Historical Report On Race

Submitted By punky2983
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Pages: 3

Historical Report on Race

The Caucasian or white race refers to individuals whose ancestral roots come from Europe, Northern Africa, South Asia and the Middle East. There are at least fifty different Caucasian ethnic groupings: Caucasian, Indo-European, and Altaic. (Painter, 2003) The word Caucasian did originate to base itself of the people of the Caucasus Mountains region. The Caucasian race then would describe many individuals all around the world. They span still from the Americas to the European countries still. Most Caucasian people in the Americas families have come across the ocean from the European countries. The cultural boundaries are what distinguish you from which Caucasian area you may come from. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was a famous anthropologist and also known as the “father of physical anthropology” proposed one of the earliest classifications of the races of mankind. He had them separated into Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian, and American. These classifications were based on a collection of observations based on sixty human craniums. (Britannica.) It was during the writing of his third edition of his book about classifications of the races where he finally referred to one race as “Caucasian”. It was also in this book where he began to refer to the racial hierarchy about beauty of the races. (Painter, 2003) “A slave trade lies at the center of the history of white people as Caucasians: the age-old, eastern, white slave trade from the Russian borderlands to the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. Because the iconography of the eastern slave trade features women, women occupy a more central place in the history of "Caucasian" than in the iconography of the western, Atlantic slave trade.” (Painter, 2003) Due to the slave trades, we became known more as Caucasians vs. white people. Many of the Caucasians who were often “traded” as slaves were due to their beauty. This was seen during the slave practices in ancient Greek times, where often women were traded as slaves for various reasons one of which being of sexual nature. Caucasian people are known as either this or white on most official items when you apply for any job, schooling, or federal census. It was in the early eighteenth century where, white officially became a