“It is still assumed, wrongly, that slavery anywhere in the world must rest on a foundation of racial difference. Time and again, the better classes have concluded that those people deserve their lot; it must be something within them that puts them at the bottom. In modern times, we recognize this kind of reasoning as it relates to black race, but in other times the same logic was applied to people who were white, especially when they were impoverished immigrants seeking work.”
― Nell Irvin Painter, in "The History of White People"; W. W. Norton (2010); ISBN 978-0-393-07949-4; a 'New York Times' bestseller

"The still current term #Caucasian connects directly to collective degradation, in the form of the gendered, eastern slave trade, via the network of learned societies that so deeply influenced the #historyOfScience in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."

… wrote Nell Irvin Painter about Johann Friedrich #Blumenbach, in a conference at #Yale on "Slavery and the Construction of #Race", 2003: https://glc.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/events/race/Painter.pdf

“The term 'Caucasian' as a designation for white people originates in concepts of beauty related to the white slave trade from eastern Europe, and whiteness remains embedded in visions of beauty found in art history and popular culture.”
― Nell Irvin Painter, in "The History of White People"; W. W. Norton (2010); ISBN 978-0-393-07949-4; a 'New York Times' bestseller