Ontology and scientific explanation pluralism as an a priori condition of psychology (2)

Discussing current theories of the origin of humanity in Africa, the original skin colour, and the issue of degeneration, it is argued that the end of the Caucasian term in the disciplin

Psychology Without Caucasians

Thomas Teo York University

Based on historical, theoretical, and empirical reflections, it is argued that the Caucasian theory and term are obsolete in psychology Discussing the historical origins of the term in Johann Friedrich Blumen-bach’s writings and the key elements to his theory, it is shown that his theory has found no corroboration and has been falsified through scientific research Discussing current theories of the origin of humanity

in Africa, the original skin colour, and the issue of degeneration, it is argued that the end of the Caucasian term in the discipline of psychology is not about political but scientific correctness The reception of the

term in different cultural contexts is reconstructed The idea that Caucasian refers to a specific group and

has no theoretical but purely descriptive meanings is rejected, as is the idea that a common sense term

is a justification for scientific concepts Suggestions for a more adequate terminology when referring to human groups are provided

Keywords:race, racism, conceptual clarity, history, theory

In this article, I challenge the problematic usage of the term

Caucasian in psychology I present the original theory underlying

this term; that is, the assumptions and elements of the Caucasian

theory, all of which are shown to be false or misleading I also

address the continued usage of the term in North America and the

reasons for the term’s success Although there have been

publica-tions pointing to the racialized history of the theory and concept

of a Caucasian (Augstein, 1999; Baum, 2006; Bhopal, 2007;

Hannaford, 1996), psychologists still use this term in their

empir-ical studies A general PsycINFO search of the term Caucasian

yielded over 5,000 results for works that used the term in their

abstracts (and nearly 500 works were listed as using the term in

their abstracts in 2007) A closer look reveals that the term is

mostly used to describe participants

But using a term that refers to a cultural-historical construction

that has no scientific basis is problematic The precision of terms

is important in psychology and, from a methodological point of

view, it is crucial to move away from falsified ideas The argument

that everyone knows what the term Caucasian means should be

challenged, too, because semantics in North America (in Europe

the term fell out of fashion, see below) does not make for a

scientific concept On the contrary, the task of science includes

challenging false beliefs Early empiricists such as Francis Bacon

(1561–1626) were aware of the problem of precision in language

Indeed, the term Caucasian is a prime example for Bacon’s (1965)

Idols of the Marketplace(errors in human knowledge stemming from

the use of language and leading to confusion in human thinking)

Following Bacon it is also argued that the term Caucasian hinders an

understanding of human diversity

If one were to compare this situation (use of the term Caucasian)

to chemistry, then it would mean that chemists still operate with

the term phlogiston to explain the flammability of objects Yet, it

would now be considered scientifically incorrect to use phlogiston theory in chemistry journals Of course, this argument has been made by Montagu (1964), who suggested that “race is the phlo-giston of our time” (p xii) and that it would have the same historical fate However, the present article is not targeting the concept of race, recognising that there is no final consensus on the concept, despite the American Anthropological Association’s

(1998) Statement on Race.1 Instead of predicting the future of

race, the present argument focuses on the Caucasian idea, for which there is a general agreement that it is an outdated and falsified theory without scientific credibility

Psychologists no longer use term Aryan or Nordic to designate

human populations These terms, which have the same scientific status as the term Caucasian, have disappeared for scientific and political reasons It should be pointed out that the following

arguments are not about, as it is sometimes called, political

cor-rectness(a term that requires an academic analysis itself); rather,

they are about scientific incorrectness For the following discus-sion it is important to differentiate two issues: (a) the Caucasian

theory, which operates with certain assumptions, and (b) the

Caucasian term Using the term does not necessarily entail an understanding or even awareness of the Caucasian theory How-ever, it is argued that the Caucasian term cannot be separated from

1This statement suggests that human populations are not biologically

distinct groups; that most physical variation lies within traditionally

de-fined racial groups; that there is greater variation within racial groups than between them; that humanity is a single species; that attempts to divide human biological populations into races are arbitrary; that race is more of

a sociocultural than a physical idea that has its roots in colonialism; that the ideology and a worldview of race functioned as a rationalization of prac-tices against conquered groups; that race is a myth about the diversity of humanity; that beliefs about different racial capabilities and behaviors are unscientific folk beliefs; and that inequalities between so-called racial groups are the product of political-economic circumstances but not a consequence of biology

