Goffman against DNA: genetic stigma and the use of genetic ancestry tests by white nationalists

Abstract

How do white nationalists use genetic ancestry tests? This article provides a qualitative analysis of posts from Stormfront, a white nationalist message board, to understand how white nationalists use genetic ancestry tests to advance ideological claims about the threat of genetic admixture. Starting in 2004, members of this message board began discussing the promises and pitfalls of using genetic ancestry tests to prove their whiteness. Using Goffman’s framework of stigma and impression management, we explore how they manage undesirable test results and genetic stigma amongst themselves – when they take genetic tests and discover they are partially non-white. Finally, this article looks at how they simultaneously deploy exclusionary or inclusionary strategies that challenge past concepts of whiteness built on the one-drop rule. Pragmatic concerns often drive their strategic positioning when confronted with undesirable test results, as they are aware that too strict exclusionary policies may impede the group’s demographical survival.

Keywords:

• whiteness
• racism
• white nationalists
• race
• genetic ancestry test
• stigma

Introduction

In 2013, Craig Cobb, a public figure in the white supremacist movement, took a seat on The Trisha Show, a tabloid talk-show filmed in the UK. In the US, white supremacy is an extremist movement that supports racial segregation to promote the social, political, and economic dominance of whites (Wildman 1996; Flint 2004; Fredrickson 1981). This movement is connected to white nationalism, an overlapping extremist political movement, where European nation-states are defined as forming a white-only racial territory (Swain 2003; Zeskind 2009).

Cobb was invited because he had recently purchased property in Leith 2013, where he planned to take over the town government and create a whites-only enclave (Southern Poverty Law Center 2013a; 2013b; Grand Forks Herald 2013; Bismarck Tribune 2013; Thomas 2015). Trisha, the talk show host, staged a confrontation between Cobb and the residents of Leith who blamed Cobb for misrepresenting the image of the town internationally. During the show, Cobb was challenged by one of the other guests who claimed that “he [Cobb] had the blood of Negroes in [his] body right now” and that consequently, he was not “100% white” (Williams 2013). In light of this accusation, Cobb accepted Trisha’s offer to conduct a genetic ancestry test (GAT).

When Cobb returned to the show, he soon learned he was 86% “European” and 14% “African,” much to the hilarity of the audience. Attempting to save the little self-esteem that he could, he responded, “this was called statistical noise,” to which Trisha answered that it was now undeniable that “[he had] a little black in [him]” (Williams 2013). In the following months, Cobb set about restoring his reputation in the white supremacist community by taking more GATs, thus proving Bruno Latour’s theory that the only way to disprove scientific results is to make counterclaims based on science itself (Latour 1987).

In March 2013, Cobb posted on Stormfront, a white nationalist online message board, a lengthy essay on his new GAT results obtained from Ancestry.com. While responses to his post ranged from disbelief to congratulations, Cobb continued to post responses for nearly a week until a moderator closed the thread. Cobb asserted that the talk show had sabotaged his identity by using “junk science.” He continued to state that the company which The Trisha Show used, DNA Solutions, was a “Jewish conspiracy” whose “intent [was] to defame, confuse, and deracinate young whites on a mass level—especially males.” Cobb also alleged that DNA Solutions did not perform rigorous testing and instead made their determinations using only “176 alleles out of over 600,000,” while another company, Ancestry.com, was using over “500,000.” He insisted that DNA Solutions was the epitome of junk science in contrast to the more thorough methods of Ancestry.com. Cobb included a screenshot (Figure 1) of his new test results to prove his European ancestry to other members of Stormfront. Overall, Cobb’s reactions and attitude reveal the weight of genetic stigma that comes with the destruction of his white identity and his inability to cope with his ancestry test results.

Figure 1. Cobb’s screenshot of his Ancestry.com results.

Cobb’s reaction is similar to those of other white nationalists who display their results online. While white nationalists use GAT to prove their whiteness or affiliate themselves with European ethnicities, few foresee how the results may affect the way other white nationalists perceive them.

In this article, we ask: how do other white nationalists, and especially the more senior members of the community who act as gatekeepers, react to newcomers’ disclosure of non-European ancestry? What are the strategies that these gatekeepers use to exclude or include them? How may white nationalists’ reactions to genetic stigma fracture prior definitions of whiteness?

When they seek confirmation of their personal racial inheritance using GATs, newcomers may be often confronted with deeply discrediting information. This new type of genetic information might create a significant gap between the person’s prior beliefs about themselves and the way others perceive them (Goffman 1963). Because GATs are private information, the genetic stigma can either be kept private, or acknowledged publicly. Analyzing a database of posts from Stormfront, we explore how gatekeepers employ different narrative strategies of inclusion and exclusion when dealing with potentially embarrassing information.

The far-right rally and the death of anti-racist protester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 have contributed to putting white supremacist movements in the media spotlight, thus raising public awareness of their existence and amplitude. Understanding white identity politics is necessary for scholars and activists alike to better comprehend and combat the ideology and misuse of history and science that white nationalists deploy.

