassians and Georgians – in their museums. In this way, Caucasians could show other Caucasians (i.e. white people in the U.S.) “what it was like to be racially pure.”
Furthermore, Prof. King talked about how Blumenbach’s and his contemporaries’ racial theories influenced the emergence of the eugenics movement, which aimed at improving the human species by mating people with specific hereditary characteristics. It was believed that all fit people would be white/Caucasian, while racial interbreeding would produce “less good, less fit” humans. According to the professor, precisely this attitude towards white people in the U.S. was commended by Adolf Hitler, who would remark that: “There is currently one state in which one can observe at least the weak beginnings of a better conception [of racial order]… the United States…”
Prof. King concluded his lecture by claiming that, from Blumenbach to the modeling of Nazi Germany, “there is one story: a long trail of race-making, racial identification, hierarchy building… it has a Eurasian component to it as this young woman [Faminae Georgianae] demonstrates.”
The Q&A part of the event touched upon topics such as Barnum’s American Museum, Russian ethnography, racial theories in Asian cultures, etc. The event was open to Georgetown students, alumni, faculty, and staff.
To watch the event, please go to our YouTube channel here.