Actually, you and I are on the same wave length where "race" is concerned, Cosmo. I was simply reacting to this passage in your original post:
...this man was not American Indian, racially. The features are all wrong. More like Mongolian (the t erm Caucasian is used, but that doesn't mean White people -- it means like people of the Caucasus Mountains of Western Asia.-
"Mongolian" is a term more properly applied, I would think, to American Indians than to natives of the Caucasus Mountains, which are half in Europe, half in Asia, Many of these (true) Caucasians, incidentally, are quite fair, with a goodly number of blonde blue-eyed types, whom even your redneck reactionaries would recognize as "white."
Did you see my post (to Cobalt Blue) on Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who first coined the term "Caucasian" to refer to the "white race"? If not, here's the ref:
Message 14179382
The concept of "race" is something we owe to the Enlightenment, to its passion for classification. But it was one of the least enlightened concepts of the Enlightenment. Blumenbach, for example, supposedly argued that all the "non-white" races (which he called the Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay) marked an aesthetic (but not moral and/or intellectual) degeneration from the high standard of beauty of the "original" and "pure" Caucasian race. But Blumenbach was by no means the worst. Here is Voltaire on the "negro race":
The negro race is a species of men different from ours as the breed of spaniels is from that of greyhounds. ....Their round eyes, their flat noses, their lips which are always thick, their differently shaped ears, the wool on their heads, the measure even of their intelligence establishes between them and other species of men prodigious differenceds. If their understanding is not of a different nature from ours, it is at least greatly inferior...
quodlibet.net
Blah, blah, blah...As Voltaire might also have said: "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
jbe |
