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THE RECKLESS CREATION OF WHITENESS  
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Erin L. Thompson
January 29, 2025
The Nation
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_ In The Unseen Truth, Sarah Lewis examines how an erroneous
18th-century story about the “Caucasian race” led to a centuries
of prejudice and misapprehension. _

Mikhail Lermontov’s Memory of Caucasus, 1838., Fine Art Images /
Heritage Images / Getty Images

 

Books in review
The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America
by Sarah Lewis
Buy this book [[link removed]]

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
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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.

Yet increased interest in the Caucasus meant increased scrutiny of who
exactly lived there. Americans began to acknowledge the diversity of
ethnicities and religions in the Caucasus: a fragmented region
composed of Persians, Ottomans, Georgians, Yazidis, Jews, and even
Buddhist nomads. Already by 1855, the abolitionist and physician James
McCune Smith wrote
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the attempts of race scientists to “seek paternity” for the white
race in Arabia after realizing that the people of the Caucasus “are,
and have ever been, Mongols.” “Keep on, gentlemen,” Smith
commented with prescient sarcasm. “You will find yourselves in
Africa, by-and-by.”

George Kennan, an explorer and one of the most popular American public
lecturers in the late 19th century, was probably the first American to
travel the length of the Caucasus Mountains and was certainly the
first to make a living talking about the “kaleidoscope of ethnic
groups” he had seen there. The Caucasus was revealed to be similar
to the United States after all, in that both populations were a
“heterogeneous collection of the tatters, ends, and odd bits of
humanity.”

We can see Americans working out the issue of the relationship of the
Caucasus to whiteness with the help of P.T. Barnum, who debuted a new
attraction at his American Museum in New York City in 1864. Advertised
as an “extraordinary living FEMALE SPECIMEN,” Zalumma Agra trotted
onstage with her hair teased straight up, as if electrified, while
Barnum recited her “biography,” describing her birthplace in the
Caucasus and how she had fled from the Russians. Zalumma was the first
in a line of performers in Barnum’s and then rival establishments,
known as “Circassian Beauties.” In reality, none of them had set
foot in the Caucasus: They were local performers, often Jewish or
Irish women whose hair had been stiffened with the help of coatings of
beer. Zalumma herself was born Johanna Nolan—although, in a truly
American twist, Census records show that she kept her new name even
after she no longer performed for Barnum.

Lewis argues that Barnum’s chicanery was part of the point:
Audiences enjoyed the puzzle of guessing whether or not the women were
who Barnum claimed they were. The Circassian Beauties functioned,
Lewis argues, “as an optical exam for a country consolidating its
rules of visual racial discernment.” Fittingly, souvenir photographs
from the 1870s show African American and albino women portraying
Circassian Beauties, making even more antic comment on the concept of
just who was Caucasian.

The fascination, though, proved to be long-lasting. In 1919, President
Woodrow Wilson asked a major general on a trip to Armenia to render a
report on “the legendary beauty of the Caucasus women.” Wilson,
who saw America as a “great White nation,” was considering whether
the US should arm the Armenians in their fight against the Turks for
autonomous rule, since he considered the people of the Caucasus to be
“of our own blood.” The cooperative British chief commissioner of
Transcaucasus gathered 70 women for inspection, but a stroke left
Wilson incapacitated before he could receive his deputy’s
conclusions about this curious beauty pageant.

By the turn of the 20th century, however, fewer Americans believed
that all white people descended from a specific location. The new
looseness of whiteness turned out to have crucial advantages.
Unmooring race from a definite place made whiteness an imagined
community into which new populations, such as Irish and Italian
immigrants, could be welcomed
[[link removed]] when
this proved politically expedient. But a “whites-only” segregation
regime was hard to administer when the authorities found it difficult
to define just who exactly was white.

Lewis argues that “visibility is at the core of politics” in
America, where what matters most is whether your fellow citizens see
you as a “fully empowered subject.” _The Unseen Truth_ fits into
a tradition of arguments made by thinkers like Frederick Douglass and
Freeman Henry Morris Murray about the importance of representation to
race and politics. (One of the core contributions of the book is
Lewis’s contextualization of the work of the underappreciated
Murray, a writer, activist, and civil servant who fought against
Wilson’s expansion of segregation.) Lewis adds an important insight:
that the grinding scrutiny of the supposed inferiorities of Americans
of color was a rearguard action fought after the collapse of any
coherent idea of a “white race.” Upholding discrimination meant
jumping from one delusion to another.

When Lewis traveled to the Caucasus in 2019, hardly anyone she met
knew that “Caucasian” could be a synonym for “racially white.”
Only the handful of Caucasians she met who had traveled to the United
States understood their unintended recruitment into whiteness, and
they learned of their status almost accidentally—filling out an
immigration form, or in a chance encounter with a white supremacist
who treated the visiting Caucasian “like a god.” Lewis sees the
idea of the Caucasian race as a “haunting” that still manages to
convince some Americans that there is some scientific validity to the
idea of a unified white race. Her book aims to put that idea finally
to rest.

Still, one might bemoan just how rapidly the idea of whiteness has
recovered from past attacks on its intellectual underpinnings. Facts
do not seem to matter when the fiction is so convenient. But at least,
as the current uproar over critical race theory shows, teaching the
public about the evolution of the concept of race is treated as enough
of a threat to make the endeavor seem worthwhile.

_ERIN L. THOMPSON is the author of Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall
of American Monuments and teaches at the City University of New York_

_Copyright c 2025 THE NATION. Reprinted with permission. May not be
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* U.S. history
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* race
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* Racism
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* slavery
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* P.T. Barnum
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