Caucasian Race - Usage in The United States

Usage in The United States

In the United States, the term Caucasoid is commonly associated with notions of racial typology, and modern usage is generally associated with racial notions and therefore discouraged, as it is potentially offensive. The term "Caucasoid" is still used in certain disciplines such as anthropology, craniometry, epidemiology, forensic medicine and forensic archaeology.

In the United States, the term Caucasian has been mainly used to describe a group commonly called Whites, as defined by the government and Census Bureau. Between 1917 and 1965, immigration to the US was restricted by a national origins quota. The Supreme Court in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) decided that Asian Indians were ineligible for citizenship because, though deemed "Caucasian" anthropologically, they were not white like European descendants since most laypeople did not consider them to be white people. This decision represented something of a contradiction because the court had itself equated "white persons" with "Caucasian" in the earlier Ozawa v. United States case, wherein it had declared skin colour irrelevant in determining whether or not a person could be classified as "white" and instead emphasized ancestry. In 1946, the U.S. Congress passed a new law establishing a small immigration quota for Indians, which also permitted them to become citizens. Major changes to immigration law, however, only later came in 1965, when many earlier restrictions on immigration from South Asia were finally lifted.

The United States National Library of Medicine often used the term "Caucasian" as a race in the past. However, it later discontinued such usage in favor of the more narrow geographical term "European", which traditionally only applied to a subset of Caucasoids.