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Thomas

Teo, Department of Psychology, History and Theory of Psychology, York

University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada E-mail:

tteo@yorku.ca

91

the Caucasian theory, at least not in an academic discipline, and

that the common sense (better: common understanding) usage of

the term in a particular context does not legitimize it

Historical Origin of the Caucasian Theory

The idea of a Caucasian goes back to Christoph Meiners (1747–

1810) (see Baum, 2006) However, the idea received its influential

theorization in the writings of the German physician, natural

scientist, and physiologist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–

1840), who suggested a five-race schema (varieties of human

beings) in the third edition of his 1795 book On the Natural

Variety of Humankind: Varietas Caucasia, Varietas Mongolica,

Varietas Aethiopica, Varietas Americana, Varietas Malaica

(Blumenbach, 1795, pp 285–296, 303–322; or ¶ 81, 82, 85– 89).2

He rejected Pieter Camper’s (1722–1789) idea that the

measure-ment of facial angles (deviations from a main line) could explain

the differences that he found in his own skull collection (¶ 61)

Instead he suggested arranging the skulls without the lower jaw on

a horizontal line on a table and studying them from the rear view

(¶ 61) This approach would allow for the identification of those

parts of the skulls that form national character: the direction of the

mandibula (jawbone) and the ossium jugalium (zygoma), the width

of the calvaria (skullcap), the flatness or elevation of the frontal

bone, and so on

Based on this method he argued that the middle skull in this

arrangement, which for Blumenbach had the most symmetry and

beauty, belonged to a Georgian woman Her Caucasian skull was

described as beautiful, balanced, gently rounded with moderately

leveled forehead, and narrow cheekbones (Blumenbach, 1798)

The skull on her left was for Blumenbach a deviation from a

balanced form and belonged to an Ethiopian (African) woman Her

skull was elongated and appeared beak-shaped The skull on her

right also deviated from perfect balance and belonged to a

Mongolian (Caribou Tungusian) The skull of this individual was

extended on the sides and appeared flattened According to

Blumenbach, differences were not confined to skull shape but

could also be observed regarding the shape of teeth, ears, breasts,

genitals, limbs, feet, hands, and stature

The Caucasian race received this name because of the mountain

range Caucasus; because its neighbouring countries are inhabited

“by the most beautiful human stock” (Blumenbach, 1798, p 213),

the Georgian people; and because the “fatherland of the first

human beings” can be found in this area (¶ 85) He emphasised that

this variety had the most beautiful skull, a form that represented

the middle between two extremes The white colour of the

Caucasians was also the primordial “real colour of humanity” (p

214), because—according to Blumenbach—it was easier to

ex-plain the degeneration from white to black than from black to

white The concept of beauty was not only justified by looking at

features of the skull but also included aesthetic differences

be-tween national facial features (¶ 56)

The Caucasian variety deserved in Blumenbach’s system the

first position because he considers it the original (primordial) race

(¶ 81) The Caucasian race was for Blumenbach the balanced race,

with Mongolians and Ethiopians at the other ends, and Americans

and Malays in between Whereas Americans were constructed as

the middle between Caucasian and Mongolian varieties, Malays

were considered to be the middle between Caucasian and

Ethiopian varieties The Caucasians were of white colour, with red cheeks, black or brown hair, and round head (¶ 82) All Europeans with the exception of Lapps and Finns, western Asians unto the river Ob, the Caspian Sea, and the river Ganges, as well as the inhabitants of Northern Africa, belonged to the Caucasian variety Although Blumenbach (1798) discussed five human varieties,

he emphasised the unity of humankind (p 203) The notion of unity as well as the location of the Caucasus could be accommo-dated to the accounts of the Bible However, this should not obscure the fact that he cemented an aesthetic hierarchy An assessment of the whole program suggests that his Caucasian theory consists of four elements: (a) Caucasians are the most beautiful people; (b) the original cradle of humanity is close to or within the Caucasus; (c) Caucasians are the original race with

other races being degenerations; and (d) white was the original

colour of humanity In terms of the (a) aesthetical component in his theory it should be noted that Blumenbach derived his arguments

for the qualities of the Caucasian from a female skull This should

not be understood as an emancipatory attempt to move away from

male-dominated constructions of the nature of man Rather it becomes more understandable if one realises that he used aesthetic

criteria, cultural-historically associated with women, for establish-ing his rankestablish-ings

