"Like A Ted Cruz Look-Alike Contest"
We need to exterminate any whites who fail the DNA test and demonstrate
mongrel blood.
We hope you pass, but prepare to fail.
White Supremacists Not Happy When DNA Tests Reveal Non-White Ancestry
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 �6
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.
㜁ait a minute, wait a minute, hold on, just wait a minute,�he said,
trying to put on an all-knowing smile. 孏his is called statistical noise.�
Then, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he took to the white
nationalist website Stormfront to dispute those results. That𠏋 not
uncommon: With the rise of spit-in-a-cup genetic testing, there𠏋 a trend
of white nationalists using these services to prove their racial identity,
and then using online forums to discuss the results.
But like Cobb, many are disappointed to find out that their ancestry is
not as 𢘛hite�as they鏆 hoped. In a new study, sociologists Aaron
Panofsky and Joan Donovan examined years�worth of posts on Stormfront to
see how members dealt with the news.
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It𠏋 striking, they say, that white nationalists would post these results
online at all. After all, as Panofsky put it, 懀hey will basically say if
you want to be a member of Stormfront you have to be 100 percent white
European, not Jewish.�
But instead of rejecting members who get contrary results, Donovan said,
the conversations are 㺸verwhelmingly�focused on helping the person to
rethink the validity of the genetic test. And some of those critiques �
while emerging from deep-seated racism �are close to scientists�own
qualms about commercial genetic ancestry testing.
Panofsky and Donovan presented their findings at a sociology conference in
Montreal on Monday. The timing of the talk �some 48 hours after the
violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. �was
coincidental. But the analysis provides a useful, if frightening, window
into how these extremist groups think about their genes. Reckoning with
results
Stormfront was launched in the mid-1990s by Don Black, a former grand
wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. His skills in computer programming were
directly related to his criminal activities: He learned them while in
prison for trying to invade the Caribbean island nation of Dominica in
1981, and then worked as a web developer after he got out. That means this
website dates back to the early years of the internet, forming a kind of
deep archive of online hate.
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 璌NA test,�蘔aplotype,��3andMe,�and
幞ational 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. 𡦖retty damn pure blood,�said a user with the username Sloth.
But the majority didn㦙 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𠏋 knowledge
about his or her own genealogy is better than whatever a genetic test can
reveal. 孏hey will talk about the mirror test,�said Panofsky, who is a
sociologist of science at UCLA𠏋 Institute for Society and Genetics. 孏hey
will say things like, 飡f you see a Jew in the mirror looking back at you,
that𠏋 a problem; if you don㦙, you𠆫e fine.'�Others, he said, responded
to unwanted genetic results by saying that those kinds of tests don㦙
matter if you are truly committed to being a white nationalist. Yet others
tried to discredit the genetic tests as a Jewish conspiracy 懀hat is
trying to confuse true white Americans about their ancestry,�Panofsky
said.
But some took a more scientific angle in their critiques, calling into
doubt the method by which these companies determine ancestry �
specifically how companies pick those people whose genetic material will
be considered the reference for a particular geographical group.
And that criticism, though motivated by very different ideas, is one that
some researchers have made as well, even as other scientists have used
similar data to better understand how populations move and change.
孏here is a mainstream critical literature on genetic ancestry tests �
geneticists and anthropologists and sociologists who have said precisely
those things: that these tests give an illusion of certainty, but once you
know how the sausage is made, you should be much more cautious about these
results,�said Panofsky. A community𠏋 genetic rules
Companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe are meticulous in how they analyze
your genetic material. As points of comparison, they use both preexisting
datasets as well as some reference populations that they have recruited
themselves. The protocol includes genetic material from thousands of
individuals, and looks at thousands of genetic variations.
㜁hen a 23andMe research participant tells us that they have four
grandparents all born in the same country �and the country isn㦙 a
colonial nation like the U.S., Canada, or Australia �that person becomes
a candidate for inclusion in the reference data,�explained Jhulianna
Cintron, a product specialist at 23andMe. Then, she went on, the company
excludes close relatives, as that could distort the data, and removes
outliers whose genetic data don㦙 seem to match with what they wrote on
their survey.
But specialists both inside and outside these companies recognize that the
geopolitical boundaries we use now are pretty new, and so consumers may be
using imprecise categories when thinking about their own genetic ancestry
within the sweeping history of human migration. And users�ancestry
results can change depending on the dataset to which their genetic
material is being compared �a fact which some Stormfront users said they
took advantage of, uploading their data to various sites to get a more
𢘛hite�result.
J. Scott Roberts, an associate professor at the University of Michigan,
who has studied consumer use of genetic tests and was not involved with
the study, said the companies tend to be reliable at identifying genetic
variants. Interpreting them in terms of health risk or ancestry, though,
is another story. 孏he science is often murky in those areas and gives
ambiguous information,�he said. 孏hey try to give specific percentages
from this region, or x percent disease risk, and my sense is that that is
an artificially precise estimate.�
For the study authors, what was most interesting was to watch this online
community negotiating its own boundaries, rethinking who counts as
𢘛hite.�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㦙 𢘫ate,�or
only had children with certain ethnic groups. Still others used these test
results to put forth a twisted notion of diversity, one 懀hat allows them
to say, 𤨩o, we𠆫e really diverse and we don㦙 need non-white people to
have a diverse society,'�said Panofsky.
That𠏋 a far cry from the message of reconciliation that genetic ancestry
testing companies hope to promote.
廍weetheart, you have a little black in you,�the talk show host Trisha
Goddard told Craig Cobb on that day in 2013. But that didn㦙 stop him from
redoing the test with a different company, trying to alter or parse the
data until it matched his racist worldview.
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