CAUCASIAN IN AMERICA

by Panzer
[INTRO MUSIC]
When we discuss whiteness in America, we often use the term "Caucasian" to refer to white people.
Takao Ozawa was a Japanese immigrant who fought to be legally recognized as white because
because at the time, Naturalization laws but required you to be either a “free white persons” or an “aliens of African descent"
His case went to the supreme court and ultimately Supreme Court Justice, George Sutherland stated
that “White” was a term reserved exclusively for people of the “caucasian race”.
But what does Caucasian even mean?
The term Caucasian was coined by German Philosopher,Christoph Meiners in his treatise "The Outline of History of Mankind"
His work was wildly popular and is the root of the scientific racism that I describe in my first video.
Meiners was a Polygenist, and believed that each race had a different origin.
In the 18th century, it was a common belief that beauty equated to perfection and Meiners’
findings were based mostly on the level of attractiveness according to him of every racial group.
He set up a racial hierarchy from least to most attractive and established two racial categorizations:
The Caucasians and the Mongols.
The Caucasians were intelligent, cultured,morally sensitive and attractive while the Mongols
every non European group and were were viewed as completely opposite from Caucasians.
Meiners compared and contrasted several physical features like hair and body type, but like
most early racial theorists, he used skin tone as a way of determining supposed natural degrees of inferiority and superiority.
At one point, he even suggested that Caucasians with darker skin were somehow part Mongol.
Though he revised this later realizing that not all so-called Caucasians had the benefit
of staying inside all day waxing poetic about racial superiority.
Meiners concluded, that out of all European groups, the Germans were the most superior
of them all, and as you can imagine, the German public ate it up.
His work become heinously popular.
And we went on to publish several more articles reinforcing his idea
of racial hierarchies and the superiority of the Caucasian race.
He often used Physiology as a way of making a connection between the cultural and political power of people of color.
In 1790, he published several articles in response to slave uprisings in the French Colony of St. Domingue.
And in these articles he argued that it was not only impossible, but also simply unjust to give Negros any modicum
of equality because they were, as he put it, born inferior and naturally predisposed to slavery.
He often compared Negros to animals and argued that they didn't feel humanity
in the same way that their white christian masters felt it.
He stated that they were cowardly, unintelligent, easily irritable, promiscuous, and lazy creatures with in-sensitivities to beatings and torture.
Meiners' work was not based in science, but he often twisted the work of scientists to confirm his bias.
This got him a lot of critics from the scientific community and one of his biggest critics was
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.
Blumenbach was a German physician, naturalist, philosopher. and psychologist
Unlike Meiners, he argued that the human race was only separated by opportunity and all originated from one source.
This, of course coincided with the idea that all humanity originated from Adam and Eve.