Milk, White Supremacy, and Misinterpreted Genetics

Milk, it’s one of the most innocuous drinks, not just in its taste but in its representation in culture as well. Milk is often used as a symbol of purity or youth in films and literature because of its relation to infants. However recently, certain groups have attempted to repurpose milk.

White supremacist groups have taken to public displays of milk drinking to assert their “racial superiority”. While this is certainly strange, it is not until we examine the motivation behind this milk drinking that we understand its true implications. The reasoning behind these public displays is that the genetic trait that allows adults to continue to digest lactose after childhood is more prevalent among white people than other ethnic groups. Until roughly 5,000 years ago, according to geneticists, this lactose-digesting trait would cease functioning as people matured and were no longer dependent on milk for sustenance. However after the advent of cattle farming in western Europe, a chance genetic mutation allowing adulthood lactose digestion occurred, permitting an additional nutrition source in times of food shortage. Milk drinking began to spread among white Europeans. Currently white supremacists are attempting to use this genetic trait’s prevalence among white people as a scientific backing for their racist ideology.

While most would already agree that white supremacist ideology is detestable, lactose intolerance cannot even be used as a metric for delineating race because substantial portions of the black population are not lactose intolerant, and a smaller but still relevant sample of the white population is lactose intolerant. Geneticists explain this saying that dairy farming did exist in parts of western Africa but to a lesser extent than in western Europe.

While it is clear to see that judging a people group by their ability to digest lactose is not only wrong but logically flawed, it is not so easy to determine what should be done to combat hate groups using a fundamental misunderstanding of genetic research to back their ideas. Some believe that geneticists should directly address these groups; others think that their direct address will only cause them to feel validated. In this way genetics becomes a sort of authoritarian technic, not because of its inherent traits, as is generally the case, but because of misunderstanding of its meaning. This issue is not made any easier by the complexity of modern genetics. Many geneticists feel that increased communication with the public could help reduce ill-intended misinterpretations of their work, but do not fully know how to effectively relay their work to the public because of its complexity. This problem likely does not have a simple answer, however in the coming years the dialogue between scientists and the general public will only become more prominent as fringe groups attempt to use their innovations for malicious purposes.