The Alt-Right Movement is a white nationalist movement that “[promotes] a form of identity politics for European Americans and white people internationally,” as defined by Wikipedia. In an article written by Sarah Zhang, “Will the Alt-Right Promote a New Kind of Racist Genetics?” Zhang confronts the way extremist groups use science to back their ideologies. The article expresses how a graduate student at the University of Michigan, Jedidiah Carlson (who is not a white nationalist), ran into Stormfront, an online white nationalist forum. Carlson found a trend during his browsing, where users were discussing how reliable 23andMe results were, and debating whether Neanderthal interbreeding was why the white population was genetically superior. The article puts the concept in concise terms:

“Obsession with racial purity is easily channeled…into an obsession with genetics.”

– Sarah Zhang, author

The Alt-Right Movement is using science to back their thinking, by choosing to ignore certain scientific findings that are not helpful to their movement, and carefully selecting the only findings that support their beliefs. For reference, Stormfront has existed since the 1990s, so it has been around for the entire genetic revolution; the opinions of white nationalists on sequencing the first human genome, the first at-home ancestry test kits, and much more all exist in the archives of the forum. Carlson found that some of the users on Stormfront, “have a really profound understanding of the everyday concepts in population genetics”- to be clear not to dismiss the validity of some of these users’ thinking. However, their ideology behind their posts is fundamentally wrong, and Carlson was quick to point out that in the current political climate, it was very possible that his work and the work of his fellow geneticists could be used as weapons for these extremist groups instead of as public scientific findings intended to promote the truth, not a selected version of the truth.

Sarah Zhang writes that the problem isn’t primarily with the science — the science provides the public with facts. The problem is that those facts become censored and filtered by people who have preexisting biases and beliefs, and who may subconsciously be searching for scientific evidence to support their beliefs/biases. Everyone is raised differently; we all have biases and different beliefs. Therefore, the acknowledgement should be in recognizing that those are factors that influence our everyday thinking and how we internalize information, rather than choosing to blame aspects of ourselves or others. We are human, we have formed our individual opinions about these topics, and now the step is to increase our awareness of that. Is that what the facts are telling me? Or is that my personal bias influencing the information being given?

However, the science is not blameless. Zhang writes how racial categories are still deeply ingrained into biomedical research — for example, the US National Institute of Health requiring researchers to collect the race and ethnicity of clinical trial participants. In this requirement, the belief that race is significant to physical health is implied — and the research that is generated from these trials supports that idea. An example given in the article is the proposed headline: African Americans have higher rates of diabetes, when genetic diversity make up 0.1% of human DNA. To dissolve these racial constructs, the science would do well to cease use of racial collection; perhaps instead referring to clinical trial participants by age group or physical health.

To summarize — the theme, that race is much more a social construct than a scientific factor — is again reinforced. However, this time, extremist groups are using scientific findings that are still structured to include race as a factor, to support their beliefs and actions. The proposed solve for this is to stop collecting data on race and ethnicity in clinical trials altogether — because, scientifically, the text did not provide a clear purpose to the inclusion of racial factors in scientific trials. But, even if that did happen– it is hard to change a society’s social construct.