Current Events > TIL Finnish people at one point were considered "Asian" in the US.

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10fwxiy/my_american_friends_greatgrandfather_was_finnish/

Really puts into perspective how silly the concept of "race" is.

Japanese and Indian men sued the Supreme Court to be considered Caucasian and were rejected for contradictory reasons. Thind v US and Ozawa v US.

Armenians successfully pulled it off in US v Cartozian.

DrizztLink posted...

Armenians successfully pulled it off in US v Cartozian.

smh an ethnic group from the actual Caucasus having to win a court case in order to be Caucasian

It feels weird opening a Gamefaqs thread to be led to a Reddit thread to read.

They wanted to be considered Caucasian because at one point Spaniards, Irish and Italians didn't even qualify as white.

Almost like race isn't biological no matter how many times people go "but why do those people look different then?"

That is how dumb and arbitrary the concept of race is.

To start with, "caucasian" is supposed to mean "from the caucasus". The caucasus is a region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, mainly comprising Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and parts of Southern Russia.

Let us just think about how dumb a system of classification is when someone from Japan is supposedly the same race as a pakistani ("Asian") and a middle eastern is the same as a guatemalan and a samoan ("brown"), yet a blond, blue eyed person is not "white" but "brown" if said person is of latin heritage but someone as dark as trump jr or boebert are seen as the pinnacle of whiteness.

That Supreme Court case where people from India stopped being labeled white named United States vs Bhagat Singh Thind doesnt get brought up much.

End result was a lot of Indians got stripped of their citizenship. They tried to do it to the lawyer that argued at the case at Supreme Court but he fought back and got saved from it happening to him.

hockeybub89 posted...

Almost like race isn't biological no matter how many times people go "but why do those people look different then?"

It's my understanding that our modern concept of race stems from the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism and 19th century imperialism with a dash of "scientific" racism. Basically Europeans trying to conceptualize how they managed to subjugate most of the world as a biological fact and their innate "superiority" over other people.

From my reading of the past I don't believe you see the concept of "race" in the past. People did recognize the differences between other people but it wasn't tied to a biological identity and it was at times tied to moralizing factors. For example in the Middle Ages Europeans tied skin color with moral character. In art they often depicted "Saracen" people with black skin tone as a means to mark their moral character. There's a poem which the name escapes me of a Saracen converting to Christianity and his skin turns from black to white. White skin in the medieval European imagination represented pure and moral character, black skin represent immoral and bad character.

In the Classical Era it's climate that determines the moral characteristics of people. Greek philisophers wrote on how the climate of the Near East turned its people into decadent, docile and effeminate people. This extended to even the Greeks living in Ionia and later those that settled in the Hellenistic Kingdoms in the Eastern Mediterranean and later on the Romans would turn around and use those stereotypes against the Greeks, some Roman moralists would argue that Greek influence was making the Romans less manly.

Ultimately, much like "Greekness" in the past, "whiteness" is tied to social, cultural and political privileges. In an era I take interest in, Classical Greece, Greekness served as a similar tool to our modern day concept of "whiteness" except Greekness was tied to culture and language, and later on even political systems and virtues, but much like "whiteness" it was at times arbritary and ever shifting. Like Thukydides viewing the people of Aetolia as barbarians despite speaking Greek and being culturally Greek because they practiced "barbarian" customs such as carrying weapons in open spaces and being rural societies. Even simple things like the way you drank your wine was tied to one's Greekness, there's an excellent article by Dr. Kate Topper drawing parallels between Greek drinking culture as a means to exclude and include others and the practice of chugging milk by white supremacists as a means to exhibit "whiteness".
https://rfkclassics.blogspot.com/2018/10/wine-and-milk-drinking-cultures-as-acts.html?m=1