While I’ve written about my dislike of Antifa, there’s another group I despise just as much: white nationalists. The idea that somehow anyone is born with more worth than another because of skin color is ridiculous — though it does bear mentioning that this attitude isn’t exclusive to white nationalists. I can’t stand those other groups, either.
Yet to them, being white is almost magical. So it’s not surprising that many of them are using genetic testing to prove just how white they are. Unfortunately for them, they’re not as white as they think:
To find relevant comments in the 12 million posts written by over 300,000 members, the authors enlisted a team at the University of California, Los Angeles, to search for terms like “DNA test,” “haplotype,” “23andMe,” and “National Geographic.” Then the researchers combed through the posts they found, not to mention many others as background. Donovan, who has moved from UCLA to the Data & Society Research Institute, estimated that she spent some four hours a day reading Stormfront in 2016. The team winnowed their results down to 70 discussion threads in which 153 users posted their genetic ancestry test results, with over 3,000 individual posts.
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.’” Others, he said, responded to unwanted genetic results by saying that those kinds of tests don’t matter if you are truly committed to being a white nationalist. Yet others tried to discredit the genetic tests as a Jewish conspiracy “that is trying to confuse true white Americans about their ancestry,” Panofsky said.
Poor racial supremacists.
The “blood and soil” crowd are eagerly willing to ignore the importance of blood when it’s convenient. “Got a bit of black or Hispanic in you, Adolf, Jr.? Well, don’t worry. So long as you don’t feel black or Hispanic, then you’re still a good little Aryan.”
If they keep thinking about it, maybe sooner or later they’ll end up advocating that people should be judged on character, not the color of their skin.
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