ENJOY THE GENETIC FREAKOUT

It’s tempting to simply quote the hed on Michael Glassman’s post at Salon: “Let’s enjoy the white supremacist freakout after DNA tests show they aren’t 100 percent white”. Then just wiggle your toes with pleasure, and leave it at that. The private politics of schadenfreude.

But you might also offer amused congratulations to sociologists Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan on the brilliant, if fortuitous, timing of their American Sociological Association paper. The  presentation came just two days after the racist events–and the automotive murder of a woman (and injury of many) protesting those events–in Charlottesville, Virginia. Thus ensuring media attention. (The researchers posted a preprint of the paper at SocArXiv a few days later.)

Panofsky and Donovan did their work by lurking on the white nationalist chat site Stormfront. (No link because Stormfront is at present homeless, having been refused haven by a number of web hosts. To tell the truth, though, I might have decided against linking even if the site was comfortably situated. That’s the private politics of schadenfreude too.)

Anyway, the sociologists found that white supremacists were using commercial DNA testing to try to prove their whiteness and hence their supremacy. Some, however, were disappointed. Not to say appalled.

153 users posted their results, but only a third of them were able to crow about their pure blood. Disturbed by a test result indicating unexpected Ashkenazic DNA of nearly 20%, apparently from a grandfather, one poster said, “He always said he was Russian. Welp, I guess he meant THAT kind of Russian. It’s caused me to have to reassess my self-image a whole lot.”

Some members who disclosed “nonwhite” analyses on the forum were trashed, especially if they were new to the forum. But in many cases other members offered comfort and found reasons to reject test results.

There were claims, for instance, that ancestry testing was itself a Jewish conspiracy designed to confuse true whites by providing doctored results or to foster white genocide by assimilation. Jewish conspiracy theories like this are common on the several alt-right message boards; Stormfront is just one of  them. Elspeth Reeve described others emphasizing the genetics of whiteness in a Vice post last year.

One high-profile white supremacist who was found to be 14% sub-Saharan African “denounced his test as “statistical noise” and described it as a Jewish conspiracy to spread “junk science” whose “intent is to defame, confuse and deracinate young whites on a mass level—especially males”. Using a test from another company, he was able to claim that he was European, apart from a “3% Iberian thing,” according to Michael Cook at BioEdge.

In my geography book, Iberia is part of Europe, but never mind. One consistent source of conflict among white nationalists is who counts as white.

GOOD SCIENCE FROM BAD GUYS

But here’s the reason I’m not really entitled to my schadenfreude about white nationalist discomfort over their ambigously white genes.  Some of their critiques of ancestry findings are scientifically justified. In fact, they are the same critiques genetic scientists and anthropologists have offered for years.

The genetic testing companies’ methodologies tend to be proprietary and therefore mysterious. One specific and persistent criticism, noted by Eric Boodman at STAT: “how companies pick those people whose genetic material will be considered the reference for a particular geographical group.” The tests offer an illusion of precision, but it really is just an illusion.

Enormous variations in skin color (a trait influenced by many genes and not yet fully understood) make humans seem much more different than their DNA actually is, population geneticist John Novembre told
Nsikan Akpan at PBS. “White European” is not a genetically homogenous group. “If you are in some ethnic group, there are not single genetic variants that you definitely have and everyone outside the group does not,” Novembre said.

So DNA testing cannot reliably prove whether a person is a member of any ethnic community. To assume it can is to assume that there’s something inherently different in the genetic makeup of a particular group and that this chunk of DNA is universal within that group. Not true, Matt Miller points out at Future Tense. “[E]thnicity is not a trait derived from a single gene, because ethnicity is mostly our perception of a collection of traits, rather than a trait itself,” he says.

The ethnic tests compare snippets of a client’s DNA to snippets of DNA of people of known origin, looking for similarities. “The problem is that DNA snippets, or markers, are inconsistent. Sometimes they are passed on and sometimes they are not, and whether they are or aren’t is random.”

Can we expect science to make the tests more precise eventually? Probably not, Miller says. Human mobility is a confounding factor, and it’s only going to get more confounding in future.

Not to mention that the companies doing the tests draw on limited data about populations, data that varies from company to company. Miller’s advice: “if you don’t like your heritage results, try a different company. You’ll get a completely different breakdown.”

Case in point:  At her blog DNAeXplained–Genetic Genealogy, the super-dedicated genealogy researcher Roberta Estes reports on her experiment. She uploaded her DNA to six of the ancestry services for analysis. Result: “None of the vendors’ results are the same. Some aren’t even close to each other, let alone to my known and proven genealogy.”

Her conclusion: ethnicity testing is pretty accurate as to continental origins: European, Native American, African, and so forth. (Jews, however, she lists as a separate “continental” group. Is she talking about Ashkenazi Jews (and their descendants) in particular? Or members of the Jewish diaspora worldwide, who have been farflung for several hundred years?)

Despite the relatively reliable targeting of ancestral continents, distinguishing between, for instance, French and German origins is quite a different matter, owing to that pesky human mobility. She notes, “In many ways, it’s like trying to discern the difference between Indiana and Illinois.”