Some white nationalists are trying their best to cope with disturbing news discovered when they had their DNA tested: they’re not so white after all.
On Monday, only two days after the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, between white nationalists and members of the Left, including Antifa, sociologists Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan delivered the results of their two-year study of forum posts from the white supremacist site Stormfront in which participants described their horrified reactions to genetic ancestry tests they had taken.
Panofsky, Donovan, and their team of researchers analyzed 3,070 Stormfront posts ranging over a period of ten years and found that white supremacists who discovered their “racial purity” was endangered had engineered a variety of reasons in order to exculpate themselves from their findings.
One technique used to deflect the facts: use visual, subjective methods to determine their white purity was intact, e.g., the “mirror test,” asking themselves, “When you look in the mirror, do you see a Jew? If not, you’re good.”
Another time-honored technique: blame it on a conspiracy by the Jews, who controlled the testing sites: “I think 23andMe might be a covert operation to get DNA the Jews could then use to create bio-weapons for use against us.”
A third argument: arguing that a client’s DNA matching the DNA from a particular country was not relevant, as the population of the native country could have changed over time. One Stormfront user wrote:
See, THIS is why I don’t recommend these tests to people. Did they bother to tell you that there were whites in what is now Senegal all that time ago? No? So they led you to believe that you’re mixed even though in all probability, you are simply related to some white fool who left some of his DNA with the locals in what is now Senegal.
A fourth avenue: accept DNA results but widen the scope of what being acceptable as white is.
Another user wrote:
So in one nation having Ghengis Khan as your ancestor won’t disqualify you, while in others it might. Hypothetically, I might take a DNA test and find that I don’t qualify for every nation and every nation’s standards, though I’m sure that at least one of those nations (and probably many of them) will have standards that would include me.
Yet another route: arguing that the scientific method used in the testing was unreliable.
The most famous example of a white supremacist being confronted with evidence of his lack of “racial purity” came in 2013, when white supremacist Craig Cobb, who attempted to turn the tiny town of Leith, North Dakota, into an all-white enclave, found out on daytime TV that his ancestry was 14% Sub-Saharan African.” Cobb later posted on Stormfront to dispute the DNA test’s results.
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