The construction of white identities in a contemporary context has been tied socially and historically to the rise of new participatory technologies, such as online forums. Since the decline of the Klu Klux Klan in the 1960s, popular movements centered on men’s rights or white identity have gained much momentum online, especially after President Obama’s 2008 election (Cunningham 2012; Daniels 1997, 2008, 2009; Casajus 2023, 183–228). More recently, the election of President Donald J. Trump in November 2016 and his support for a vindictive far-right conservative platform have also given new impetus to white supremacy movements in the country (Perez Huber 2016). With the arrival of the Internet in people’s homes, much of the recruitment of whites has occurred online. These “imagined communities” are constructed in deterritoralized spaces (Anderson 1983; Giddens 1990). White nationalists’ online presence has long been documented by social scientists (Adams and Roscigno 2005; Meddaugh and Kay 2009; Thompson 2001; Caren, Jowers, and Gaby 2012). As they show, white nationalists use online forums to promote ideologies as well as to discuss and construct their own identities and a sense of belonging (Brown 2009).

GATs are often used not only by whites, but by Americans of all races, to gain knowledge about their families (McGuire et al. 2009). The practice of participatory research that lies behind the use of GATs allows the user to partake in an “empowering” participatory culture, drawing on the democratizing potential of the internet, personal genomics, and knowledge of identity groups (Harris, Wyatt, and Kelly 2013). GAT companies such as 23andMe often promote their products as “recreational genetics,” based on a “participant-driven research model.” (Lee, Koenig, and Richardson 2008; Lee, Mountain, and Koenig 2001). Consequently, studying communities of users of GATs is a new way to understand the politics of identity formation (Roberts 2011; Nelson 2008). Because GATs make new genetic selves possible, they both trouble and may reify existing racial categories (Bolnick 2008, 399; Nordgren and Juengst 2009; McGowan, Fishman, and Lambrix 2010; Joblin, Rasteiro, and Wetton 2016). Consequently, the association between race and genetic narratives may strengthen essentialist discourses on human nature, as argued by numerous social science researchers (Via Marc and Burchard 2009; Bamshad and Olson 2003; Shriver, Smith, and Jin 1997; Fujimura and Rajagopalan 2011; Fullwiley 2007). While race has always mixed science with common sense (Wacquant 1997), the use of GATs by the public may accentuate the link between scientific authority and beliefs in biological racial realism (Lynch et al. 2008). One of our goals is to test this hypothesis using the data gathered about a specific online community, i.e. white nationalists, and determine whether or not GATs participate in fostering biological realism.

Some empirical studies have focused on how consumer genetic testing prompts patterns of active self-affiliation amongst certain populations, such as Native Americans (TallBear 2013) and African Americans in the United States (Reardon 2001, 2004; Nelson 2016, 2008; Abel and Sandoval-Velasco 2016) and Afro-descendants in Europe and in Brazil (Abel 2022; Bonniol and Darlu 2014). In recent years, articles have tackled how whites have used GATs to create newer self-narratives infused with exoticized, “nineteenth-century anthropological imageries” (Reardon and TallBear 2012) and claim alternative identities, in an era in which whiteness as a social category no longer fits their identity appraisals (Roth and Ivemark 2018; Hunt and Merolla 2022). However, white nationalists may have different social and political uses of GATs than the broader white population, as they have a pro-active and exclusionary political affiliation to whiteness (Goodrick-Clarke 2003; Lensmire 2010).

In a landmark article, Panofsky and Donovan (2019) have tackled how white nationalists produce “repair strategies,” showing how individuals attack the legitimacy of GATs using anti-scientific arguments when they receive upsetting results that they consider evidence of non-white ancestry. They show that community reactions depend less on what a GAT reveals than on the revealer’s deference to the community’s judgment (Panofsky and Donovan 2019, 663) and how individual upsetting results are repaired through anti-science strategies rejecting GATs as legitimate knowledge. For example, in the light of damaging results, white nationalists argue that traditional genealogical knowledge is superior to GATs (Panofsky and Donovan 2019, 665), that race is a visible variable and does not need to be corroborated by GATs (Panofsky and Donovan 2019, 666), that GATs are produced by companies whose leaders have an anti-white bias (Panofsky and Donovan 2019, 666) and that GAT results are unreliable because they display statistical errors (Panofsky and Donovan 2019, 667). Following up on this research, Panofsky, Dasgupta, and Iturriaga (2021) have explored how white nationalists support hereditarian notions of race using blogs and OpenPsych journals, which allow amateur bloggers to publish open access content online. Their article shows how these posters rely on sophisticated narratives mixing well-known racial science authors writing about eugenics, intelligence, and race (such as Arthur Jensen and J. Philippe Ruston), GAT results and previous beliefs about white purity to advance their political agenda online and render it more widely accessible.

Building on this research dealing with citizen science and racial realism, this article looks at previously overlooked aspects of white nationalists’ social uses of GATs. One of our goals is to reveal how they create narrative strategies to include or exclude members within their group, despite their having received GAT results of non-European or non-white ancestry. While previous works focused on repair or even “attack strategies” targeting GAT company owners or the legitimacy of GATs themselves (Panofsky and Donovan 2019), we want to focus on how white nationalists devise complex strategies of exclusion and/or inclusion of fellow members confronted with damaging results. Inclusion strategies are even more paradoxical: how and why do white nationalists still seek actively to include within their ranks members with damaging results? Contrary to the sole focus on “repair strategies,” which highlights stigmatized individuals’ actions to win over the approval of “gatekeepers,” we focus on gatekeepers’ decisions of excluding or including a test receiver from the community. We show how GATs force white nationalists to revise previously defined identity narratives based on whiteness and the one-drop rule by relying on historical explanations, and perhaps more paradoxically the notions of diversity and culture. While adhering to the political disqualification from whiteness, according to this historical, social and legal racial classification in use since the nineteenth century in the United States, white nationalists may be confronted with test results that do not align with their racist belief system rooted in nineteenth-century racial science and ideas of racial purity (Panofsky, Dasgupta, and Iturriaga 2021).

