The Revenge of DNA

[Keith Maitland]

White nationalists are taking ancestry tests -- and don’t like what they find.

It was a strange moment of triumph against racism: The gun-slinging white supremacist Craig Cobb, dressed up for daytime TV in a dark suit and red tie, hearing that his DNA testing revealed his ancestry to be only “86 percent European, and … 14 percent Sub-Saharan African.” The studio audience whooped and laughed and cheered. And Cobb — who was, in 2013, charged with terrorizing people while trying to create an all-white enclave in North Dakota — reacted like a sore loser in the schoolyard.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on, just wait a minute,” he said, trying to put on an all-knowing smile. “This is called statistical noise.”

Then, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he took to the white nationalist website Stormfront to dispute those results. That’s not uncommon: 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.

https://www.statnews.com/2017/08/16/white-nationalists-genetic-ancestry-test/

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[Udayana]

Where do people get the idea that ancestry is somehow special anyway? Why do they think it matters that they share some genes with certain, usually long dead, people from the past?

People find it "meaningful"? Like visiting the place you were born or your ancestors lived it gives people a feeling that they are right to exist and act in certain ways, a kind of confirmation bias?