Bindman (2002) points out that Blumenbach (and Camper) can

be understood as examples of where “measurability is inextri-cably tied to aesthetics” (p 190) and that Blumenbach used beauty

as a criterion to distinguish animals from humans If one applies that criterion to human varieties, if one assumes (problematically,

of course) that humanity was originally beautiful and white, if one accepts the concept of degeneration, then indeed, one must con-clude that degenerated varieties would be less beautiful Banton (1987) pointed out correctly that degeneration did not mean dete-rioration (see p 6) for Blumenbach Nevertheless, his system cemented the idea of white aesthetic superiority in the description

of a Caucasian Clearly, from a current scientific point of view, aesthetic criteria can hardly be used to establish the origin of the human species and hierarchies Thus, the first element in his theory should be considered, from a theoretical (and not historical) per-spective, as the basis of an unsound methodological approach Before I address (b) to (d), it is necessary to discuss different developments regarding the Caucasian theory in North America and in Europe

The Cultural-Political Context of the Caucasian Theory

To address the value of the Caucasian theory, it is not only impor-tant to understand its theoretical shortcomings but also its relevance Indeed, a number of eminent scientists and race theorists have taken

up Blumenbach’s Caucasian theory and it has become an important category within many racialized systems and in scientific racism For example, in France, Georges Cuvier (1769 –1832) distinguished the three races of Caucasians, Mongolians, and Ethiopians in his famous

Animal Kingdom(Cuvier, 1817) He repeated Blumenbach’s aes-thetic and hierarchical argument: “La caucasique, a` laquelle nous appartenons se distingue par la beaute´ de l’ovale que forme sa teˆte;

2The Latin original and the German translation are used in this article For comparative purposes, Blumenbach’s paragraphs are listed

et c’est elle qui a donne´ naissance aux peuples les plus civilise´s”

(p 94) In the United States, Samuel George Morton (1799 –1851)

attributed to the Caucasian race the highest intellectual abilities

(see Gould, 1996)

In Europe the Caucasian theory took a different path Racial

thinking was not abandoned but replaced by the Aryan theory The

Aryan theory had a linguistic and a more influential racial branch

Canon Isaac Taylor (1829 –1901) argued, from a linguistic

per-spective, that the small clan of Aryans gave rise to the Sanskrit,

Greek, and German languages He attributed the end of the

“Caucasian hypothesis” (Taylor, 1888, p 239) to Sayce’s

Princi-ples of Philologyfrom 1874 However, it is difficult to separate the

linguistic and the racial arguments (see also Barkan, 1992) In

Germany, the philologist Friedrich Max Mu¨ller (1823–1900)

em-phasised that his concept of an Aryan race refers to people who

speak an Aryan language (Mu¨ller, 1892) Yet, he also argued that

the Aryan race was the “race to which we and all the greatest

nations of the world—the Hindus, the Persians, the Greeks and

Romans, the Slaves [sic], the Celts, and last, not least, the Teutons,

belong” (Mu¨ller, 1883, p 137) In England, the ethnologist James

Cowles Prichard (1786 –1848) discussed Blumenbach’s

Caucasians, but he was skeptical of considering Mount Caucasus

as the birthplace of the Europeans (Prichard, 1845, p 133)

Amongst other distinctions, his race divisions included Semitic and

Arianraces, to which he dedicated full sections in his book

The Aryan theory was embraced and developed by

Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau (1816 –1882), a French social thinker and

diplomat, who cemented the idea of the superiority of the Aryan

race (Gobineau, 1854/1966) The British political thinker Houston

Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), praising German culture and

naturalized in Germany during WWI, had a significant impact on

Adolf Hitler’s (1889 –1945) Aryan theory In his book on Arische

Weltanschauung, Chamberlain (1905/1938) identified an

impor-tant feature of Aryan thinking: racial purity He praised classical

Indian thinking as being void of the Semitic spirit, therefore pure

(see p 38), and constructed the Semite as lacking true creativity,

an argument that Hitler (1927/1999) would repeat

Augstein (1999) argued that “the rise of Aryanism helped to

prevent the Caucasian hypothesis from gaining ground in Europe”

(p 73) But what were the sociohistorical reasons for that shift?

