JohnD said:
This is a translation problem.
Americans use the word "Caucasian" to mean "White" (I don't know why) but Europeans, if they use it at all, are more likely to mean someone from the Caucasus (between Russia, Turkey and Iran) which is just beyond the Eastern edges of Europe, or possibly someone from around that area, like Chechnia, Georgia, Azerbajan
To a large degree John has it nailed, although the error goes back to anthropologists of the early Victorian era who believed Modern Europeans had first appeared in the area encompassed by the Caucasus Mountains.
Consequently they used the following categories to classify people.
Caucasian. Of white European extraction.
Negroid. Of Black african extraction.
Asian. They believed peolpes from the Indian subcontinent to be a closely related group to Caucasoid races.
Oriental. Peoples that encompassed Chinese, Japanese and related groups.
Asiatic. Peoples of the Indonesian region and Burma (Myanmar), Thailand and some Indian Ocean Islands.
Polynesian. Peoples of South America, the Pacific Islands and New Zealand.
Aboriginal. The native peoples of New Guinea, Sumatra and Australia.
In the modern world we know that this simplistic system is inaccurate and highly flawed. Unfortunately it was widely used by many law enforcement agencies around the world to classify suspects/victims by racial grouping. Some have now modified this or dropped it completely, but many have not.
