When was the last time you self-identified as a "Caucasian"?

The funny thing is that Russians call people form the Caucasus "blacks"

#28 You could apply for American citizenship and then switch to being a Caucasian!

It's interesting that it's only applicable to Americans in a country built through immigration.

#25 -- I think the standard breakdown was Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, and Malay. (Semites being Caucasian.)

most people would just say Catolico in casual conversation just to shorten the term

That's what we're saying is the case in English too, at least among Catholics. Catholics just say "Catholic". If you hear someone say "Roman Catholic" (and he's not trying to distinguish between Roman Catholics and, for example, Ukrainian or Armenian Catholics), then the speaker is probably a Protestant.

but then that profiling would be based on culture/language, not on ethnicity

Right. The people who discriminate against Latino people because they're Latino are unlikely to distinguish between Basques, Zapotecs, mestizo Bolivians, and Ashekenazi Argentines. And these forms are generally for use in programs against racial/cultural/gender discrimination.

#20

I refused to tick Caucasian, as I am not from the Caucasus

If you're filling out a French form, you have to take into account that the words will have their French significance, not their English. A "caution" will be a personal guarantee and not a warning, etc. Similarly, if you're filling out a US form, you should take into account that the words on it have the meaning that they have in US English, not in your native dialect.

Vinny, re: your last comment: up to a point.

A few decades ago the word 'nigger' was common in the Deep South to describe any black person. Even back then, some people would have objected to use the term as they considered it derogatory.
Similarly, using 'caucasian' might be common in the US but i believe it to be factually incorrect, and based on discredited racist logic described in post #1. Perhaps most people who use the term are not aware of this, and mean no harm, but I, for one, object to its usage.

'Holland' might be a common way to refer to the Netherlands in English but I can see why some Dutch people would object to that as it is not technically correct either.

BTW i love the cartoon in your sign line Vinny. ;-)

-- I think the standard breakdown was Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, and Malay. (Semites being Caucasian.)

my 'atlas of humanity' published in the early 80s, lists the 4 races as 'Europeoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, and Australoid (Aborigines and Papuans)'. Malays would be classified as Mongoloid.

Caucasian is not "factually incorrect". It has a meaning in the US
Agreed, but I'd argue that since the emergence of the Caucasian nations from under the Soviet blanket, and the greater likelihood of interaction with natives of that region who identify the term only with natives of the region, the term Caucasian to mean "white races" is now anachronistic and confusing, even in the US

I don't think so, n_rb. I doubt that anyone with a reasonable command of US English would see a form with the choices of Caucasian, black, Asian, etc and be confused. In any case, MTL is speaking of some time in the past, perhaps prior to 1990, and of course he isn't claiming that he didn't understand what the term meant in the dialect that he knew was used in that form.

If I understand him correctly, he's saying that he didn't think that it ought to mean that, because that's not the meaning it has in his dialect, the only proper one almost by definition, and he didn't want to lower himself by using some lesser dialect. I could be misunderstanding him.

By the way, it occurs to me that MTL said the form he filled out had the term "Oriental", and that that's what the embassy employee recommended. I doubt that that term has ever been used on US government forms, at least in living memory. Again, I could be wrong.

As posted by #1:
The concept of a Caucasian race or Varietas Caucasia was developed around 1800 by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German scientist and classical anthropologist. Blumenbach named it after the peoples of the Caucasus (from the Caucasus region), whom he considered to be the archetype for the grouping. He based his classification of the Caucasian race primarily on craniology.

i think it is factually incorrect because there can't be an archetype for the variety of ethnicities that includes Tamils, Berbers, Swedes and Italians. The idea that there is an original 'race' out of which others have grown is long since outdated. On top of that, the term has a root in racist thinking. People may be using it without being aware of its original meaning but I am aware of its origin and I think it is time we got rid of terms that are rooted in the racist pseudo-science of the late 19th and early 20th century.

On top of that it IS confusing, as #37 points out.

I took part in an exchange between an NGO in Vermont and several academics from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Guests from those countries were supposed to stay with American host families (including ours) and we attended several briefing sessions beforehand. The US organizers must have felt the acute potential for confusion and referred to the area where the guests came from as 'Eurasia' and their inhabitants as 'Eurasians'. Clearly this was because they wanted to avoid using 'Caucasus' and 'Caucasians'. In my mind, this only enhanced the confusion, as there are other agreed definitions for both Eurasia and Eurasians and none of these are synonymous with Caucasus and Caucasian.

It has pretty much fallen out of everyday speech, n_rb. My secretary is probably the only guy I've heard use it in twenty years or more. I'm not even sure it's still used on forms very much.