European powers at the time did not rule a significant number of

visible minorities within Europe—with one important exception:

the more (traditional clothing) or less visible Jews and their long

history of discrimination (see Hilberg, 1985) In addition, the

ongoing wars and struggles between European powers made

dif-ferences within that continent more relevant The Aryan theory,

and later the Nordic theory, reflected these concerns For Grant

(1916) the Nordic race was “the Homo europaeus, the White man

par excellence” (p 150) He believed that the Alpine,

Mediterra-nean, and Nordic races differ significantly in intellectual, moral,

and physical characteristics, with Nordics being rulers, organisers,

and aristocrats Nordicism emphasised the superiority of the

Teu-tons within Europe (see Jackson & Weidmann, 2004)

Although Germany in the second half of the 19th century had

imperial ambitions and its thinkers published on the African soul

(Grosse, 1997), the Aryan theory became the most relevant theory

in problematizing the Jewish minority within Germany, and the

Nordic theory became significant in justifying aggression within

Europe, for example, in the rhetoric and practises against the Slavs

For Hitler (1927/1999), the “mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew” (p 300), which was his main concern He also rejected the Germanization of Slavs in Austria and called it a blessing that Germany still possessed “great unmixed stocks of Nordic-Germanic people” that he considered “the most precious treasure for our future” (p 397)

With the end of state-sponsored Nazi ideology in 1945 academic attempts to justify and to develop the Aryan or Nordic theory have disappeared No reasonable psychologist in Europe would consider

a comparison between Aryans and Blacks, or Nordic-Germanics and Alpines although, so the argument could go, “we all know

what an Aryan is.” The concept of the Aryan has no scientific credence as well as no political relevance In Europe, especially in the German-speaking context, academics do not use the term Caucasian to designate Europeans as it was deconstructed already

in the 19th century and there existed no political need to reintro-duce the concept after 1945.3Indeed, in many European languages the term Caucasian refers now to the peoples from Caucasus, and ironically, as Baum (2006) points out, Caucasians themselves, on the background of the end of the Soviet Union and the wars of independence in the Caucasian regions, have been racialized into being “black.”

Why has the term survived in North America? Given the history

of the United States, which included slavery, the justification for exploitation, and the lack of civil rights for African Americans (“separate but equal”), the major conflict regarding minorities

concerned the Black population Even in the context of European

immigration, when the idea of Nordic superiority played a role, when Aryan ideas were invoked, and when individuals like the eugenicists Madison Grant (1916) and Davenport (1917) shaped some of the scientific-racist discussions, the deep underlying

con-cern was the role of the Black minority in the United States In

addition, due to the assimilation to the English language and the lack of discriminatory criteria for identifying differences between European races, all Europeans could be conceived as Caucasians This sociohistorical reality helped sustain the concept of a Caucasian in the public sphere of North America after WWII (see also Baum, 2006) The idea of a Caucasian race, more or less combined with the idea of Caucasian superiority, has become common sense in North America— but common sense cannot function as a scientific justification for unscientific concepts and theories

The Cradle of Humanity

Blumenbach believed that the original cradle of humanity is close to or within the Caucasus, that Caucasians were the original

race with other races being degenerations, and that white was the

original colour of humanity What is the status of these assump-tions? There is overwhelming evidence that the original location of humanity was in Africa or as Manica, Amos, Balloux, and Hanihara (2007) phrased it: “all studies point to Africa as the putative cradle of modern humans” (p 346) The scientific discor-dance lies somewhere else; it focuses on the time line when human ancestors moved out of Africa Dawkins (2004) emphasises that

