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The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity

2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/25094612

1945-2314

Colin Fisher,

Race, History, and American Society

In The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race, Bruce Baum, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia, explores the cultural construction of Caucasian racial identity in Europe and in the United States, from the eighteenth century to the present. By exploring the invention and reification of “the Caucasian,” Baum contributes to the larger project of historicizing whiteness advanced by David Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, Matthew Frye Jacobson, and others. Baum argues that while medieval and early modern Europeans certainly made religious and cultural distinctions, they did not understand difference in terms of biological race. Only with the wholesale enslavement of Africans during the seventeenth century did European intellectuals begin to make modern racial distinctions and to articulate the existence of a white or European race. By the late eighteenth century, European race scientists (most notably Johann Friedrich Blumenbach) began to call that race Caucasian, so named for the Caucasus region, which was widely seen as the place where human life originated. Baum narrates how, during the first half of the nineteenth century, monogenist and polygenist race scientists sought biological markers of race and increasingly attributed intellectual, moral, physical, cultural, and even aesthetic superiority to those people they identified as Caucasian.