The Boston Marathon bombings, or whatever historical name we decide to apply to the event, showed Americans at their best and their not-quite-worst. Despite the heroism and selflessness displayed by people at the event, other people, all of whom did not experience the incident directly, rushed in to cast a wide net of blame, mostly directed at Muslims. The most interesting take on this, to me, was David Sirota’s April 16 piece in Salon, “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.” The context of his piece, to me, was not so much an actual wish to implicate white, right-leaning Americans in the bombing, but rather an observation of how we deal differently with crimes committed by white people and non-white people:

[I]n the context of terrorist attacks,…white non-Islamic terrorists are typically portrayed not as representative of whole groups or ideologies, but as “lone wolf” threats to be dealt with as isolated law enforcement matters. Meanwhile, non-white or developing-world terrorism suspects are often reflexively portrayed as representative of larger conspiracies, ideologies and religions that must be dealt with as systemic threats — the kind potentially requiring everything from law enforcement action to military operations to civil liberties legislation to foreign policy shifts.

In other words, if the bomber(s) turned out to be white people, the aftermath would likely consist mostly of criminal investigations and prosecutions, rather than a nationwide panic reaction like the one that birthed the PATRIOT Act and the war in Iraq. Of course, some people are determined to read the worst possible interpretation into such a statement, and Sirota unfortunately used words that others could shape into “ghoulish race-baiting.” I do not see much point in trying to engage with those who use terms like “race-baiting,” because I doubt anything I say would have an effect (especially considering Sirota’s clarifications and further thoughts on the matter here, here, and here.).

The revelation that the bombing suspects (remember, there has been no conviction, so they remain alleged bombers) are originally from Chechnya has thrown a wrench into everyone’s reflexive discussion of race and ethnicity as it pertains to terrorism and national security. Yes, they’re Muslims, but they’re also literally Caucasian. This has led to some interesting (I use that term broadly) discussion of what exactly it means to be “white” and whether or not we can continue to profile Muslims as a group in any sort of efficient manner. It might not have stopped the invective of some on the right towards immigrants in general and the basic rights of criminal suspects, but it has at least brought a strange sort of nuance to the discussion among some. At the very least, it gives Americans an opportunity to learn something about an unfamiliar part of the world.

This raised two questions for me: (1) is being a Caucasian from the Caucasus at all the same as being Caucasian in the sense of being white? and (2) does it make even a smidgen of difference when it comes to questions of national security or anti-terrorism?

The answers, for those who want to stop reading at the end of this sentence are: (1) no, but it’s interesting and worthy of further exploration; and (2) no, but given the amount of right-wing terrorism associated with white nationalism in this country, along with anti-Muslim rhetoric, people on the right have no business acting offended all of a sudden.

I don’t feel any need to delve into question (2) any further, because life is short, but question (1) is interesting to me, either as a history major or as a nerd. “Caucasian” and “white” really should not mean the same thing, as Razib Khan noted on the Discover blog more than two years ago, quoting another blogger who addressed this issue about six years ago:

Caucasian, literally, refers to people native to the Caucasus, but it has become interchangeable with any number of ‘White’ populations, most of wh1om trace their ancestry to Europe. One gets the feeling that the term ‘White’ fell out of favor and was replaced by ‘Caucasian’ much like ‘Black’ was replaced by ‘African-American’. But the roots of such terminology are a bit disturbing; it was postulated that the natives of the Caucasus exhibited the idealized physical appearance so the Caucasus were believed to be the birthplace of mankind. The logic behind this idea — the assumption that Whites exhibit the best physical appearance — is implicitly racist. Additionally, we now know our species first appeared in Africa, so the biology isn’t any good either. The connotations of the term Caucasian along with the geographical absurdity of using that term to describe all Europeans or Whites are the two main reasons we should abandon the term. [Emphasis in original.]

So from the standpoint of common usage, the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing are not “white,” but I maintain that the fixation on this from people on the left has more to do with the way many on the right become fixated on race or ethnicity when a suspect is not white, and are now strangely silent, rather than an actual desire to blame white people. It could just be that we do not know enough about Chechnyans to stereotype them effectively.

Based on my extensive research (i.e. I read a couple of Wikipedia articles late last night), the term “Caucasian” as applied to European white people originated with the personal preferences of an 18th-century German philosopher, who apparently had a thing for the Georgians:

The term “Caucasian race” was coined by the German philosopher Christoph Meiners in his The Outline of History of Mankind (1785). In Meiners’ unique racial classification, there were only two racial divisions (Rassen): Caucasians and Mongolians. These terms were used as a collective representation of individuals he personally regarded as either good looking or less attractive, based solely on facial appearance. For example, he considered Germans and Tatars more attractive, and thus Caucasian, while he found Jews and Africans less attractive, and thus Mongolian. [Internal citations omitted.]

The concept itself did not gain much support in what then passed for the scientific community, but the name seems to have stuck. About ten years later, another German philosopher adopted Meiners’ terminology based on his observations of similarities between the craniology of people from the Caucasus and people from Europe. That is at least slightly more “scientific” than choosing the name of the best-looking people. It is somewhat-less-racist than basing a classification of humanity based on a subjective belief that Europeans and Caucasians are more attractive than Africans or Asian, but only slightly less racist.

This lead to much speculation about how to differentiate between European “Caucasians” and people of other races, who were assigned names most people are too polite to say anymore. The lengthy debate is interesting, sort of, but did I mention it was lengthy?

The actual Caucasus is quite fascinating, and probably completely alien to most Americans, who are accustomed to a relatively homogenous culture spread across an entire continent. The Caucasus region is home to about fifty ethnic groups speaking languages from three separate language families: Caucasian, Indo-European, and Turkic. Only one Caucasian-language-speaking people have their own indisputably-independent nation, the Georgians, as the Abkhazians still do not have diplomatic recognition from much of anybody else in the world. Armenian is an Indo-European language, and Azeri (spoken in Azerbaijan) is Turkic. The rest of the peoples of the Caucasus either live within one of these three countries or within one of the many republics and other divisions of the Russian Federation. This includes Chechnya and Dagestan, both of which have been in the news recently. Another group, known as the Adyghe or Circassian people, have a huge diaspora population living in Turkey, the Middle East, and elsewhere, but almost no one in their ancestral region.

I’m not sure of the total land area of the Caucasus region, but I’m pretty sure it’s smaller than Texas. At just under 6,700 square miles, the Chechen Republic, part of Russia, is slightly larger than Brewster County, Texas. Just ponder that for a while.

It’s fascinating, but then it’s mostly only fascinating to me because I sit ensconced in comfort and privilege in Texas, which hasn’t really seen warfare since the 1830’s. It’s also not remotely relevant to what happened in Boston.

Photo credits: Ras.sham (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons; (Kirk Stauffer) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons; Temo blumgardt (Temo blumgardt) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.