Last week (Aug 17, 2017) Dick Eastman posted an article with the title above on his blog, “Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter.” We are reprinting it here with permission:
UPDATE: This news story is mushrooming. The original news article listed in the article below was knocked offline for a while, probably because thousands of people were accessing it simultaneously. It is back online now but may disappear again due to all the publicity and thousands of people reading the article. However, dozens of other news services have since picked up the story and now it is one of the top trending articles on the Internet.
You can find dozens more stories about this by starting at: http://bit.ly/2wWKhr6
The recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past weekend speak for themselves. The various news media are full of stories about bigotry, racism, and fringe far-right political activities that resulted in murder and also in a lot of embarrassment to the American people. However, there is one genealogy issue that might affect the motivations of these extremists:
Are these white supremacists really “all white?”
I suspect that many white supremacists won’t like to learn the truth.
A geneticist at the University of California at Los Angeles ran a project for months that culminated in the presentation of a paper in Montreal this week at the annual gathering of the American Sociological Association. It seems that DNA testing of many members of one white supremacy organization indicates that a number of those who were tested have mixed racial ancestry. In other words, these white supremacists are not 100% white.
The paper is based on an examination of thousands of posts on Stormfront — a white nationalist online message board launched by former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Don Black, a protégé of former KKK leader David Duke.
Ancestry matters to Stormfront users because the website states that members must be of “wholly European descent to be white.”
Oops! Some of the present Stormfront members and even some of the leaders are not eligible for membership in the organization, according to their own DNA.
The publication of the geneticist’s paper is causing a lot of consternation amongst the hate groups. It seems that human biodiversity is far more widespread than what some of the white supremacists ever envisioned.
You can read the full story in article by Jamaal Abdul-Alim in the Diverse Issues in Higher Education web site at: http://diverseeducation.com/article/100349.
Of course, geneticists and anthropologists will probably tell you that very few, if any, of the white populations in North America, Europe, or elsewhere are 100% white.
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