One of the saddest ironies of the past two weeks has been witnessing the stark idiocy of young, privileged and pampered white American men and women pretending they are somehow victims of some cruel societal machination in which their “whiteness” has been devalued—as if being born Caucasian ought to afford some type of inherent “value” from a social standpoint in the first place. The idea seems to be they are not being given their due by a society being manipulated by sinister forces of “multiculturalism” to favor those who they perceive as “the lesser” humans. By an amazing coincidence all of these “lesser” folks have skin a tad shade darker than their own.
But of course it’s not a ”coincidence.” The whole premise of white supremacy rests on the assumption that “whites” are genetically superior to everyone else.
It goes without saying that for someone to believe in this stuff they have to be convinced of their own “whiteness” to begin with. That’s a pretty important prerequisite—an imperative, actually.
According to this article in Scientific American, based on their postings on the white supremacist site, Stormfront, the majority of the site’s 300,000 registered members who have taken genetic tests to prove their “whiteness” have proven to be far less “white” than they assumed, causing the site to become a sort of therapeutic clearinghouse for sad racists eager to rationalize their poor test results:
It was a strange moment of triumph against racism: The gun-slinging white supremacist Craig Cobb, dressed up for daytime TV in a dark suit and red tie, hearing that his DNA testing revealed his ancestry to be only “86 percent European, and … 14 percent Sub-Saharan African.” The studio audience whooped and laughed and cheered. And Cobb—who was, in 2013, charged with terrorizing people while trying to create an all-white enclave in North Dakota—reacted like a sore loser in the schoolyard.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on, just wait a minute,” he said, trying to put on an all-knowing smile. “This is called statistical noise.”
Cobb spent the next two years trying to prove that the results of his testing were “junk science.” He’s not alone. With the rise of do-it-yourself genetic testing, white supremacists often post their results online in an effort to justify themselves. Unfortunately most of them are getting less than stellar results. A new study by sociologists Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan, presented this week at the American Sociological Association, examined the postings of these people (a shower-inducing endeavor if there ever was one) and noted that rather than rejecting those who report such results as unworthy of respect (which strict adherence to their philosophy would demand), the racists of Stormfront will instead band together and console each other about the validity of the testing.
But instead of rejecting members who get contrary results, Donovan said, the conversations are “overwhelmingly” focused on helping the person to rethink the validity of the genetic test.
After examining literally millions of posts through keywords (“DNA”, “testing”, etc) the researchers ultimately winnowed their analysis down to 153 members of Stormfront. Only a third were pleased by their results. The others, with the support of other site members, would find fault with the testing itself, and would fall back on shaky rationalizations for their poor results:
About a third of the people posting their results were pleased with what they found. “Pretty damn pure blood,” said a user with the username Sloth. But the majority didn’t find themselves in that situation. Instead, the community often helped them reject the test, or argue with its results.
Some rejected the tests entirely, saying that an individual’s knowledge about his or her own genealogy is better than whatever a genetic test can reveal. “They will talk about the mirror test,” said Panofsky, who is a sociologist of science at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics. “They will say things like, ‘If you see a Jew in the mirror looking back at you, that’s a problem; if you don’t, you’re fine.”
Full stop. If your criteria for the purity of your “whiteness” is only what you “see in the mirror,” then your “scientific” rationale for white “superiority” has collapsed (of course, this is the only criteria applied by most of these folks).
Others rationalized their results by saying it didn’t matter as long as you truly considered yourself a “white nationalist.” Still others called the genetic testing ”A Jewish conspiracy” designed to mislead white supremacists. Again, full stop. Neither of these arguments make sense. If your own genetics show you to be “inferior,” you can’t overcome that with dogma. You failed your own test.
Finally, there are those who challenge the methodology by which these companies go about determining ancestry. And the article points out that there is some validity to this type of argument. The datasets employed by these “ancestry companies” are necessarily correlated to the type of personal information provided, which can vary in accuracy. There is also an added element of due to shifting populations and geopolitical boundaries, as a person’s DNA is compared with those currently in the region. A genuine mainstream literature questioning the soundness of these companies’ methods and analytical data exists, and the Stormfront users have taken to exploiting those critiques to an art form.
But the bottom line is not the existence of uncertainty, but in arguing that the uncertainty always favors your point of view. That’s what the researchers are seeing among members of these sites, and that’s where the sheer bankruptcy of white supremacist thinking is glaringly apparent.
For the study authors, what was most interesting was to watch this online community negotiating its own boundaries, rethinking who counts as “white.” That involved plenty of contradictions. They saw people excluded for their genetic test results, often in very nasty (and unquotable) ways, but that tended to happen for newer members of the anonymous online community, Panofsky said, and not so much for longtime, trusted members. Others were told that they could remain part of white nationalist groups, in spite of the ancestry they revealed, as long as they didn’t “mate,” or only had children with certain ethnic groups.
When faced with the fact that their assumptions of “superiority” can’t be reconciled with their own genetic history, the instinct of these people is to find an excuse to remain together. What this really boils down to is tribalism, a tribalism rooted in a misplaced sense of entitlement, a sort of magical thinking that suggests one’s problems and difficulties would suddenly evaporate if society could be “cleansed” of people with bothersome and perplexing different colors and faiths. It takes a profound degree of self-delusion and ignorance of human history to adopt this type of worldview, but unfortunately it seems to be a feature, not a bug, throughout human history, from Nazi Germany, to Bosnia, to Rwanda, and now, unfortunately, thanks to Donald Trump, emerging from the shadows in the United States.
(For the record, ancestry.com has condemned the violence in Charlottesville as well as any efforts to use its services for the purposes of proving white ethnic “purity.” In its statement, the company advises: “People looking to use our services to prove they are ethnically ‘pure’ are going to be deeply disappointed.”)
For more, see Hunter’s excellent treatment of the subject, here.