Earlier this year, we were appalled to see a figure from a paper co-authored by one of us (S.R.) displayed in a 180-page screed that was used by an avowed white supremacist to justify his massacre of ten Black people at a shop in Buffalo, New York.
Even before then, we had noticed that our work on patterns of global genetic diversity in humans was increasingly being invoked in online discussions among those who support white nationalist ideology.
So what should human geneticists be doing to counter white supremacy?
Many of the denunciations of racism by scientists, scientific societies and editorial boards invoke decades of human-genetics research debunking the idea that human ‘races’ are biologically distinct, and repeatedly emphasize instead that race is a shifting social, historical and political construct. They stress that most human genetic variation is distributed as a gradient; that there is considerable genetic overlap between members of different populations; and that today’s patterns of genome variation can be explained by migration and mixing of populations during human history.