3I did not find a single entry in PSYNDEX using the German term,

1977–2008; the term seems to be used sporadically in medical journals

“everybody agrees that our ancestors are from Africa if you go

back far enough” (pp 56 –57) Yet, he also distinguishes between

a “Young Out of Africa” and an “Old Out of Africa” theory (p

57) The former suggests that all living human beings came out of

Africa less than a hundred thousand years ago and replaced

exist-ing populations that emerged from Africa in previous waves,

hundreds of thousands years earlier For Wells (2002) all our

ancestors lived in Africa about 50,000 years ago On the other

hand, Templeton (2005) argues that the first wave of an

out-of-Africa expansion happened 1.9 million years ago, the second one

700,000 years ago, and the third one around 100,000 years ago

The migrants from the last wave were mating with populations

from earlier waves

Despite these different scenarios it is clear that Africa as a

location played the central role as the cradle of humanity and the

Caucasus appears in no current accounts as the location of human

origin There has been some emphasis on Central Asia as being an

important site for a genetic marker (M9) that can be found in most

European and Asian males (Wells, 2006), but even the most

generous interpretation cannot allow this location to be

reinter-preted to overlap with the Caucasus Indeed, Central Asia as an

important geographic centre for Eurasian lineages could more

easily be adapted to the Aryan theory As Barbujani and Goldstein

(2004) phrased it regarding the peoples from Europe: “Modern

Europeans are African immigrants” (p 119).4Clearly, based on

archeological, linguistic, anthropological, and genetic evidence,

the second element of Blumenbach’s theory is empirically not

corroborated

It should be mentioned that the idea of three, four, or five basic

races is questionable, and indeed, one could argue that this

cate-gorization is unsupported This holds true for morphological but

even more importantly for genetic comparisons Lewontin’s

(1995) pioneering research showing that there is more variation

within than between traditionally defined races, and recent

popu-lations studies (Wells, 2002, 2006), corroborate the notion that

traditional race distinctions are more than problematic More

re-cently, Serre and Pa¨a¨bo (2004) have shown that major

disconti-nuities between “races” do not exist However, it is possible to

identify genetic markers than can be associated with certain

pop-ulations More specifically, researchers and commercial

enter-prises can identify the Haplogroup within which an individual

belongs based on an analysis of the Y-chromosome or the

mito-chondrial DNA (for male individuals, both may be used); but this

does not confirm in any sense the concept of a Caucasian (or

European) race

Admittedly, there is dissent regarding the success of the

decon-struction of the traditional concept of race (see interpretations

regarding the studies by Rosenberg et al., 2002), but there is no

support for the idea that Blacks degenerated from Whites Indeed,

evidence suggests that it is the other way around: Europeans have

African ancestry and in terms of colors, white could be considered

a degeneration (to use Blumenbach’s terminology) from black and

not vice versa Skin colour is usually explained by reference to

climate, natural selection, and sexual selection More specifically

a strong correlation between skin pigmentation and the intensity of

ultraviolet radiation has been shown (Norton et al., 2007) The

same researchers argue that the variation in skin colour should be

understood as adaptation to different ultraviolet radiation

condi-tions based on natural selection Analysing the specific

mecha-nism, they also argue that the lighter pigmentation of many Euro-peans and East Asians can be explained by independent genetic mutations Despite questions regarding the details of these pro-cesses, it must be concluded that sub-Saharan Africans had dark

skin and that the original human beings were not white.

However, Jablonski and Chaplin (2000) argue that the proto-hominids’ integument may have been close to that of the current chimpanzee: Under the dark hair was a white or lightly pigmented skin (see p 58) In the evolution of hairlessness a change occurred

“as the density of body hair decreased and the density of sweat glands increased, the need for protection of subepidermal tissues against the destructive effects of UV radiation, particularly UVB, also increased This protection was accomplished by an increase in melanization of the skin” (p 59) For the genus homo a “darkly pigmented integument occurred” (p 57) A sophist could argue that Blumenbach was right after all, but Blumenbach never envi-sioned the first beautiful white human beings as having a hairy ape-like appearance, as this would have offended his sense of

beauty (see above) When it concerns humans the evidence seems

clear: they were dark-skinned and that the light skin of the Euro-peans can be understood as an adaptive advantage within a par-ticular context

