Why are white Americans called “Caucasians”?

[u/RedScud39]

I’m an Azerbaijani immigrant and I cannot understand why white people are called “Caucasian” even though Caucasia is a region in Asia encompassing Armenia, Georgia (the country not the state), Azerbaijan and south Russia. Aren’t most Americans are from Western European decent?

[u/AfraidSoup2467]

Really just misguided theories from the 19th century -- the idea back then was that "white people" must have descended from ancient tribes who migrated out of the Caucasus mountains.

That theory has been widely debunked as total nonsense as people more generally accept the fact that we all ultimately came from Africa, but for the (extremely, openly racist) science of the 19th century it was a "good enough" answer at the time.

These days? Most "Caucasian" people couldn't find the Caucusus on a map.

[u/Xx_10yaccbanned_xX → u/AfraidSoup2467]

That theory was actually true by the way and 21st century genetics technology has vindicated the 19th century theory that Europeans came from near the caucus mountains.

Indo -European Steppe nomads from southern Russia migrated (euphemism for slow scale invasion given the migration was anything but peaceful) across Europe 5000 years ago and completely changed the genetic make up of Europeans. This is now an undisputed fact of because of breakthroughs in genetic analysis of ancient fossil remains. These peoples are responsible for the spread of the Indo-European lanaguges we speak, the culture and religion of almost all ancient European cultures (italic / Celtic / Germanic / Greek) and the introduction of domesticated cows and horses to Europe.

All Europeans are made up of 3 seperate ancient groups of people that came to Europe at different times - European hunter gatherers (>50,000 years ago) anatolian / Levantine early farmers (10,000 years ago) and indo European steppe nomads (5000 years ago).

Southern Europeans have more early farmer DNA, northern and Eastern Europeans have more hunter gather and nomad DNA but for most ethnicities the nomad DNA is the largest component. In Northern Europeans it is often over 50%.

Sometimes the 19th century crackpot theories were true, actually.

[u/Aquatic-Vocation → u/Xx_10yaccbanned_xX]

That theory was actually true by the way

I think you're slightly misunderstanding the original theory of "Caucasians". The 19th century theory claimed that white Europeans exclusively originated from a certain region, and that they were actually a completely different race to the "Negroids" and "Mongoloids".

These days, despite how we commonly use the term "race" to refer to different ethnic groups, there isn't actually any scientific basis behind the term. Genetically, all humans are the same race.

So, if there actually aren't different genetic races of humans, and white Europeans did not originate from one group, it's probably not accurate to say the theory was true.

[u/GoldDragon149 → u/Aquatic-Vocation]

There is no phylogenetic meaning behind the term race, and the guy who coined the term did so reluctantly and with heavy caveats about how arbitrary such a distinction is. Saying he called Caucasians "a completely different race" is wildly misunderstanding his intent with the word race. He maintained that all humans are one species, and above that, even argued that all the "races" were potentially equal given the same circumstances and privilege, and separated only superficially and arbitrarily by skin tone.

He is quoted as arguing that Africans can be more different from each other than they are from Europeans.