Americans have long been invested in an imaginary story: that whiteness stems from the mountainous region between Eastern Europe and Western Asia known as the Caucasus. In The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, Sarah Lewis tells the story of the origins of the “Caucasian race” and the concealment of its discrediting in the early 20th century. Lewis has written a bold intellectual history, drawing from school atlases and encyclopedias, circus sideshows, yellow journalism, and presidential files to reveal the false foundations of ideas of race that continue to shape the United States.
The Caucasus was identified as the homeland of the white race by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in his 1795 treatise On the Natural Varieties of Mankind, which was written to provide a more scientific footing for the notion of polygenesis: the theory that God created separate human races for different parts of the earth. Blumenbach believed that all living humans were descended from the family of Noah after they came stumbling out of the ark when it landed on Mount Ararat in the southern Caucasus. In his telling, God sent Noah’s darker-skinned sons off to other lands to begin the African and Asian races, while his lightest-skinned son simply remained in place. Blumenbach further pinpointed one local group, the Circassians, as the “purest” examples of the white race, on the basis of nothing more than travelers’ tales about the exemplary beauty of Circassian women.
Such ideas were eagerly adopted by American slaveholders, who wanted to think that the enslaved were a different, inferior type of human. But Blumenbach’s crackpot history moved from race-science arcana to headline news in the 1850s, when Americans became fascinated with the Caucasian resistance to Russia’s attempts to extend its territory southward. By the 1860s, Southern journalists frequently drew a parallel between America’s own War of Northern Aggression and the Caucasian resistance. In 1864, the Russians expelled hundreds of thousands of Circassians from their homeland. Many died before reaching a new, uneasy home in Turkey. The Caucasian War was a dark mirror, then, for those who defended the South in the Civil War: It revealed a possible dreadful future for the Confederates, who considered themselves defenders of the white race.