History and Genetics Won’t Uphold White Supremacist Logic or Confederate Statues

History is often told from the side of the winners and we always hope that the winners were on the side of good. In the case of the American Civil War we know that good triumphed. Slavery is wrong, believing other ethnicities and races are beneath yours is wrong, segregation is wrong, and the confederates who fought for those things were wrong.  

Recently neo-Nazi’s, white supremacists and the K.K.K found inspiration to band together and fight for these things during the protest of the removal General Robert E. Lee’s statue from a park in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/us/baltimore-confederate-statues.html

Lisa Richardson, a Los Angeles Times writer, recently gave a unique perspective on the removal of the confederate monuments from public spaces in her piece titled “I'm a black daughter of the Confederacy, and this is how we should deal with all those General Lees.”

Richardson enters the narrative with her own family history. She is the great-great-great granddaughter of the Confederate soldier Jeremiah H. Dial. She is not the only African American with “white” DNA as she points out the DNA of the average African American is 29% European.

“Blacks and whites will have different perspectives on their entwined history,” Richardson said. “War victory for my white great-great-great grandfather, Jeremiah H. Dial, who enlisted in the 31st Arkansas infantry regiment and was wounded in the battle of Stone River, Tenn., in December 1862, would have meant defeat for my great-great-great-grandmother Lavinia Fulton and their daughter, Mary Ellen.”

Despite a story about the dividing of people by race and ideals in the narrative of the Civil War, Richardson uses the word intertwined. She points out that not only are whites and black’s history intertwined so is their genealogy. 

While there is a divide it is important to note the relation. Technically everyone’s DNA is intertwined. As college students will find in a basic anthropology course, everyone in the world came from a common ancestor who was born in East Africa within the last 100,000 to 200,000 years. 

http://www.debate.org/opinions/is-race-a-social-construct

PBS News Hour’s story learned from genetic anthropologist John Novembre at the University of Chicago that “genetically, the idea of white European as a single homogenous group does not hold up…Most of the genetic variants you or I carry, we share with other people all across the globe…If you are in some ethnic group, there are not single genetic variants that you definitely have and everyone outside the group does not.”

Most white supremacists and neo-Nazis aren’t going to be thinking about how science has found we really don’t differ genetically at all. However, they do care about genetics and whether or not they are considered “pure” genetically or not.

In PBS News Hour’s story called “How white supremacists respond when their DNA says they’re not ‘white’” Nsikan Akpan interviewed sociologist Aaron Panofsky who, with fellow UCLA sociologist Joan Donovan, had combed through the online community on white supremacist website Stormfront. They found 153 posts where users volunteered the results of genetic ancestry tests and the community’s responses to them whether the ancestry was found to be purely white European or other. 

In the case that a white supremacist's DNA test said they were completely of white European descent, users were ecstatic.

"67% British isles
18% Balkan
15% Scandinavian…
100% white! HURRAY!" 

In the case when users found they had some non-white genetic markers in their DNA there were a couple of responses. Some responses did reject the user as a part of the white supremacist group. The other response was to try and interpret the “bad” news in a way that would make it better. 

Another way to reject the results was to decide the test was incorrect or a scam. Some tried to explain away what the test revealed in a new light by breaking it down to culture and appearances. 

“They looked in the mirror and clung to the notion that race and ethnicity are directly visible, which is false,” Novembre told NewsHour.

As the field of genetics develops and new insight is shed on our history, we can see that white supremacists don’t understand much about our history or how genetics work.

Lisa Richardson, the African American Confederate descendent, sees little importance in the argument over our history and genetic past when it comes to the monuments. 

“The monuments debate isn’t really about the past. It’s about a present-day assertion of white supremacy and whether our nation is going to stop making excuses and stare it down. Most of the statues, as has been widely discussed, were erected long after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. They were hoisted into view to assert white dominance at specific points in time when African Americans gained a measure of political influence — during Reconstruction and the civil rights era.”

If our genetic stories cannot uphold racism then neither should our monuments.