Reclassified ‘Caucasian’
The first of my recent experiences is summed up in this entry in my diary following a visit to a health services centre during my stay in the USA:
Fri 28 May 2010: Today, Sophie Martin gets the EKG machine ready to check my heart. She repeats to herself the answers as she enters them into the boxes on the machine: ‘Zimitri. Caucasian. 53 kg’. She pauses, then asks, ‘Do you know your height?’ ‘Approximately 1.5 m, nurse,’ I say.
The air around my body is tight as an elastic band. It releases when I tentatively ask, ‘Did I hear you register me as “Caucasian”, nurse?’
‘Oh, yes. Everyone’s Caucasian. Unless they insist on being something else,’ she says, with such conviction, the space to insist otherwise shrinks to insignificance.
This experience warrants a detour through the history of the term ‘Caucasian’. The term is geographically connected to the Caucasus: the name of the land and mountains in Russia that separate the Black Sea to the west from the Caspian Sea to the east. In ancient Christian mythology the biblical story in the Book of Genesis tells that Noah’s Ark landed on Mount Ararat in the Caucasus, which provided its inhabitants with much needed refuge after devastating floods. These mountains form a natural border between what we know today as Europe and Asia. In the ancient world, slaves were sent from the Caucasus to Europe and to Asia Minor, or what we now know as Turkey. Today this region includes Chechnya (historically predominantly Muslim) and Georgia (historically predominantly Christian). Nell Irvin Painter (2003) traces the history of the term Caucasian as the name for people constructed as white to this ancient slave trade of predominantly white women, and to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (before Europe’s Enlightenment and before its world wars). Sara Figal (2014) concurs with Painter (2003) that the racialised conception of these slave women as the epitome of beauty is significant because of its decisive and gendered influence on the invention of the ‘Caucasian race’ as white, superior and beautiful.
Johann Friederich Blumenbach (1752-1840), author of the 1775 dissertation De generis humani varietate nativa, translated into English by Thomas Bendyshe as On the Natural Variety of Mankind (Blumenbach 1865), is known for first associating the term Caucasian with white people and, for this reason, he is often regarded as the father of racial science and race classification. According to Painter (2003: 10), Blumenbach borrowed the term from the philosopher Christoph Meiners and chose it as a name for white people in Gottingen in April of 1795. In the matrices of aristocratic male privilege, prestigious learned societies, institutional power and scholarly authority across London, St Petersburg and Gottingen, Caucasian was soon made a scientific classification. It first appeared in English in William Lawrence’s 1807 translation of Blumenbach’s Handbuch der vergleichenden Anatomie (A Short System of Comparative Anatomy) (Painter 2003: 10). The first edition of De generis humani varietate nativa (1775) was revised for a second edition in 1781, and again in 1795 for a third edition. In the third edition of his dissertation Blumenbach conceives of humans as one species divided into five varieties. He notes ‘the Caucasian’ as ‘the primeval one’ or the standard from which the remaining four varieties deviate. For him, ‘the Caucasian variety’ includes inhabitants of Europe, East Asia and North Africa. He describes ‘the Caucasian variety’ as follows: ‘Colour white, cheeks rosy ... face oval, straight, its parts moderately defined, forehead smooth, nose narrow, slightly hooked, mouth small ... In general, that kind of appearance which, according to our opinion of symmetry, we consider most handsome and becoming’ (Blumenbach 1795: 264-65, translated by Bendyshe in Blumenbach 1865).
Painter (2003) highlights the significance of this conception of beauty as part of the meaning of Caucasian and part of a racial hierarchy of physical beauty and skin colour. She notes that for Blumenbach, these features were associated with Caucasian and specifically Georgian beauty. For Christoph Meiners, such features were associated with ‘the Nordic/ Aryan race’ (Painter 2003: 36). Painter writes that once Blumenbach had ‘established the superiority of Caucasians, the term floated away from its geographical origin’, and people from the Caucasus region subsequently ‘fell off the apex of the racial pyramid’, but the idea of ‘the Caucasians’ lived on, as did its claims of racial superiority and beauty (2003: 27). The nurse in the USA who reclassified me as Caucasian revealed that this idea remains alive in the twenty-first century. The difference here is that Caucasian as a signifier of whiteness as superior is used by her as the default classification, unless one ‘insists on being something else’. Herein lies the paradox of her practice: in the same act, she reinscribes a superior whiteness as the norm while rendering it unstable in this particular application of the classification to a person who would in all likelihood be considered African-American in the USA. This contradiction has a similar timbre to that pointed out by Figal (2014): that the image of white slave women was re-appropriated to construct a notion of whiteness as a superior race. This detour questions the use of Caucasian as a descriptive, scientific and biological category.
Defending the spelling of ‘Coloured’
My second recent experience also happens to have occurred in the USA. A few months after the above encounter, I defended the spelling of the administrative category Coloured, not its legitimacy. The editors of a respected journal insisted on the use of the American spelling, ‘colored’, as opposed to the South African one, ‘Coloured’, in a special issue focused on the use of race in South Africa. I argued that like the terms White and African, in South Africa Coloured was and remains an official, though contested, administrative category. The spelling in South Africa should not be changed to that used in the USA because the meanings of these terms are context-specific. Unlike the situation in the USA, in South Africa Coloured does not always mean black in dominant discourses, historically and contemporaneously. Nor does it always mean black in popular discourses. There is a history, from the 1920s through to the present, of US projections of its black/white binary – in which ‘colored’ always means black because of the imagined percentage of ‘black blood’ in one’s veins – onto the far more complex South African context (see Hill and Kilson 1971). Given the erroneous approach of this history, the retention of the South African spelling was, for me, significant.
Unclassified
When I joined the University of the Witwatersrand in 2011, I did not tick the box for the racial category Coloured on the form provided by the university’s human resources department. I refused to classify myself by race. In the space that lists apartheid’s racial categories, I wrote a note informing the administrator of my refusal to comply with this request. I question the use of a classification system which is premised on this crude racialised way of knowing. That I denounce the continued use of race categories, albeit for racial redress in post-1994 South Africa, does not imply that I disavow the ways in which South Africans have been racialised. Nor does it imply that I deny the continued legacy of the effects of these categories on everyday life. I am after cultivating indicators for historical exclusion that are premised on a way of coming to know that recognises and disrupts these effects without resorting to race classification.
In 2015, in an effort to promote the transformation of the academic staff body at this historically white institution, the office of the Vice Chancellor at my university called on black African South African and Coloured staff to meet with him in order to discuss the university’s decision to set aside funding for the advancement and recruitment of black African and Coloured staff. The rationale for gathering staff by race classification was that staff classified Indian are over-represented, and that