Read on Twitter
This presentation is about to be SO lit.
Check out the work of presenter Joan Donovan & Aaron Panofsky who researched how genetic tests that challenged white nationalists’ notion of their own ancestry also challenged their notions of the very science they used to assert their purity/superiority https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/7f9bc
Craig Cobb took to Stormfront to refute the "junk science" that defined him as 14% black by using http://Ancestry.com data that demonstrated him as being overwhelmingly European, i.e. "white" which then led to forum board participants to question Ancestry's algorithm.
. @BostonJoan is describing how ancestry projects are far more popular in the United States because of country's history of fabricating and destroying family records & imposing blood identity; racializing notions of ancestry bear important meaning around defining "Americanness."
For people who use "whiteness as political projects," what are the logics and technologies used to define it? (she cites Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924, the one-drop rule and other fractional markers)
She describes how white nationalists are able to go between genotype and phenotype in order to transform white nationalism into a "big tent movement" in the way certain Europeans were subsumed within whiteness: basically if you aren't black or Jewish, you're in!
The study’s methodological breakdown of how Stormfront participants received and rationalized the results of their genetic ancestry tests.
Different ways of defining whiteness.
When a Stormfronter's genetic ancestry test (GAT) reveals non-white DNA, there are processes of rationalizing inclusion (deep history v. whiteness as civilizational, whiteness as non-monolithic) or non-inclusion.
What is even going on LMFAO
“White white” v. “Sub-races”/lesser whites, but arguably phenotypical diversity makes the white race stronger.
(This is the preface to ideas of ideological diversity we’re grappling with now)
(This is the preface to ideas of ideological diversity we’re grappling with now)
The study’s conclusion.
@BostonJoan also poses the question of what happens when whiteness is extracted from its hegemonic position and treated as any other potentially “aggrieved” identity.
@BostonJoan also poses the question of what happens when whiteness is extracted from its hegemonic position and treated as any other potentially “aggrieved” identity.
One of the problems with the methods of genetic ancestry testing is how genetic populations are mapped onto contemporarily drawn nation-states. That is one of THE problems, the ways that these ancestry programs reinscribe western coloniality.
Dr. Ian Whitmarsh (a medical anthropologist & the respondent) is describing why this genetic ancestry phenomenon is a peculiarly American: because whiteness as marking claims to whiteness through nations elsewhere, nations in Europe.
He states that even these white people who have sub-Saharan African DNA showing up in their is likely a result of colonial conquering and rape on the continent: it's an Africanness via white conquest, a diasporic domination.
The threat of Jewishness presents a kind of specter: Jews hold a kind of secret power and an ability to create junk science (which is how many Stormfront members characterized the results that indicated they were "less right") and deracinate the white man.
He concludes by stating that America uses the white nationalist movement (white nationalist movements v. white nationalISM) as a kind of easy to ridicule boogeyman to obscure a broader structural/state investment in the project of racial capital.
Wow. As an observer of white supremacist identity-making and rationalization on social media everyday, this presentation has been a fascinating take on an aspect of social movement-making. Fascinating stuff.