Using Goffman’s concepts in digital sociology

Using Goffman’s conceptual framework on stigma and strategic interactions, this article addresses the exclusionary or inclusionary measures senior members of white nationalist online communities take to deal with new members displaying non-white GAT results. We show how white nationalists’ reactions can be explained following Goffman’s theory of “stigma,” as a follow-up to Merton’s process of anticipatory socialization. Theorizing from research conducted at Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Insane in 1955, Goffman defines stigma as “an attribute that is deeply discrediting, but it should be seen that a language of relationships, and not attributes, is really needed” (Goffman 1963, 3). This focus on the language of relationships is fundamental to understanding how stigma does not exist in the attribute that is stigmatized, but in the politics of inclusion and exclusion between the “stigmatized” and the “normal,” which in turn inform conceptions of self and other. Based on cultural norms, stigma arises out of a discrepancy between actual identity, i.e. how a person defines their self, and virtual identity, i.e. how others view them. Since DNA is viewed as an informational tool that cuts across biology, race, and character, the dissemination of GAT results is embedded in relations of power and identity politics. Following Goffman’s interpretation, genetic stigma can arise when a person’s genetic identity is perceived as a disease risk by potential mates or employers, which shows that genetic explanations can lead to new processes of stigmatization (Markel 1992). Goffman’s concepts of “impression management” and “dramaturgical circumspection” are also key to our analysis. “Impression management” refers to how individuals strategically adjust their behavior to exhibit characteristics that they think others will view as desired traits or actions. “Dramaturgical circumspection” refers to how individuals, when displaying information that they know will be viewed negatively by others, minimize risk by preparing for expected problems (Goffman 1959). While “impression management” refers to the whole range of self-preservation tactics, involving strategic concealment of test results, or on the contrary, the selective display of GAT results to others online, the concept of “dramaturgical circumspection” will be used to refer specifically to how individuals prepare for negative online comments on the part of their peers in the process of displaying their test results publicly. While Goffman only studied face-to-face interactions, this article will demonstrate how Goffman’s classic work can be used in the context of digital sociology, when white nationalists interact online and engage in virtual identity-building processes in the twenty-first century. In so doing, it complements other works on the applicability of Goffman’s dramaturgical concepts to online communities, while focusing specifically on an extreme right-wing cybercommunity to reveal their affects and strategic positioning. Indeed, Goffman’s concepts have so far only been used in digital sociology to analyze routinized, candid interactions taking place on public or semi-public forums that are relatively open to newcomers: the practice of posting selfies on social media accounts and other self-presentation rituals (Hogan 2010), virtual interactions between members of the online platform Second Life (Bullingham and Vasconcelos 2013), in a London-based online learning community (Ross 2007), or exchanges between users of a dating platform (Kalinowski and Matei 2011). Studying an extreme right-wing group that cultivates strong gatekeeping practices provides new insights on digital interactions, thus renewing Goffman’s applicability today.

Methods

To collect data, we used Stormfront.org, an online discussion forum “for whites only” as our primary source material. Stormfront was launched on 27 March 1995 by Don Black, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and is known as the first website dedicated to racial hate. We used the same dataset referenced by Panofsky and Donovan (2019) and Panofsky, Dasgupta, and Iturriaga (2021).

Blee (1998, 2007) shows that few researchers conduct ethnographies of the far right due to safety concerns. White nationalists are often suspicious of outsiders, and ethnographic accounts are rendered difficult in extreme right-wing communities because issues of trust and empathy often impact the production of knowledge (Castelli Gattinara and Bouron 2019). Social media analysis proved to be a powerful way to reconstruct white nationalists’ “spaces of communication,” as well as deciphering the “content, production or circulation” of their social interactions (Couldry 2013, 2). It also allowed us to examine interactions in the making, as white nationalists in the United States primarily use forums such as Stormfront to discuss and spread their ideas (Daniels 1997, 2008, 2009).

Conducting observation research online may appear as a way of overcoming the methodological dilemmas that occur during real-life observation studies, such as ethical considerations associated with covert research. However, as shown in substantial discussions in the field of digital sociology, online research is no less interventionist than conventional, “offline” research. Internet research also requires robust ethical frameworks and careful planning, including taking measures that are different from conventions in “offline” research. Though Stormfront encourages users to remain anonymous, we also utilized data anonymization by changing users’ names in our publications and keeping only the year of the post for privacy reasons. Although these posts cannot be retrieved with a simple copy and paste into a research browser because they are featured on a forum on which users need to log on before accessing the threads, we did not want to identify specific usernames used by members of the community. This anonymization process was made to maximize the de-identification efforts, as a protective measure for social science researchers such as ourselves. Such measures are common among sociologists working on extreme right-wing groups or hate communities online (Blee 2007; Castelli Gattinara and Bouron 2019).