Comparing Blumenbach’s theory to current knowledge, re-searchers must conclude that an aesthetic justification for the superiority of the Caucasian is scientifically not feasible; that the idea of the Caucasus as the birthplace of humanity is false; that the notion that all other populations degenerated from Caucasians

is fictitious; and that the assumption that the first humans were of white skin colour is not supported We can safely conclude that the Caucasian theory is falsified and that as a consequence the concept

of a Caucasian should be labelled as unscientific Psychologists have no other choice but to abandon an outdated theory However,

as philosophers of science know from Lakatos (1970), there exist various strategies to form a protective belt around a falsified theory In the case of the Caucasian it is the idea of common sense: English-speaking North American culture assumes that the term of the Caucasian is universally accepted Yet, common sense is no instrument for scientific correctness

Caucasian as a Common Sense Term

The idea that Caucasian is a legitimate term because “everyone” uses it in North America should be challenged The common sense philosopher Thomas Reid (1710 –1796) (1764/1997) argued that intuitively accessible general truths (i.e., common sense) are part

of the constitution of all normal human beings and play an impor-tant role in obtaining knowledge of external objects and events Skeptical approaches and arguments that contradict common sense should be considered wrong He also pointed out that common sense does not depend on philosophy, or on critical theoretical reflection (as we would label it) Although Reid himself did not exactly have human taxonomic concepts in mind, it seems to be common sense in North America that the Caucasian is a real object The term’s embeddedness in English-speaking North

4Rather than stating, “you are a Caucasian” it would be more appropri-ate to stappropri-ate: “you are an African.” Indeed, we all should declare that “we are Africans.”

American culture and linguistic pragmatics makes the concept

self-evident, and individuals using the term take it for granted (see

also Danziger, 1997) Challenges to the concept are resisted

be-cause “there is nothing wrong with a word” that everyone

under-stands and uses However, I suggest siding here with Antonio

Gramsci (1891–1937), who argued that common sense is an

am-biguous and contradictory concept, and that referring to common

sense as a confirmation of truth would be “nonsense” (Gramsci,

1997, p 423) Scientific correctness cannot be obtained through

collective pragmatics

Still, it may be argued that the term does not have a theoretical

meaning but is solely a descriptor or synonym for Europeans In this

common sense and seemingly descriptive meaning the term is used by

leading genetic scientists such as Craig Venter, one of the pioneers in

mapping the human genome In a widely publicized article on

dis-closing Venter’s genomic DNA, Levy et al (2007) write (Venter was

listed as the last coauthor): “The individual whose genome is

de-scribed in this report is J Craig Venter a self-identified Caucasian

male” (p 2114) But one should not blame natural scientists who

appear to be ignorant about the history of race theory for using a

problematic concept They are in good company with the social

scientist Malik (2003) who is knowledgeable about the development

of the idea of race but who also uses the term without quotation marks

(referring to other researchers’ works) Baum, who comments on

Cavalli-Sforza’s (a pioneer of population genetics) use of the term

Caucasoidin his writings, concludes that it “reveals the degree to

which racialist notions continue to shape scientific and popular

un-derstandings of human diversity” (p 214)

The common sense argument, which is also a pragmatic argument,

suggests that “we” all know what we mean by the term Caucasian—

even if the underlying theory is wrong The first argument against this

common sense proposition is that, even if a term or concept is used in

public discourse, there is no scientific rationale to keep a falsified

concept in psychology as an academic discipline Psychologists no

longer use the concept of an elan vitale, even if one could make the

argument that people bring different “energies” to their activities

(whereby the term energy is equally problematic) If a layperson

mentions that he or she observed a beluga whale, and that the fish was

5 m long, we would correct the person by stating that whales are not

fish The person might get away with the argument that everybody

knows what is meant by using the word fish in everyday

conversa-tions, but it certainly would be unacceptable to use this scientifically

incorrect term in academic journals

The second argument against using Caucasian as a common sense

term is that this word prescribes ways of false thinking It enforces the

idea that the so-called Europeans form a large unified group when

indeed the Europeans of 1492 or any other time consisted of a variety

of populations, with different customs, languages, habits, and

mor-phological features that are all shifting The concept of a Caucasian

imposes uniformity where there is none and cements the idea that

Caucasians form a meaningful racial unit It has been argued that it is

important to keep to this notion for medical purposes I think it is fair

to argue that large categorizations of humanity provide only a rough

guide and in some instances actually prevent the examination of

specific populations that are afflicted with certain diseases As

Gold-stein and Hirschhorn (2004) phrased it: “But in the context of disease

and drug response, geographic ancestry is only a proxy for what we

really want to know, which is the set of risk factors (and response

predictors) carried by an individual” (p 1244)

