this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
798 points (97.5% liked)
People Twitter
8514 readers
2113 users here now
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
- Mark NSFW content.
- No doxxing people.
- Must be a pic of the tweet or similar. No direct links to the tweet.
- No bullying or international politcs
- Be excellent to each other.
- Provide an archived link to the tweet (or similar) being shown if it's a major figure or a politician. Archive.is the best way.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I suspect it’s a joke based on The Office. Oe of the main characters is a Triscuit-American called Jim. There is a different character called Asian Jim. Caucasian James = white Jim.
But "Caucasian" is now recognized as a racist term (in that using it produces racism), kind of because it's a science-y word for "white", an unscientific concept.
Who recognizes "Caucasian" as a racist term? I'm asking this in all seriousness as I have never heard this before
Caucasian should mean "from the Caucus mountain region"
Which leads in perfectly to another joke from the US version of The Office where Dwight claims that Kelly, of Indian heritage, doesn’t qualify for their parent company Sabre’s “Print in All Colours” initiative because Indian people are technically Caucasian
Reminds me of that old chestnut of the white guy from South Africa who, after emigrating to the US, got into trouble for stating he was "African-American."
I had a friend who moved to the US from South Africa as a kid. When "African-American" started being used she was very confused. She would ask "How is X 'African' when he was born in New Jersey and only speaks English while I was born in South Africa and speak Swahili and Xhosa is not African just because Im white?" It was then I started realizing how racist some of the attempts to counter racism ended up being.
As a science term for "white", see "Too Many Scientists Still Say Caucasian" in Scientific American, also "Abandoning the word Caucasian" in the Journal of Genetic Counciling and "The Ongoing Incorrect Use of Caucasian in Medical Research" in the journal Health Equity. There are a bunch of scientists who think this.
I think if you are actually describing something or someone from the actual Caucasus mountain region, it would be correct, but people might thing you meant "white" so even then you might be better off with "from the Caucasus Mountains".
Thank you for this.
My understanding was “caucasian” applied to all groups that migrated through the caucuses and that’s why Persians and other non-European nations were included. To be clear Im in my 50s so the above could just be the result of institutionalized racism that never got addressed due to not having much in an education in sociology/ anthropology
*Caucasus
Please don't just pull shit out of your ass and present it in public...
I didn't make this up.
No.
Yes?
I suppose this doesn't exactly suggest it's deprecated in Twitter handles. But if the scientists have given up on it, why should normal people keep it?
No.
A couple researchers suggesting a literary review of the specific usage of a word and how it is used in specific contexts within scientific literature is a far cry from the idea that scientists in general are claiming that the word caucasian is a generally racist word.
I don't know that scientists in general (from chemists to seismologists) know it, but the people who study what scientists ought to call groups of people seem to have reached consensus.
No, read the fucking link you provided, that is not at all what it’s saying.
Oh I see, maybe this is saying more that people should abandon the term, not that they have already abandoned the term. I might be filling in the bit where people actually notice that they should indeed abandon the term and do so, which might not actually be happening.
If you look at this article for example I think it supports your view: people often in practice continue using the term even though it has been discovered by some experts to be incorrect. That's not what a broad consensus in science and medicine overall would look like.
I guess I think the people providing evidence that the term should not be used are in fact correct. I haven't seen a lot of support for the opposing view, so I think there is consensus among the people who professionally consider questions of terminology around race and ethnicity. None of the articles citing the first article I posted seem to be along the lines of "no we should keep it actually". So my view is that the field consists of people who know better and people who haven't bothered to think about the question, and the people who know better are probably right.