You don't even know who Blumenbach is, don't you?
Yes it does.
No it doesn't. Let me explain this to you as simply as I can, since you seem to have problems grasping the idea that humans aren't a box of crayons.
When the German scientist Christoph Meiners fist used the term "Caucasian" in 1785, he didn't apply it to "white people" as it is now defined in the US. It referred to Europeans exclusively, whom he regarded as the most superior race.
This idea was later expanded on most famously by another German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1790. It is from him that you get the five colors of Benetton that you so confidently repeat now (white, black, yellow, brown, and red). None of it is based on genetics, linguistics, or even common sense (the science of genetics wasn't even invented yet, and evolution was only being proposed).
He based it on
skull shape. He believed that the other races (aside from his own - white) were all "degenerate" forms of Adam and Eve, that the original human species was white, and that if Africans were fed enough European food and exposed to European climates and customs, they would revert back to being white.
You still think this was "science"?
Now let me show you why skin color has nothing to do with genetic lineage. You know how the US classifies Middle Easterners as "Caucasian" but South Asians as "Asians"? Because Arabs are fair-skinned, right? Indians can't be Caucasians since their skin is so dark! You say.
Wrong. The ethnolinguistic grouping to which Europeans, South Asians, Persians, Kurds, etc. all belong to is what is known to modern science as the
Indo-European peoples.
Genetically, linguistically, culturally, etc. all these people descended from the same ancient group of humans, the Proto-Indo-Europeans. And this relationship can still be traced today through genetic markers like R1a1a.
http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v18/n4/abs/ejhg2009194a.htmlMeanwhile, Jews, Arabs, Phoenicians and other ethnic groups from North Africa, the Levant region, and what is now Iraq and the Arabian peninsula, despite being lumped under the term "white" in US law, actually belong to a separate ethnolinguistic branch - the
Semitic peoples. They speak a different language family, have different genetic lineages, and different cultures.
They have mixed together in modern times (especially after the Arab conquest of most of the Middle East and North Africa during the Islamic Caliphates), but it does not erase the fact that the brown-skinned Indians were more closely related to fair-skinned Germans, than Germans are related to the similarly fair-skinned Arabs.
Can you understand that? Or is this going over your head?
As opposed to ancient Americans?
As opposed to 18th, 19th, and early 20th century Americans. You're a bit dense, aren't you?
White means white people. Caucasians are white people. Not black, brown, red or yellow.
You think the people whom Americans considered "white" remained the same through centuries? LOL.
No.
I really don't know how it's so difficult for you to understand that "white" is NOT a scientific classification. It's arbitrary. Most of it is based on superficial similarity (again skin color) or politics.
Let me give you an example.
Did you know that in the 18th century, IRISH people were not considered white? Nor did Americans consider Finns or Swedes as white back then either. Because like most northern Scandinavians, they have a relatively higher rate of occurrence of the epicanthic fold, i.e. "slanted" eyes, and thus Americans reasoned that they must have come from the "yellow race".
Modern Americans don't even consider Latin Americans as "white", despite the vast majority of Latin Americans actually being mostly genetically European in ancestry. I've actually met one American who thought Spaniards (i.e. people from
Spain), were Latinos and not Europeans.
"White" doesn't mean squat. It means what people want it to mean. If you want to classify people, at least classify them on actual quantifiable criteria like genetics. And ferchrissakes it's the 21st century, stop friggin' repeating Blumenbach.
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