A classic example of how thinking in traditional race groups is misleading is sickle cell anemia Once considered a racial disease, this description does not do justice to empirical reality The sickle cell

allele not only occurs amongst Blacks but also amongst individuals of

the Western Mediterranean, in India, and in parts of the Middle East The illness does not coincide with race but with the habitat of the malaria parasite Resistance against the malaria parasite was a selec-tive benefit (see Perry, 2007) As a consequence, Lewontin (2006) emphasises that it is more important to look at specific ancestry rather than traditional race or group identities He uses the example of thalassemia, an inherited blood disease, which can be found in high frequencies in individuals in certain parts of the Mediterranean, Ara-bia, and southeast Asia, with the highest frequency found in Nepal Because the disease is rare in most of Asia, traditional race categories such as “Asians,” according to Lewontin, would result in a failure to test for the disease Ioannidis, Ntzani, and Trikalinos (2004) conclude, based on their analyses of large-scale databases, that: “Literature claims for ‘racial’ differences in genetic risks should be scrutinized cautiously Some of them may be spurious interpretations of the data The available evidence is compatible with the hypothesis that genetic effects are usually consistent across human populations” (p 1316) Thusly, the term Caucasian prevents a look at specific populations (which themselves are only proxies), and more importantly, the term obfuscates the study of medical concerns at the individual level

The third argument against a common sense term in psychology

is based on developments regarding the internationalization of psychology By internationalization, I do not mean the distribution

of North American psychology to the rest of the world, but rather

a move away from a centralized American to a genuine global psychology This international psychology involves a process of assimilation, by which North American psychology incorporates non-Western concepts into the discipline, but more importantly, it involves a process of accommodation, by which the very nature of American psychology changes based on ideas from around the world (see Brock, 2006) Internationalization in the context of the Caucasian concept involves moving away from a tradition that gives primacy to the common sense notions of one cultural group American psychology could attempt to convince the rest of the psychological world to use this very North American term, but it seems unlikely, based on the evidence, that the Caucasian term will receive international acceptance

Conclusions and Implications

The term Caucasian is unscientific from a historical, cultural,

and biological point of view.5The concept of a Caucasian is not only unscientific but perpetuates a division that goes back to the 18th century and cements thinking in large biological groups There is no reason, even based on common sense arguments, why

5The title of this article, Psychology Without Caucasians, is an allusion

to Friedrich Albert Lange’s (1877/1950) proclaimed a psychology without

a soulas the only promising research strategy in the discipline Beginning with Lange, and throughout the twentieth century, a consensus was reached

in psychology’s mainstream such that concepts that could not be observed,

or empirically validated, or logically/philosophically analyzed—thus, con-cepts that were metaphysical in nature—should not be used in a discipline with a scientific self-understanding Consequently, the concept of a soul was removed from the discipline’s research programs

psychology as a discipline should lessen the scientific status of its

studies by using terms from a falsified theory The usage of the

term Caucasian is also an example of what has been labelled the

hermeneutic deficit of psychology (Teo, 2008): Experimental

de-signs, operationalized variables, and data do not automatically

make a scientific study The term scientific involves operating with

concepts that do justice to the status of knowledge in the social and

natural sciences

One could argue that if there were no Caucasians, the term

White or Black would also be obsolete I suggest that the

pragmat-ics of the term Caucasian invokes an understanding of the term as

a quasi-natural category, with a scientific history, whereas the

pragmatics of the term White could imply that the term is used as

a sociopolitical and not a biological category Indeed, Whiteness

Studies emphasise the social construction of Whiteness (e.g.,

Cooks, & Simpson, 2007) and Whiteness becomes a sociopolitical

term referring to people who are perceived as being white and

therefore have certain privileges qua being white This definition

includes the idea that the perception of whiteness may change

according to cultural contexts The one-drop rule (the idea that one

“drop of black blood” makes one black) in the United Sates differs

from race classifications and discussions in Brazil (see Bailey &

Telles, 2006) Mills (1997) went even further and argued that

“Whiteness is not really a colour at all, but a set of power

relations” (p 127)

