Paper short abstract:

How do white nationalists interpret genetic ancestry tests?

Paper long abstract:

Since the advent in the mid-2000s of genetic ancestry tests (GATs) available directly to consumers, researchers have considered what their effects would be on individuals' conceptions of their own identities and their understanding of race and ethnicity. Studies have focused especially on the impact on African Americans and more recently on differences in reception among individuals from diverse backgrounds. This study focuses on a different population: white nationalists posting and discussing GAT results on the web forum Stormfront. This is a self-selected population that ostensibly has strong ideological commitments to notions of racial distinctiveness, purity, and hierarchy and where genetic information might put individual identity at risk. Our research shows that they use practices of "affiliative self-fashioning" similar to other populations—that is, white nationalists incorporate and reject elements of ancestry testing results selectively in ways that tend to preserve prior identities. Identity "repair" practices include denigrating the racial motivations and putative Jewish ownership of genetics companies and denigrating the validity of genetics as opposed to genealogical research or self-knowledge ("looking in the mirror"). On occasion GAT reveals are occasions for individuals to denigrate each other's identities. Finally, Stormfront posters typically interpret results in essentialist ways—they think about particular MtDNA or Y-chromosome haplotypes as typical of particular desirable and undesirable populations and emblematic of membership rather than as distributed in diverse and clinal fashion inconsistent with distinctive populations. Thus GATs become occasions for debates about the necessity of racial purity to a commitment to white nationalism.