We created a database of instances where white nationalists posted their GAT results or discussed GATs on Stormfront. While there is much discussion of genealogy and family lineage on the message board, we sought out threads related to GATs specifically to see how white nationalists coped with the results. We started by retrieving the 6,753 threads that contained mentions of DNA and different testing companies from 2004 to 2016. To find these 6,753 threads, we used Stormfront’s search engine and combed threads containing key terms such as “DNA Test,” “Haplotype,” “Haplogroup,” or company names such as “23andMe.” After searching for these terms individually, we sorted through the 6,753 threads to remove duplicates. Out of these initial 6,753 threads, only 70 threads (with a total 3,070 posts) contained Stormfront members’ GAT results, responses to test results and/or allusions to test results. Across these 70 threads, we found 153 instances where members posted test results and 486 other posts where members alluded to test results or posted partial results.

We coded the posts of these 70 threads according to whether the original poster presented their own results, whether they accepted the technology as valid or whether other members displayed negative or positive reactions to the results. First, we categorized how the original poster reacted to the results using the codes “confirmed prior knowledge,” “uncertain,” “welcome surprise,” or “unwelcome surprise.” From there, we were able to see how other members reacted to the original poster and marked a range of response types based on whether the results were accepted or rejected. As discussions developed within threads, we marked posts in which the poster claimed scientific expertise, either to offer a particular reading of the results or to impart their knowledge of genetics, whether erroneous or partial. Lastly, we coded responses about GATs and genealogy established through paper records. All posts have been proofread, and grammatical mistakes corrected, but original style has been maintained. The database was based on collective work: we compared and discussed coding variables at various stages to insure interrater reliability in our coding. We chose to include in our analysis section respondents’ comments that provided the best representations of a theme present in the data.

We are unable to make quantitative determinations about the data for two reasons. First, the search function on Stormfront artificially limits the scope of our keyword queries. Second, posting DNA ancestry test results often provokes a rich discussion that requires qualitative analysis. Posts are related to the debates not only within a single thread, but also across the entire message board, as well as to the larger white supremacist culture. Therefore, we were not able to assess the dominance of one narrative over another, as they most often emerged together in the same threads.

Moreover, some posters are perceived as holding heightened expertise on genetics, science, and technology. They therefore establish strict power hierarchies within the online community, based on their knowledge. Indeed, threads express complex power relationships between established members and newcomers. On Stormfront, all members perform front stage (Goffman 1959), thus controlling the information they divulge about themselves in public and attempting to show other members that they share the same worldview. They are expected to share a political and social entre-soi defined by the goal of racial purity and thus perform what Leslie Picca and Joe Feagin call “back-stage racism,” where all members “perform, practice, learn, reinforce, and maintain racist views of and inclinations toward people of color” (Feagin and Picca 2007, 27). We noted that some established members were frequent posters within the science and technology sub-forum, where they were considered authorities on topics related to genetics and GATs. On subjects such as identity and genetics, these established posters tended to have already taken GATs themselves as well as displayed the results publicly. Newcomers tended to have posted fewer times on the forum and, consequently, were not known by other users in the community. Membership is similar to a “career model,” where a newcomer has to prove their good intentions towards the group in order to be accepted as a full-time member (Becker 1963).

On the forum, debates about heritage, based on the one-drop rule, are crucial for community respect. Due to the stigmatization of white pride, few posters include their real name or a picture in their profile. Given the reduction in price of direct-to-consumer GATs over the last decade, we noted more posts about this technology after 2008. This indicates increased interest by members in their families’ descent, not just in their genealogy, but in the technology. Through narrative analysis, we were able to pull together these threads to emphasize how they form a collective identity. Our purpose was to unfold the various narratives that occurred on the forum by using qualitative methodology only.

Results

In the first part, “Strategies of Exclusion,” we present the processes of exclusion that white nationalists use to deny whiteness to posters presenting non-European GAT results. In “Strategies of Inclusion,” we analyze the processes of inclusion, where established members strategize to make sure a peer who has non-European ancestry can still be considered white by adopting a new collective narrative of whiteness. The two inclusionary and exclusionary strategies are not in simple opposition: they are simultaneous processes that white nationalists use to reestablish norms through exemplary exclusion, while ensuring a high enough level of social reproduction through stigma management.

Strategies of exclusion

In Box 1, an established member on the forum, User A, responds to the post from a new member who displayed his 23andMe test results in a previous post. While the newcomer explained that he took the test to obtain the confirmation that he had a high percentage of European DNA, his test revealed he was “5% black.” Despite his test displaying mixed ancestry, this newcomer did not think it would exclude him from being a white nationalist and explained that he would commit to dating white women in the future. However, User A responded to the newcomer by complaining that his test results were a threat to the entire white community.

Box 1. Post by User A (2016)

Thread: 23andme

So, you’re like 5% black? That means you will cause a woman to have a child that could inherit anywhere from 0, to, I don’t know, like 3% black traits depending on how much it takes from you and how much from her. If I found out I had a significant amount of non-white DNA, I would remove myself from competition for a mate, out of respect to the race. It’s definitely not your fault and I don’t discount you as being pro-white but I wouldn’t pass those genes on. Just my opinion though. Maybe adoption of bad-off white kids would be ideal for you?

According to User A, the newcomer’s proposal to date white women threatens the purity of the race. This first example demonstrates the amount of anxiety that exists amongst the white nationalists over potential contamination by bad genes, invoking the historical discourses of passing in the Jim Crow era and laws against miscegenation. This post also shows that established members demarcate the limits of whiteness by setting strict quantitative guidelines using percentages and statistics to define norms of exclusion from the group.

