Caucasian Smaucasian

by Bert Woodall

Looking for a job offers a wealth of unpleasantries and irritations but one in particular pops up every time I file an application. Specifically, I am asked to specify an ethnicity. A short list of options is presented from which I am asked to choose exactly one. Of course for me there is really just one option and I take it: I lie.

Invariably I tick the little circle beside “Caucasian” (also sometimes presented as “Caucasian, non-Hispanic”) and just as invariably I wish my real ethnicity was on the menu. For I am an American Mongrel. And damned proud of it.

I can understand why the ethnicity question is asked, of course. Somewhere up or down the line every company or institution is required to defend or allowed to boast of, as the case may be, its relative “diversity.” After all, if the phrase Equal Opportunity Employer is going to be used there must be some way to establish its applicability. Moreover, accepting that EOE is a worthy value, I can understand why the list of ethnicities is a limited one. Nothing, absolutely nothing, screws up data analysis so much as the “Other” option.

But still, Caucasian?

The term itself is suspect. I rely here upon Wikipedia to buttress my case:

Caucasian … has been used to denote the general physical type of some or all of the indigenous populations of Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Asia, Central Asia and South Asia. Historically, the term has been used to describe the entire population of these regions, without regard necessarily to skin tone. In common use, the term is sometimes restricted to Europeans and other lighter-skinned populations within these areas, and may be considered equivalent to the varying definitions of white people. [Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race, 07-15-2009]

Wikipedia goes on to note that contemporary scholars deprecate the term, and for a very good reason: Human genome studies demonstrate that the Caucasian Race is a fatuous notion. That it took so long to debunk a quaint phenotype ginned up around 1800 AD and based on craniology (craniology!) is a marvel. That it still shows up in every employment application process is an embarrassment to anthropological typology itself. In truth, the only defense available to the word Caucasian is that at least it is less disturbing than its close and rabid cousin, Aryan.

Even as a child, long ago and far away, I was uncomfortable being called “white” since my skin color more nearly resembled a cardboard box than a snowflake. Clearly white was at best a term of convenience — which, you know, I could sort of understand, but was never really able to accept. Ditto, the Caucasian designation.

Now, it is possible that among my ancestors were people from the Caucasus region. Even so, I know their genes had drifted at least as far as the British Isles before 1600 AD, and the odds are very good that these ancestors found themselves, shall we say, powerfully attracted to men and women from tribes other than their own. The human genome proves that the impulse toward racial purity has forever been trumped by lust.

In my own family both genetics and genealogy have found that my ancestors are at least as impure as one might expect. Prior to coming to This Great Land of Ours, the family sprang from the loins of a Europe repeatedly reconstituted by migration and conquest. From the British Isles alone my people brought a gene pool that was an indecipherable admixture of Pict, Celt, Gael, Angel, Saxon, Norse and Norman. Oh, and then there were the Danes — fully one-eighth of my ancestry, and themselves nothing less vague than “North Germanic.”

Once on this continent the family remained manifestly a people of the heart. My ancestors continued to find love wherever they went, and thus it is that I am but one great-great-forebear short of being one-quarter American Indian — three-sixteenths Indian, to be precise, and that share representing at least four Tribes. (Parts of my family at some point became African-American, too, but the geneticists tell me the family tree had split prior to this development, and the portion of Me that is African is much older than our American heritage.)

In any case, I am the proud son of a vast and fecund gene pool. An American in every sense of the word, of hardy mongrel stock, I stand before you today to ask for a job. Ethnicity? Oh, you betcha. But Caucasian? Mmm. Guess again.