SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 5, Informative) by meustrus on Friday August 18 2017, @06:27PM
The latter group are ripe to be picked up by the former group. As others have pointed out, "white" is not an ethnicity and there is no such thing as "white culture". Except to one group of people: white nationalists.
Ultimately, the "be proud of my whiteness" people are just a little bit ignorant about themselves. They're not the only group that has this problem. The other one? Young immigrant Arabs.
They also are broadly proud of their heritage, but haven't been to a mosque in years and don't really understand Islam. So when this guy shows up on Facebook telling them to take pride and filling in the blanks, it fills a need. One can get really easily sucked into an "in-group" that shares your "heritage" when one doesn't properly understand oneself.
It's the same thing, see? White supremacy bears a striking resemblance to Islamic terrorism. And you fight it the same way: by reaching the ignorant young people with positive messages before the terrorists can reach them with negative ones. Help them to discover the rich cultural heritage of their English, German, Italian, Irish, etc. ancestry. Connect them with community groups like churches, fraternal orders, outreach groups, kid-mentorship groups like the Scouts. Replace their ignorance with a sense of belonging before the terrorists can use it to instill a sense of entitlement and hatred.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?