Boxes 2–4 show consecutive messages posted in 2016 from a same thread titled “61% white as per my DNA test.” In this thread, members shun the original poster when they reveal their test results.

Box 2. Post by User B (2016)

Thread: 61% white as per my DNA test

Hello, got my DNA results and I learned today I am 61% European. I am very proud of my white race and my European roots. I know many of you are “whiter” than me, I don’t care, our goal is the same. I would like to do anything possible to protect our white race, our European roots and our white families.

Box 3. Reply to User B by User C (2016)

Thread: 61% white as per my DNA test

I’ve prepared you a drink. It’s 61% pure water. The rest is potassium cyanide. I assume you have no objections to drinking it. (You might need to stir it first since anyone can see at a glance that it isn’t pure water.) Cyanide isn’t water, and YOU are not White.

Box 4. Reply to User B by User D (2016)

Thread: 61% white as per my DNA test

The accepted background “noise” on DNA tests is 5%, I will give you that. What is your other 34%? The best thing you can do to help the white race is to never breed with a white person. You would be diluting their pure white DNA with your mixed DNA. Actually, don’t breed at all. We don’t need any more non-whites outbreeding us. You would never do this if you truly loved us.

User B starts by explaining that he learned he was “61% European.” Because he is worried that these results will not grant full access to membership on account of his high percentage of non-European DNA, User B first covers his stigma by appealing to the fact he shares the same political goal as the Stormfront community. By saying that he is “very proud of [his] white race and [his] European roots,” he tries to regulate and control information in social interaction, using what Goffman calls “dramaturgical circumspection” (1959) to minimize risk by preparing for expected problems. He therefore uses strategies of impression management (Goffman 1959) to attempt to influence the perceptions of other white nationalists reading his post. Users C and D, both established members, give their opinion on User B’s results. They attack User B’s legitimacy as a white nationalist with great vehemence. In Box 3, User C suggests that 34% is enough of a difference that it should be phenotypically visible. “Water” here refers to pure genetic white identity, while “cyanide” is the poison that tarnishes white ancestry. This metaphor reveals a clear dichotomy of values between what is perceived as “white DNA” and “non-white DNA.” User D demands that User B define the remaining 34%. To User D, 5% is the amount of “statistical noise” tolerated in test results. Beyond that, User B cannot be considered white. This contrasts with the membership rules, where one must be “wholly European” to remain part of the community.

Overall, white nationalists use statistics to define and compare results. This first narrative shows that white nationalists responding to the first user attempt to patrol whiteness and dissuade participation on the website by users they reject as non-whites, using quantitative exclusion. They see GATs as a way to “measure” whiteness, where an accepted 5% deviation reflects a scientific understanding of acceptable rates of error, setting a limit on confidence levels, and acceptable variation. Therefore, giving meaning to these otherwise abstract numbers constitutes a strategy for narrativizing their identities and excluding stigmatized members from the group.

However, users on the message board do not only use quantitative margins to exclude members. They do not consider all ethnic or racial groups equivalent to one another. In most threads, whiteness is often defined as “non-Jewish people of wholly European descent with no exceptions” (Cooper 2009). Jacobson (1999) describes how white nationalists question the inclusion or exclusion of marginalized ethnic groups that appear to be phenotypically close to European whites. This continues as a topic of discussion amongst white nationalists in the GAT-related posts (Jacobson 1999). For example, in Box 5, User E clearly establishes a “hard” boundary between whiteness and what group members perceive as Jewish identities. To User E, anyone who identifies genetically as Jewish is therefore excluded from whiteness as defined by the rules posted on Stormfront.

Box 5. Post by User E (2014)

Thread: What if YOU woke up one morning and found out your ancestors were Jewish?

Well if I really 100% found out for sure it was true, I’d probably become suicidal and decide who I wanted to infiltrate and expose with no regard for my own safety.

Contrary to the Box 5 case, we also found that white nationalists establish “soft” boundaries between whiteness and Mediterranean descent, thus highlighting the porous quality of these two categories. By “soft” boundary, we mean the process by which certain population groups are explicitly designated as genetically or biologically white, even if they are not seen by white nationalists as subscribing to their political project. In Boxes 6 and 7, Users F and G discuss the race and ancestry of Marco Rubio, a well-known Cuban-American politician and senior United States senator from Florida.

Box 6. Post by User F (2015)

Thread: Is Marco Rubio white?

He might be known as a white Hispanic. He is white to me. His politics on the other hand – not too much.

Box 7. Post by User G (2015)

Thread: Is Marco Rubio white?

Is Marco Rubio white? He’s Mediterranid, i.e. an ethnic sub-group which is part of the broader white race. More importantly, he’s a complete treasonous bastard based upon his stated policies.

Users F and G clearly define Marco Rubio’s identity as white. User F insists on qualifying Rubio’s identity as white Hispanic, thus inserting a linguistic component to the identity claim. Likewise, User G explains that Rubio is part of “an ethnic sub-group which is part of the broader white race,” thus advocating the inclusion of the “Mediterranid” subgroup within the definition of white. Other posters were unsure if Rubio’s political views, specifically his stance on immigration, disqualified him from being white culturally.

Thus, while having Ashzkenazi Jewish DNA is considered shameful by User E in Box 5, being Hispanic or having “Mediterranid ancestry” does not disqualify one from whiteness. Here, limitative percentages are not discussed as they were in the previous cases, which points to the fact that quantitative estimates are not systematically used to ban members from whiteness.

