Genes for Racists?

This article is part of the series Evil Infrastructures.

What happens when white supremacists take genetic ancestry tests (GAT)? One might think that they would avoid GAT, since genetics has decisively shown the common African ancestry of all people. Furthermore, emerging research on consumers of GAT suggests that white individuals seek them out to search for some kind of exotic, but unknown ethno-racial heritage to spice up their personal histories. However, Jo Phelan and colleagues (Phelan et al. 2014) have shown that GAT encourage people to understand race and racial differences as genetically determined. Thus, perhaps white nationalists would be interested in using GAT to police the boundaries of their community. As John Law, a member of the National Vanguard, said in a 2006 podcast: “Who’s White? . . . Non-Jewish people of wholly European descent. No exceptions.”

Established in 1996, Stormfront has been an online forum for users to ruminate about racial differences, welfare leeches, immigrant invasions, and reviving eugenic social policy. Stormfront posters often assert they are not racists, but are rather fighting to preserve a...