One slide Dr. Novembre has folded into his recent talks depicts a group of white nationalists chugging milk at a 2017 gathering to draw attention to a genetic trait known to be more common in white people than others — the ability to digest lactose as adults. It also shows a social media post from an account called “Enter The Milk Zone” with a map lifted from a scientific journal article on the trait’s evolutionary history.
In most of the world, the article explains, the gene that allows for the digestion of lactose switches off after childhood. But with the arrival of the first cattle herders in Europe some 5,000 years ago, a chance mutation that left it turned on provided enough of a nutritional leg up that nearly all of those who survived eventually carried it. In the post, the link is accompanied by a snippet of hate speech urging individuals of African ancestry to leave America. “If you can’t drink milk,” it says in part, “you have to go back.”
In an inconvenient truth for white supremacists, a similar bit of evolution turns out to have occurred among cattle breeders in East Africa.
Lactase persistence is common in Europe and Eurasia and near universal in the British Isles and southern Scandinavia. It is common also in the Arabian Peninsula and fairly common in India, where the cow is sacred. It is rare in East Asia. There are also several isolated pockets of lactose tolerance in Africa, a tale we’ll get to in a moment.
yeah, allowed them to specifically thrive under the very specific self-imposed conditions that milk was the only abundant source of nutrients. Once again white men extrapolating that since they are successful under conditions they themselves designed and control (with the help of a lucky break, no less), they must just be generally better. ugh.
A lot of non-white people can drink milk, so this is a weird way to prove something. It also bothers me that some left-wingers have picked this up and essentially appropriated a right wing meme, albeit to say different things. I’m get kind of handwavy when people assert a particularly strong association between lactose intolerance and race because it correlates two sets of phenotypes that are not intrinsically related. For example, black people in the US share a genetic history with Europeans because of the widespread sexual exploitation of slaves in the prebellum (and antebellum) South. It should not shock anyone that plenty of black people with non-East African heritage can drink milk with no issue.
Then there’s the issue that genetic lactose intolerance doesn’t seem to line up neatly with behavioral lactose intolerance, i.e. people who are purportedly lactose intolerance drink milk unaware of their supposed genetic destiny with few or no symptoms to speak of. I haven’t had a chance to dig into the data or turn this into a project because I’ve been so busy with other scientific endeavors, but I have a strong hunch that the way we talk about lactose intolerance may come under some scrutiny in the next ten years.
Wait… I have some lactose intolerance (though it’s much, much better than it was when I was a kid, when it would make me puke). Does… does that mean I’m a race traitor or not white somehow?
Also, are they REALLY that fucking stupid? The “master” race indeed.
The Right keeps trying to push forward racist pseudo-science like Charles The Bell Curve Murray, “proving” differences in racial IQ, so that spending on social welfare is a waste of money because some people are just born poor and in prison, and that can never be changed.
They’re upset that their crap keeps getting smacked down, no matter how much money they use to promote it. (Murray’s base, American Enterprise Institute: $309,728,804 in assets in 2016!)
It’s no wonder that they’d seize on an actual, but relatively trivial, genetic trait like it was the Holy Grail.
I’m white and I have worsened lactose intolerance to where 20-minute stretches of ‘inner sanctum monopolization’ to deal with intestinal distress are common with even half-and-half dairy.
I see this silly season as an attempt to make infantilization “happen”: notice that most of these males do not form mature, nurturing relationships with other adults. They cling to motherless lactation through digestion of bovine, ovine, caprine milk. They are tithead weenies who missed out on emotional weaning.