Strategies of inclusion

We have previously found that white nationalists engaged in strategies to exclude members displaying non-European DNA results, either by setting up statistical boundaries or by using qualitative judgements, based on a self-defined qualitative hierarchy of race and ethnicity. Paradoxically, they sometimes use strategies of inclusion to retain members displaying non-European DNA results. In Box 8, User H begins their post by explaining that while having “10% Middle-Eastern DNA” or “5% North African DNA” is highly prejudicial, it does not necessarily mean the DNA is “non-white.”

Box 8. Post by User H (2005)

Thread: When does DNA testing conclusively disqualify someone as non-white?

What happens if someone has DNA testing done and it says something like 90% European and 10% Middle-Eastern, or 95% European and 5% North African? For most of us that would make them non-white. I mean this solely from the perspective of DNA (which isn’t completely reliable anyway), which could be due to neolithic migrations from Anatolia or Northern Africa when those regions were white anyway. As an Italian, I recognize this is a strong possibility and I think there may be people who view ancestry testing results in the wrong way. Some are obvious, i.e. sub-Sahara African or East Asian, but Middle-Eastern is much more ambiguous when looking at it from a historical perspective.

User H first attempts to dismiss GATs as a scientific proof of someone’s whiteness, but then goes on to make a historically nuanced argument about migration. To User H, GAT results give insight into historical patterns of migration in Neolithic times, where haplogroups designating populations from these currently “non-white” areas are actually “white” from a historical standpoint. By taking the example of “Middle Eastern” history, User H points out the disjuncture between the past geographic haplogroups and the present-day inhabitants of these areas, who are not usually considered “white” by white nationalists. When faced with unwanted “non-white” results, such as “Middle-Eastern,” User H illustrates how white nationalists can appeal to historical explanations to reassure themselves of their whiteness.

Ironically, white nationalists use the concept of “diversity” to include some individuals with non-European GAT results in the group. In Box 9, User I was responding to a thread from 2003 titled “How racially pure are you?” which highlights how white nationalists describe whiteness.

Box 9. Post by User I (2005)

Thread: How racially pure are you?

I understand we need to be pure to be “useful” members of our race so we keep its genetic pool clean but … I think sometimes it can be taken to the point where we are actually alienating members of our own race, which actually hinders the movement. With this, I am referring to the people who almost act like the “white whites’ are somehow better than the slightly darker whites, even though both in fact may be “pure” whites. I see a lot of this with the Nordic pride stuff (nothing wrong with Nordic pride necessarily … I’m Nordic :D) but sometimes the sub-races [the Nordic group] start considering themselves the TRUE whites and alienate everyone else … This ends up pushing the other whites over to the “other side” and cripples our movement. […] Ironically, one of the things that makes our race beautiful is its diversity … I almost feel bad for saying that:p, but it’s true, our race has blondes, brunettes, redheads, various eye colours, etc … We are not a race in which all its members have black skin, black eyes and black hair.

User I lays out a common principle of white nationalism according to which members must be white people who are “useful” to the race. According to User I, someone who is “white” phenotypically, but not “genetically,” would be most likely banned from the community because they could destroy the genetic purity of the gene pool. However, User I then revises this first claim in the second part of their response because consistently excluding some “darker whites” from the white nationalist community would have a negative impact in the long run. User I is therefore conscious that distinguishing between two kinds of whites, i.e. “white whites” who are Nordic and genetically “pure,” and “darker whites” who are phenotypically white, but not genetically “pure,” would reduce their recruitment potential. User I proceeds to argue that “diversity” should be celebrated within the white race by including all the different phenotypical factors of the “white race” such as the color of skin, eyes, and hair. Ironically, User I’s argument about the white race’s beauty based on phenotypical diversity also pushes for mixing in ways that angers other members who value blonde hair and blue eyes. In sum, this narrative strategy is used to cover for phenotypical features that are predominant among non-European whites but are also genotypically present among European whites too.

Finally, white nationalists use the strategy of defining whiteness as phenotypical, political and cultural in order to maintain some stigmatized members within the group. Boxes 10 and 11 feature Users K’s and L’s posts which are replies to two threads where users struggle to define whiteness. In the first case, User K explains that whiteness is not only about GAT results, but mostly about political actions and culture. User K privileges phenotypical and cultural definitions of whiteness and claims that he “wouldn’t let a DNA test stop my heart full of pride,” therefore accentuating their rejection of GAT if the results reveal non-European DNA.

Box 10. Post by User K (2016)

Thread: What would you do if you took a DNA test and found you had a bunch of nonwhite DNA?

Well, I look White, act White and feel White. I wouldn’t let a DNA test stop my heart full of pride.

Box 11. User L (2014)

Thread: What if Your DNA Results Said You Had Ashkenazi Jewish Origins?

When you look in the mirror you see white. You feel white and act white and love your white brothers and sisters. And work to maintain your people. I’ve been told the “we have Indian somewhere” story. No one has ever said where. I have a genealogical study back 12 paternal generations. I’m American, 2 generations from Canada, and 6 more to France. I am white. I do not identify as anything else.

User L also argues that whiteness is made in and lived through a cultural community. By saying that he does not identify “as anything else,” User L stresses whiteness is matter of self-identification only.

