I have often wondered–the Caucasus Mountains are a pretty remote area between Russia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Who goes there? Who has ever been there?
Dr. Sarah Lewis has compiled a story—a history—of how the name came to describe white people and continues to be used to this day.
Brenee Brown mentions this book in her podcast: “In this episode, Dr. Sarah Lewis joins me again to talk about her new book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America. With examples from her historical research, she walks me through the power of visual culture in generating equity and justice. We talk about how what we see and what’s left unseen shapes everything we believe about ourselves and other people — and how we can start changing the narrative about who counts and who belongs in America.”
Harvard University Press says this:
The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations—and offers a way to begin to dismantle it. In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Lewis examines the Caucasian War’s role in the nineteenth century in revealing the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive “Caucasian” for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen—until now.
“In ‘The Unseen Truth,’ it is almost as if Sarah Lewis has given us a new pair of glasses that allow us to see history in ways that were previously unclear… It has changed the way I observe the world. Lewis has provided us with an indispensable resource to better see ourselves.”
— Clint Smith, author of “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
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 Nation provides something of an overview. Blumenbach based his conclusions at least in part on Phrenology, a long debunked pseudoscience popular in the nineteenth century to classify and describe human behavior.
Books in review
The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America
by Sarah Lewis Buy this book
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.
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