Clearly, the terms Black and White are nonsensical from a

biological perspective, are embedded in racialized and racist

tra-ditions, and are incorrect in terms of their representations These

terms are not sustainable for the long term, but there exists a

difference in the pragmatics of language that is relevant to these

terms Although linguistic pragmatics is not a justification for the

usage of everyday terms in academic contexts, I suggest keeping

the terms Black and White in North America in quotation marks or

in Italics—when they are introduced as political categories without

biological meaning This makes them equal to the term Caucasian

(both are nonsensical) but different in terms of their application:

white and black are understood as socially constructed categories

that have no natural representation They cannot be found in the

animal kingdom but only in a past in which racism has played a

significant role in shaping the outlook of human societies

These short reflections should make it evident how difficult the

usage of scientifically correct terminologies is when it comes to

the description of human groups or individuals Academic

con-cepts relating to human groups are interlaced with political and

everyday language meanings Following the Publication Manual

of the American Psychological Association (2001), I suggest being

aware of the changes in terminology that happen repeatedly in the

course of history I support being as specific as possible when it

comes to the denotation of participants Thus, I agree with the

Manual that suggests, for example, that one should refer to

Vietnamese, Koreans, Pakistanis, and so on, instead of Asians.

However, I want to caution that this practise may become

prob-lematic, as it may underestimate variations and changes within

these designations Although self-identification categories provide

a fast solution to the problem, they should be treated with caution

because participants may use the very terms that turn out to be

scientifically incorrect In addition, it should be remembered that

there can be no preordained system of ethnic group descriptions

because various histories of various countries must be taken into

account: A system that may be relevant in contemporary Canada might not be useful in South Africa, and vice versa

It remains to be seen whether advances in population genetics will allow for more precise biological identifications Is the usage of concrete markers (see Wells, 2002, 2006), such as a Haplogroup O3 (M122) for a lineage that can be traced to Neolithic Chinese rice farmers, more useful than traditional and self-identification systems? Given the history of recent migrations, group identity politics, and intermarriages, it will be difficult to separate the biological marker from the sociopolitical experience and identity For instance, a male individual identified as being from Haplogroup O3 (based on analysis

of the Y-chromosome) might have grown up in Italy with an Italian mother, who herself can trace her maternal lineage back to Haplo-group I (analysing mitochondrial DNA), designating her as having ancestors probably from Northern Europe Then let us assume that the whole family migrated to Canada The objective biological markers may be very different from the person’s sociohistorical identity It should also be noted that the commercial practises of genetic ancestry testing might obscure or mislead the public about its limitations (see Bolnick et al., 2007) My concern is that the historical conditioning of

thinking in races, including the thinking in Caucasians, will prevent a

critical understanding of one’s biological ancestry that includes shift-ing practises of migration and intermarriage, but also notions of identity

Re ´sume ´

En s’appuyant sur des re´flexions historiques, the´oriques et em-piriques, nous avanc¸ons que la the´orie caucasienne ainsi que le terme sont de´suets en psychologie En discutant des origines historiques du terme dans les e´crits de Johann Friedrich Blumen-bach et des e´le´ments cle´s de sa the´orie, il est de´montre´ que sa the´orie n’est pas appuye´e et a e´te´ falsifie´e au fil de la recherche scientifique En discutant des the´ories actuelles des origines de l’humanite´ en Afrique, de la couleur de la peau originale et de la question de de´ge´ne´ration, il est avance´ que l’abandon du terme caucasien en psychologie naıˆt d’un souci de conformite´ scienti-fique et non politique L’acceptation du terme dans diffe´rents

contextes culturels est reconstruite L’ide´e que Caucase puisse

re´fe´rer a` un groupe spe´cifique sans avoir de signification the´orique mais plutoˆt descriptive est rejete´e, tout comme l’ide´e selon laquelle

un terme issu du sens commun constitue un concept scientifique Des suggestions visant une terminologie plus ade´quate pour re´fe´rer a` des groupes humains sont propose´es

Mots-cle´s: race, racisme, clarte´ conceptuelle, histoire, the´orie

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Received June 18, 2008 Revision received October 2, 2008 Accepted October 2, 2008 䡲