User L relies on a national definition of white heritage by tracing their genealogy through America, Canada, and France. For white nationalists in the US, being associated with settler nations, like France, strengthens their belief in their inalienable right to American soil. For User L, being white means “you feel white and act white and love your white brothers and sisters,” which requires political work to protect other whites. Accordingly, whiteness is a self-defined, cultural, and political choice, where race is defined as a performance (Carbado and Gulati 2015). This cultural narrative also allows white nationalists to include new members and swell the ranks, by giving a broader definition of whiteness, not merely based on biological variables. Thus, paradoxically, as white nationalists reconstruct their arguments to stay “white” in a genetically diverse world in order to keep their demographics, they also harm previous social constructions of white superiority that used to be based solely on blood purity and the one drop-rule (Davis 2001; Guterl 2004; Daniel 2002). This last post echoes a fluid definition of race, rather than an essentialist one, as demonstrated by Scully, Brown and Turi King (2016) in their ethnographic study of the genetic legacy of the Vikings in Northern England. They argue that participants in their study believe that their racial identities are fluid and reflexive because they are able to intertwine wider cultural narratives of selfhood and history with biological narratives of race based on their GAT results (Scully, Brown, and King 2016). Instead of defining race biologically, participants framed race as a biosocial paradigm, thus confirming its dual modalities (Scully, Brown, and King 2016). Similarly, white nationalists espouse a biosocial paradigm when they advocate defining whiteness as a cultural and political performance.

Discussion: towards a sociological theorization of white nationalists’ genetic stigma

Through our analysis, we have shown how white nationalists appropriated GATs in order to assign new values and meanings to whiteness based on their understanding of culture, history, and science. This is consistent with white nationalists’ prior use of racial science to justify their beliefs and ideologies. The use of GATs also highlights contradictory political and social goals. By promoting the inclusion of genetically mixed members within their community, they expand their base and can recruit in greater numbers. Inclusion can therefore be seen as an act of rationalization. Indeed, the paradoxical inclusion of identity-damaged members in a hate group that values racial purity above all has an important social function: that of ensuring the reproduction of the community that would otherwise be shrinking, as demonstrated in prior works showing their constant loss of credibility and declining membership over the years (McVeigh and Estep 2019). This paradoxical strategy highlights a moral conundrum as the demographical survival of the group is linked to their capacity to absorb members who do not display, in their GAT results, the same “pure” identity that they vow to protect. This constitutes one of our major findings, as it connects the literature on the social uses of GATs with the works on the current declining demography of white nationalist groups.

Before the invention of GATs, members relied on family histories to narrate their ancestry. Yet, because GATs are marketed as a tool to unlock a hidden past, the technology can reveal family secrets. As racism is an intergenerational phenomenon that is often learned within the family and community (Duriez and Soenens 2009), white nationalists’ use of GATs can also trigger the stigma of family inheritance. Ultimately, members of Stormfront sought and paid for GATs to confirm what they already knew or uncover more information. Rarely did they think they might discredit their own identity or adopt a new narrative of self. Members posted their DNA information because they were worried about what it meant for their claim to whiteness – central not only to their identity, but also to their political values.

In “Strategies of Exclusion,” we described how members on the forum set up quantitative and qualitative boundaries for whiteness, defined as a biological and genetic entity. As previously shown, the statistical 5% “non-white DNA” is broadly accepted as an informal limit that determines whether someone should be considered white or not. Someone having between 1% and 5% “non-white” DNA is generally accepted by the community. The traditional meaning of the one-drop rule is therefore redefined here since inclusion of up to 5% of “non-white DNA” is permitted. One of our major findings is that these tactics of exclusion are also fueled by publicization: by excluding deviant members, established members act as gatekeepers who by judging an individual effectively enforce collective norms which are exemplary for the group. They perform exemplary exclusions, which occur on the metaphorical front stage (Goffman 1959) online, thus revealing silently but firmly to other members the collective norms and expectations of the group.

In “Strategies of Inclusion,” we illustrated three narrative strategies that are used by members to reduce the weight of the one-drop rule and redefine purity. Among white nationalists, the notion of whiteness has often been associated with the one-drop rule, which has marked the concept of racial purity in the US since the late nineteenth-century. Therefore, the one-drop rule is often understood as genotype ruling over phenotype: a person who looks white and acts white is considered “non-white” if their DNA reveals non-European ancestry. As shown in this part, now that GAT is available, whiteness is not defined as completely biological to white nationalists. The three narratives of inclusion – based on historical explanations, the notion of diversity, and whiteness as a cultural and political performance – tend to minimize genetic results and undesirable phenotypical features to cover for those who are allies to the political cause. In these instances, their politics and dedication to culture are what matters.

All the examples presented in our analysis also emphasize results that do not conform to the test taker’s expectations or prior knowledge of their ancestry. Like Merton’s classical theory of anticipatory socialization (1957), where the outsider tries to anticipate and take on the values and standards of the groups they aspire to join, we have illustrated how white nationalists cope with genetic stigma by relying on techniques of information control, while also seeking information about what these results mean to others. The article has therefore explored how white nationalists create narratives of inclusion and exclusion in order to cope with this new, actual social identity in light of the virtual social identity (Goffman 1963, 2) imposed on them by their peers’ reactions.

Instead of avoiding testing (Tekola et al. 2009), white nationalists share their test results online and experience genetic stigma if a discrepancy occurs, when their prior imagined white identity conflicts with their test results, revealing what they perceive as non-European or non-white ancestry. The second part of the article has also shown how narrative strategies are used by established members to recuperate the unexpected results of posters who report non-European DNA. This way, stigmatized members become white by redefining white identity according to a different standard. Adopting new identity narratives helps them resolve the conflict between their virtual and actual identities. Their stigma is covered and their act of passing for white is accepted by the community.

