Reductio ad Absurdum

Identity and separation.

Aside from all my other criticisms of the testing companies, and the idea of using imprecise data with wide error bars for “cutoffs,” there is a more fundamental problem with the idea of any definitive defined cutoff, and one shared with phenotypic rankings such as McCulloch’s “Nordish scale.”

Any ranking cutoff – typically arbitrarily determined – that would result in “blood” members of the same monoracial family being “binned” into different polities is logically absurd and untenable and would almost certainly (and rightfully) be rejected by the population. Let’s indulge in a bit of reductio ad absurdum to illustrate the point.

Imagine a White family, an extended family wholly of European descent. Let’s make the example even starker – let us assume they are all of the same ethnic group.  But, alas, brothers Jim and Tom differ by 1% on some component of an (likely imprecise) ancestry test,  and this crosses a cutoff threshold, so Jim goes to one ethnostate and Tom to another – and these are full brothers of a monoracial and monoethnic family. The same principle applies if Jim has a “Nordish rankling” one point different from Tom. And what about the rest of the family?

Mom goes to one state, Dad to another. Siblings, parents and children, husbands and wives – all could be placed in different ethnostates based on arbitrary cutoffs on rankings derived from genetic ancestry testing or based on someone’s subjective analysis of physical appearance.

The (weak) counter-argument would be “Well, the same principle holds for racially mixed families - under any racialist plan, they would be separated, they would object, and if they wish, they can go to the outgroup ethnostate, away from us.”  

How can you compare the two sets of circumstances? They are qualitatively and quantitatively different.

On the one hand, you have Mary Sue Mudshark marrying Tyrone Carjacker; on the other hand, you have two full brothers of a monoethnic family who differ by percentage points on an ancestry test.  On the one hand, you have John Omegashire marrying a Chinatrix; on the other hand, you have someone deciding that two family members of the same ethny differ by one point on their “Nordish ranking” and so must be separated – or the “in” person has to decide to follow the “out” person and leave the ethnostate. It’s not the same thing at all. Racial identity is at the core of racialism, it is its entire meaning, and racial intermarriage abrogates that – but arbitrarily drawn cutoffs on fuzzy genetic testing or on subjective phenotypic rankings do NOT define racial identity.

You can make exceptions based on family relationships – but then that conflates to ethnic ancestry.  So, the only logical, consistent, and reasonable policy – and one that has the greatest chance of acceptance by sane people – is to “bin” people based on their ethnic ancestry and overall racial identity, and only use those other determinations for cases in which ethnic designation is unknown (e.g., adoption).

It is one thing to separate people based on their racial and ethnic identity; i.e., separating different races and ethnic groups from each other. It’s another thing entirely to separate members of the same race or even the same ethnic group from one another based on arbitrarily determined criteria. This latter situation leads to the absurdity of separating members of a monoracial or even monoethnic family from each other based on those criteria. Solving the problems inherent in the latter situation inevitably leads to the former situation – simply separating people based on determined identities based on historically established ethnic groups and the major racial groups to which those ethnic groups belong.

I imagine that some would then try to invoke a leftist argument here – “Ethnic and racial groups are also arbitrary,” but that is objectively false and goes against the entire meaning of racial activism (and ethnonationalism for those interested in that). There are historically determined ethnic groups that have a biological basis, and race can be similarly determined.  Some may argue that looking from a purely genetic and biological basis that there are some “fuzzy” boundaries for race and ethnicity.  But this is the nature of biological reality – and even non-biological reality as well (define color, define location, etc.).  But, even so, particularly at the level of continental-scale population groups (races), there is good clustering, and, even more importantly, racial and ethnic identifies have components in addition to the purely biological (although that is the most important), and all of these components together create distinctive ethnic and racial identities even if any one component in isolation is fuzzy.  Read more about all of that here.

This would seem to be common sense, but I’ve been arguing against the idea of arbitrary cutoffs that would cut across racial, ethnic (and family!) lines since the early 2000s, and it is still necessary to do so today.