people of color & Chicano

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:08 PM -0800 2/7/01, ANNE V. GILBERT wrote:
>Tony and all:
>
>>  And Caucasian is the worst of all. How many white people have a clue
>>  where the Caucasus is (are? I don't even know if that's a plural or
>>  singular), let alone whether that is where their ancestors originate!
>
>Since few people have any idea where the Caucasus Mountains are, a lot of
>these folks use "Caucasian"  to mean "whites" generally.  They have no idea
>that one Johann Friedrich Blumenbach coined the term in the 18th century to
>describe what he thought was a perfect specimen of a "white" person, namely,
>the skull of somebody who had lived in the Caucasus region.  And
>"Caucasian", in Russian, anyway, actually still does refer *only* to people
>from the Caucasus, not to "whites" generally.

And the Caucasian language group (including Georgian, Abkhaz, etc.)
is not the family containing all and only those languages spoken by
white people (or, for that matter, the family of white languages).

larry