То, что сейчас это политкорректно переводят как "белая раса", не означает, что изначально не имели в виду именно "кавказская раса". Как раз-таки имели.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race

The Caucasus as the origin of humanity and the peak of beauty
In the eighteenth century, the prevalent view amongst European scholars was that the human species had its origin in the region of the Caucasus Mountains. This view was based upon the Caucasus being the location for the purported landing point of Noah's Ark – from whom the Bible states that humanity is descended – and the location for the suffering of Prometheus, who in Hesiod's myth had crafted humankind from clay.

In addition, the most beautiful humans were reputed to be the stereotypical "Circassian beauties" and the Georgian people; both Georgia and Circassia are in the Caucasus region. The "Circassian beauty" stereotype had its roots in the Middle Ages, whilst the reputation for the attractiveness of the Georgian people was developed by early modern travellers to the region such as Jean Chardin.

Göttingen School of History

The term Caucasian as a racial category was first introduced in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History – notably Christoph Meiners in 1785 and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1795 – it had originally referred in a narrow sense to the native inhabitants of the Caucasus region.

In his The Outline of History of Mankind (1785), the German philosopher Christoph Meiners first used the concept of a "Caucasian" (Kaukasisch) race in its wider racial sense. Meiners' term was given wider circulation in the 1790s by many people. Meiners imagined that the Caucasian race encompassed all of the ancient and most of the modern native populations of Europe, the aboriginal inhabitants of West Asia (including the Phoenicians, Hebrews and Arabs), the autochthones of Northern Africa (Berbers, Egyptians, Abyssinians and neighboring groups), the Indians, and the ancient Guanches.