Still in the first 100 days of the second Trump presidency, we have seen a lot of changes, particularly around data availability and collection of data related to diversity.
As my colleague Michael Harnett wrote about before, lack of collection of data on a population can severely hamper our ability to understand the population in question. Many are worried that changes in the federal administration will lead to reduced collection of demographic data that will then make it harder for researchers and analysts to understand demographic trends among the public.
The Biden Administration had even improved some demographic collection practice for the Census Bureau, greenlighting “Middle Eastern or North African” and “Latino” as options for future censuses. This was a change a decade in the making.
But just as the federal government was beginning to modernize demographic categories—finally recognizing groups like Middle Eastern or North African as a distinct racial identity and using a phrase like “Latino” that is more commonly used among people from that racial group—current decisions by the new federal administration could potentially unravel the existing demographic collection infrastructure. Instead of refining how surveyors collect data to better understand the demographics of the U.S. population, they are now facing a chance that demographic data could be obscured or never collected in the first place.
This threat isn’t just about which categories appear on a form. It’s about how researchers, analysts, policymakers, and the public think about identity, and whether the categories we do reflect the reality of identity in the United States today or reinforce other incorrect classifications.
One example of a term that lingers in public discourse is “Caucasian.” In 1977, the Carter Administration’s Office of Management and Budget Directive 15 established “white” as the official racial designation throughout the federal government, endorsing it over its rival “Caucasian.” It is a sign of our times that this original directive is not available for public viewing as of February 2025, though it was publicly available as recently as December 2024 according to the Wayback Machine.
Even though the federal government has endorsed the use of “white” over “Caucasian” for nearly half a century now, the word still appears in legal documents, medical research, and everyday conversation. Where did this phrase come from and why is it still so persistent today despite falling out of official favor five decades ago?
The term “Caucasian” used to refer to how we refer to people who are ethnically “white” dates back to the late 18th century, when a German historical school with a special focus on race was trying out different classifications of human races. An especially popular classification was to split humanity into three major races: “Caucasian”, “Mongoloid,” and “Negroid”, roughly corresponding to what our Census Bureau would term “White,” “Asian or Pacific Islander,” and “Black.”
But why “Caucasian?” The term comes from an association with the Caucasus Mountains, a range that defines the northern borders of modern-day Georgia and Azerbaijan with Russia between the Black and Caspian seas. What does this area have to do with white people?
This goes back to a historical theory that is very different from the present-day consensus. The prevalent view among European scholars in the 19th century was that the human species began in the Caucasus Mountains. This was based partially on Caucasus being the purported landing place for Noah’s Ark.
“Caucasian” was first applied to a broad swath of humanity by German historian Christoph Meiners in his 1785 book The Outline of History of Mankind. In this book, Meiners grouped Europeans, Middle Easterners, North Africans, and Indians into one racial group, arguing its main characteristic was beauty driven by virtue. In his words, “the more intelligent and noble people are by nature, the more adaptable, sensitive, delicate, and soft is their body.”
Ten years later, German Anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach popularized the term in his studies of human craniology. He categorized human “varieties” into five categories: Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian, and American. Despite creating these categories, he acknowledged the capriciousness of this approach to categorization, saying “All national differences in the form and colour of the human body...run so insensibly, by so many shades and transitions one into the other, that it is impossible to separate them by any but very arbitrary limits.”
While many of Blumenbach’s views would not be seen as correct today, he was considered an anti-racist in his time, opposed slavery as a practice when it was still in legally sanctioned in nearly every country across the world, and argued against common claims of his day that certain races were imbued with an “inherent savagery.”
Despite these views, Blumenbach made the phrase “Caucasian” popular and much of his work was later co-opted by scientific racists who told a very different story about mankind than Blumenbach did.
Meanwhile, in the new United States of America, the terminology of “white” was a big part of the early law of the country. The designation was one of the original categories of self-reporting in the decennial census of the fledgling nation. Naturalization was limited in the Naturalization Act of 1790 to “free white persons.”
The term “Caucasian” became a lynchpin for citizenship debate in the 1920s, with immigrants from Japan and India losing Supreme Court cases where they tried to argue they should be considered “caucasian” under current immigration law. The U.S. draft for World War II often designated enlistees as “Caucasian” and legal briefs and arguments around the case of Brown v. Board of Education in the 1960s often used the phrase. Even the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, formed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, used the phrase “Caucasian” in demographic reporting.
It was not until the Carter Administration designated “white” as the preferred term in 1977 that the federal government officially moved away from the phrase “Caucasian.” But we still see it in use today, especially in medical research contexts.
I actually remember first hearing the phrase, and I remember the allure of it. Today’s understanding of race is so messy: a social phenomenon roughly associated with phenotypic characteristics. There was a certain allure to this new word I heard: this feeling of scientific precision that race doesn’t give us. I don’t think I am alone in feeling this draw.
But it’s a falsehood. “Caucasian” is a phrase that misplaces current social phenomena in an 18th Century German story about a sparsely-populated mountain range in central Asia. Correct understanding of social phenomena means understanding the true roots of these categories. So just use “white.” It’s easier, everyone knows what you’re talking about, and you’re not rooting your language in a veneer of scientific accuracy that is built on a shaky pseudoscientific foundation.