White nationalists are flocking to genetic ancestry tests. Some don't like what they find

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: August 17, 2017 at 10:38:37 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] White nationalists are flocking to genetic ancestry tests. Some don't like what they find
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> White nationalists are flocking to genetic ancestry tests. Some don’t like what they find
> By ERIC BOODMAN
> Aug 16 2017
> <https://www.statnews.com/2017/08/16/white-nationalists-genetic-ancestry-test/>
>
> 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.”
>
> Then, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he took to the white nationalist website Stormfront to dispute 
> those results. That’s not uncommon: With the rise of spit-in-a-cup genetic testing, there’s 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 “white” as they’d 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.
>
> It’s striking, they say, that white nationalists would post these results online at all. After all, as Panofsky put 
> it, “they 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 “overwhelmingly” 
> 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 “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.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/18849915-ae8fa580
Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-aa268125
Unsubscribe Now: 
https://www.listbox.com/unsubscribe/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-32545cb4&post_id=20170817115041:D0F5A640-8363-11E7-97D9-EF50B7532410
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com