This article both complements and departs from prior works on the social uses of GATs by white nationalists. First, the use of Goffman’s classic framework proved to be helpful when differentiating exclusionary strategies from inclusionary strategies devised by the group members online. The exclusionary strategies revealed in the first part match Goffman’s classic framework of “impression management,” when individuals judge appearance or conduct as unworthy of their standards: these marginalized individuals are therefore ridiculed and a line is drawn between them and members of the group. The positive reactions or aggressive treatments they receive by gatekeepers on the forum act as “clearance” signs (Goffman 1966, 92) in the case of positive evaluation or deterrent signs sent out to all other members, preventing them from engaging any longer with the stigmatized member and establishing collective norms about whiteness.

The article also complements Panofsky and Donovan’s seminal work on GATs (2019), pushing further its analysis of white nationalists’ reactions to GATs and GAT companies. While the 2019 article did not outline specific exclusionary strategies, we contend that white nationalists use narratives on whiteness as a historical and biosocial construction, and as a performance signaling political alignment with their hate cause. While including stigmatized members within their ranks, they use self-defined quantitative limits (such as the 5% threshold) to determine what constitutes unwanted forms of passing. Furthermore, our article shows that far from constructing a “monolith of ‘whiteness’ […] disaggregated into a complex set of overlapping, locally designed groups with an unclear hierarchy” (Panofsky and Donovan 2019, 671), white nationalists base their inclusionary practices on “soft boundaries” and a qualitative hierarchy of subgroups composing whiteness. Analyzing “soft” boundaries therefore provides a new variable that helps researchers complexify the ways white nationalists engage with individuals displaying mitigated GAT results. In the end, this article shows that “soft boundaries” promote the group’s own demographical survival and respond to the pragmatic goal of fostering ongoing recruitment in the community.

We have benefitted from Roth and Ivemark (2018), who theorized “genetic options” to explain how whites who use GATs end up changing their identity when willing to win over group appraisals. In the case of white nationalists, it is clear that, overall, their aspirations to “pure” biological identities are destabilized by GATs. To not destabilize their online community by excluding too many members, they engage in an identity management pattern that echoes Alondra Nelson’s concept of “genealogical disorientation” (2016), when GAT customers receive their genetic ancestry tests only to find their identity not confirmed by the test results. Therefore, white nationalists (like other GAT users) incorporate their DNA data selectively and not always based on essentialist conceptions of identity. This comes as a paradox, considering their extremist ideological beliefs.

However, it would be wrong to say that their uses of GATs always lead to the destabilization of beliefs in biological realism. This comes as one of the main differences between white nationalist test users – who pro-actively define themselves as “white” (Goodrick-Clarke 2003), as this aligns with their exclusionary politics – and other white users of GATs (Roth and Ivemark 2018). While gatekeepers of the community sometimes bend the “one-drop rule” when using inclusionary strategies, they also, in certain cases, set hard boundaries when discussing quantitative statistical data (the 5% limit for example). This finding nuance Nelson’s definition of “genealogical disorientation” (2016) by showing that it does not apply equally to all social and political groups, nor to all strategically defined identity narratives. As highlighted in “Strategies of Exclusion,” white nationalists manage to incorporate DNA ancestry data in ways that still reinforce prevailing essentialist biological narratives of race and heredity, especially when they devise hard boundaries between whiteness and other groups.

Overall, this paper demonstrates that while we expect white nationalist groups to use GAT in order to build an extreme, strict, closed and exclusive category of white identity, our findings indicate that they also, in some cases, incorporate members using cultural definitions of whiteness when the test results do not match with their choice of identity. Ultimately, our article shows that contrary to expectations, white nationalists also define their identity and capacity to be part of the group according to pragmatic concerns, as they are aware that too strict exclusionary policies may impede the group’s own demographic survival. These pragmatic concerns drive the ways gatekeepers of the community define white identity, which is measured according to the stigmatized individual’s political potency and willingness to serve the cause.

This result is significant and highlights the way whiteness is being redefined in twenty-first-century United States. It shows that genetic ancestry tests are considered by lay audiences a legitimate way to prove one’s racial identity, after sociologists have spent decades demonstrating that race is first and foremost a social construct, and not an identity puzzle that allows interplay with biological or genetic variables. Racial identity and belonging are being redefined through such tests as identities that can still be defined as partial biological truths, despite claims that we live in a post-racial world.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the researchers and research assistants involved in the Participation Lab at the Institute for Society and Genetics, UCLA, led by Professor Chris Kelty and Associate Professor Aaron Panofsky. Special thanks to graduate student researchers Roderic Crooks, Irene Pasquetto, and Jennifer Pierre as well as undergraduate researchers Jeniece George, Michael Abassian, Francesca Essilfie, Amir Ljuljanovic, Sarah Meskal, Pamela Lim, Ravneet Purewal, Michael Scheipe, Antoine Rajkovic, and Won Kyung Oh. A shortened version of the article appears here: Élodie Grossi and Joan Donovan, “Hate in the Blood: White Supremacists’ Use of DNA Ancestry Tests,” The Activist History Review, October 20, 2017.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by National Science Foundation, Grant/Award Number: 1322299.