Caucasian No More: Divesting White Appropriation from Indigeneity
There are Caucasians and then there are Caucasians. In the West we have the racial category of “Caucasian” and then there are actual Caucasians, the people indigenous to the region of the Caucasus Mountains.
Due to the work of anti-racism, critical race theory, advocates and activists — mainly those of color and/or Indigenous background — many of us are becoming increasingly aware of the cultural misappropriation embedded in our society. As we work towards normalizing decolonization and the acknowledgement of original lands, practices and peoples, we must naturally turn this critical lens on the category of whiteness as well.
In this article I will explore how the conflation of Caucasian with Northern European whiteness is a misappropriation and argue that we should divest the identity from being a synonym for white, returning it to the actual Caucasians: the diverse, native peoples of the Caucasus region. (I will not be able to address the history and complexity of Caucasian Indigeneity and land rights in the scope of this writing.)
Known in regional languages as Kafkas, K’avk’asioni, Kavkazskiye, Kovkasyan and Qafqaz, the Caucasus Mountains are situated at the cusp of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, between the Black and Caspian Seas. The range serves as a geological landmark, informing the imagined division between East and West, spanning across the present day nations of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Southern Russia. Today, the often contested region is home to over 50 distinct ethnic groups, many sharing overarching similarities in dress, culture and dance, with few bearing resemblance to native Northern European peoples.
It was, however, the appearance of a single skull from the Caucasus Mountains (which apparently resembled German specimens), that led German professor of medicine, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, to publish work in 1781 espousing that Europeans were Caucasian in origin. Yes, a single skull, in the defunct, white supremacist study of ethnology, was co-opted to establish this faulty link over two centuries ago. The theory was corroborated by the proximity of Mount Ararat, which in Abrahamic cosmology was the landing site of Noah’s Ark, with the re-population of the flooded Earth spiraling out from the region. This allowed Europeans to situate their ancestors within a biblical frame of history.
In 1908 the racist linguist and ethnologist, Augustus Henry Keane, opined that “Caucasians (white and also dark), [are indigenous to] North Africa, Europe, Irania, India, Western Asia and Polynesia.” Keane conscripted many disparate and decidedly non-white peoples to fit into his definition of Caucasian, the colonial implications abound, as it is easier to claim stewardship over land and people already belonging to “your race.” Keane’s definition also factored into the construction of race in the United States and the restriction of who was admitted into whiteness and who remained outside of it.
It is little surprise that a Eurocentric worldview both culls from its dubious Eastern periphery, while projecting itself onto peoples from and well beyond that periphery. In Orientalism Edward Said explores the Aryan-European and African-Oriental divide, with the Orient/al as innately inferior, effeminate, sensual and penetrable when compared to the rational European. The Western peoples are perceived as superior to the Eastern “subject races,” regardless of whether a common ancestral denominator was shared. The Caucasus, situated to the East, has had no romantic bearing as a “motherland” for the European descendant to return to or even defend. If anything the ethnologists of the past saw the native Caucasian not as an ethnic sibling, but as the raw human fodder from which the refined Northern European was able to depart and evolve.
To this day Western “Caucasians” have no discernible interest in the people living in the Caucasus region. How many Americans even know where the Caucasus is, let alone any detail of the Caucasian peoples? It took the United States over 100 years (2019) to even recognize the Armenian Genocide of 1915, with Biden as the first U.S. president to formally recognize it on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, April 24, 2021.
If anything the Caucasus region is regarded as just another chaotic frontier: remote, underdeveloped, hardly an ideal vacation destination. Should any news of the Caucasus reach us at all, it is of dangerous Chechen rebels, or residents of Artsakh/Nagorno Karabakh massacring one another, or other swarthy peoples engaged in incomprehensible land disputes we have no stake in. The West simply does not care about native Caucasians.
There is no sense to the average American white “Caucasian” that they owe anything or belong in any way to the Caucasus region. This obsolete racial distinction has endured for centuries and it is time we retire it from its use as a synonym for white skinned people of European origin. We cannot change the history behind the term, but we can regulate our individual use of it and ask our communities to consider the same. We can just as easily use “European” instead. We can also use just plain old white — that privileged category of ethnic erasure in the U.S. social order.
The resilient peoples of the Caucasus have fought to maintain their distinct identities in spite of past Soviet and imperial occupations. They know who they are and where they are from. And have you actually seen Caucasians? A person with Northern European features would stick out among them like an irradiated thumb. On social media I have read accounts of brown skinned Caucasian people facing discrimination from white skinned Russians. Apparently, in Russia, the Caucasus is equated with melanated skin and ethnic features, not the whiteness we have incorrectly come to expect. Due to the misuse, we lack awareness of who the term even belongs to —
That would be the Avars, Lezgins, Chechens and Laks; the Circassians, Armenians, Ossetians, Talish and Kurds; the Cossacks, Assyrians, Azeris, Kumyks and Nogais; and all of the peoples of the Caucasus I have failed to name. It belongs to the people who have been living in relation with the mountains, snow and legends of the land. And it belongs to a skull that was stolen long ago.
