There is a hep new trend in the white supremacist movement: Racists getting DNA tested to see just how "pure" their whiteness is. As you can imagine this generally hasn't been going well.
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.
To be sure there's valid sociology reasons for such a study, but we prefer to believe that Panofsky and Donovan also just couldn't resist what they knew would be a gold mine of sad, frustrated racists. So we will believe so until told otherwise.
As for the results, the reactions of lifelong racist assholes to finding out that they themselves have Jewish or African or other ancestry appears to be hilarious mixed. One argument was that so long as you don't look non-white, well, that's good enough for Stormfront. Other arguments were equally ... intriguing.
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.
Yeah, go figure. But the most interesting part, from a sociological standpoint, is the hoops the rest of the racist community could jump through to reassure racists-in-good-standing of their value as upstanding white supremacists. But that charity was not extended to less prominent members, and might come with specific restrictions:
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.
So they’re in luck, because mating is not something a lot of these Citronella Nazis will ever have to worry about!
It's an interesting read. It feels like we should be making far more fun of these dull-witted cretins, but it's hard to do, this particular week. We'll take a raincheck.