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Over at StatNews is a story on a recent trend where low cost commercial DNA testing is resulting in a number of White Nationalists taking genetic tests, and sometimes they don't like the results that come back.
The article looks at research on how they respond to the sometimes unexpected results:
[...] 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.
[...] 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. [...] 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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday August 18 2017, @03:46PM
This highlights the distinction between DNA and identity. Most populations are going to run into this issue time and again if they're trying to base their identity on their genes. There are some edge cases like, say, Icelanders or isolated tribes from Papua New Guinea, where the purity is going to be near 100%, but most places that have had contact, trade, and wars with others will have had consensual or non-consensual mixing of genes.
That will not stop the engines of identity, though, as this case is demonstrating. People identify as one thing or another because they choose to identify as one thing or another. If they have been raised their whole lives to believe that they're Armenian, and they have constructed their identity, their sense of self around that, then showing them a DNA test that shows they're 25% Turkish is not going to dissuade them. What's more likely is they'll cling to and assert their Armenian identity all the more fiercely, especially if an aggrieved sense of victimhood surrounds that construct.
It's why I'm generally not in favor of that tribalism, as I think of it, that so many practice. Try foods and customs from all peoples. Live in another culture for a long period and experience culture shock and living according to a different world view than you grew up with. Travel. Learn another language. Read the works of great authors from a different continent. Walk a mile in another man's shoes.
After that, it's fine if you celebrate Georgian Christmas or relish the pierogies your mom makes for Thanksgiving, but then it's like putting on your old clothes rather than believing that's the only set of clothes a 'normal' person can wear.
Washington DC delenda est.