Much Ado About "Caucasian"
07/13/2013
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Razib, over at Discover Blogs, has a mild—and of course scientifically well-informed—rant about the usage of the word “Caucasian.”

Evelyn Waugh was getting jokes out of this 65 years ago:

“I presume the Loved One was Caucasian?”
“No, why did you think that? He was purely English.”
The Loved One, 1948

I had a go at the same strain of humor in that spacetime-bending bestseller We Are Doomed:

[Jonathan] Kozol is especially vexed at the fact that schools named after African American heroes are invariably among the most segregated.  He cites Thurgood Marshall Elementary School in a Seattle neighborhood where half the families are "Caucasian": GreatSchools.net shows the school's student body as 79 percent black and Hispanic.  It seems that the local Armenians, Georgians, Ossetes and Azerbaijainis prefer to enroll their children in private schools.

Pearls before swine, I’m afraid. 

 

 

 

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