Why DNA Tests Can’t Decide Who’s “White”
How white supremacists misunderstand the concept of race and usage of ancestry tests
Recently, I found myself debating a white supremacist who insisted only “white people” should enjoy certain rights: the right to enter a country as an immigrant, claim refugee protection, or hold the highest public office.
When I asked how he’d decide who counts as “white,” he said: “Easy — anyone of European ancestry. DNA tests are so accurate now — they’ll prove it.”
At first, that might sound scientific. But scratch the surface, and the whole idea collapses into nonsense.
How ancestry tests actually work
First, your DNA doesn’t contain segments labeled “European,” “African,” or “Chinese.” There’s no genetic switch for “whiteness.” Nearly all human genes exist in every population — humans are about 99.9% identical at the DNA level.
What ancestry tests measure is statistical similarity — and how your DNA clusters with other people.
A company builds reference groups — thousands of people whose families lived mostly in the same region (like Norway, Poland, or Italy) for many generations.
They scan for genetic markers (SNPs) that differ in frequency between these groups. For example, one marker might appear in 40% of Germans, 65% of Norwegians, 50% of Swedes.
The test then checks which patterns of markers your DNA shares with these groups — and runs the math to see which clusters your DNA segments group with most strongly.
The result is a probability estimate:
“54% match with our Norwegian cluster, 30% German, 16% British.”
So, your DNA doesn’t come with a single hidden meter showing “how white you are.”
It shows which population clusters you most resemble — always with some fuzziness.
These matches don’t literally measure how many “liters” of Spanish or North African DNA you contain — they compare how your genome fits multiple clusters at once. Because clusters overlap, you can match several at the same time.
A good analogy is how a neural network recognizes handwritten digits:
It might say a digit has an 80% match for “7” and a 35% match for “1.” It’s not because the digit is partly “one” and partly “seven” — it’s because those digits share shapes. The system just finds the best statistical fit.
In the same way, ancestry tests don’t find “pure” genes for Spain or North Africa. They find stretches of DNA where certain markers are more common in one group than another. Very few markers are unique to a single population.
Migration makes clusters blurry
Europe’s own DNA shows why the idea of measuring “whiteness” precisely breaks down. Take Spain, Portugal, Sicily, or parts of southern Italy. History tells the story: North African Moors ruled parts of Iberia for centuries; Sicily and southern Italy were crossroads for Greeks, Arabs, North Africans, Normans.
As a result, many people in these regions today carry some North African or Near Eastern ancestry — often 5–20% in genetic studies. So what does that make them? Are they “less European”? Should Spain be banned from Europe?
It gets blurrier when you flip it around: if you test a North African whose family historically traded with Andalusia, they might show a moderate “Spanish match” — not because their grandparents came from Spain, but because those regions blended genes back and forth for centuries.
And DNA tests don’t show the direction of mixing. If the gene flow went south instead of north — say, Iberian people migrated to North Africa in large numbers — then modern Spanish people could still show a “North African match,” even if their ancestors never lived in North Africa.
You see the same blur along other borders: Greece and Turkey, or the Balkans and the Middle East. A Greek family that matches Turkish reference clusters doesn’t automatically mean they “have Turkish blood.” It could be that a nearby Turkish region has Greek ancestry from past migrations — or the other way around.
So these clusters are real — but human movement means they fade into each other over time. The DNA doesn’t come with a tidy label saying who crossed which line first.
Finns and Estonians
Let us look at the North instead of the South. Modern Finns and Estonians carry noticeable Siberian and Uralic ancestry — genetic traces that come from ancient migrations of peoples from the northeast. Does that make them “less European” than, say, a Swede or a Dane? Are they 50% white and 50% something else? Of course not — they’re just Finnish or Estonian.
The “California cluster” experiment
Push this logic to the present: imagine you build a California cluster today.
California is wildly mixed — people with European ancestry, Latino heritage, East Asian roots, African ancestry, Middle Eastern immigrants — all living in the same place.
You gather DNA from a thousand Californians and average it into one reference group.
Now run a test on a random Norwegian. They might come back “10% Californian.” Why?
Because they share Northern European DNA with part of California’s population — the piece descended from settlers, Scandinavians, Germans, Brits.
Does that mean Norway was settled by Californians? Should Norway open the border for a “return migration?”
Obviously not — the match is real math, but the cluster is just a convenient average hiding older differences.
So what does this show?
It shows you can always make a cluster — but whether it makes sense depends on whether the people in that group really share a single, historically stable population history.
When white supremacists talk about “Europeans” or “whiteness,” they’re basically pointing at a cluster that is tighter than California today. Europe’s population structure is older — people mostly mixed within Europe for thousands of years, so you do get clearer blobs on a DNA plot.
So fine — Europeans form a “realer” cluster than “California.”
But here’s the twist: modern Italy is not so different from the California example.
Italy lumps together deep regional clusters:
Sardinians, who form a clear island population.
Northern Italians with heavy Central European input.
Southern Italians and Sicilians with layers of Greek, Arab, North African ancestry.
So when a DNA test says you’re “40% Italian,” it’s often doing exactly what the “California cluster” does: blending distinct older groups into one convenient average.
The number is real — but the label can be as misleading as calling your DNA “Californian.”
When DNA becomes a gate
If you tie rights — immigration, citizenship, holding office — to a DNA percentage, you create an obvious incentive to stretch the boundary.
You can’t just throw wildly different people into a “white” cluster — the math splits them into separate blobs immediately. Nobody’s sneaking Nigerians or Han Chinese into “Norwegian.” The structure shows up whether you want it or not.
But you can quietly expand the edges:
Oversample border regions, coastal towns, or groups that overlap. Fold in Turks with deep Greek ancestry, Berbers with Mediterranean ties, or Anatolian regions with heavy European gene flow.
Nothing fake — just careful choices about where to look, who to call “typical,” and which parts of the map to highlight or hide.
Companies do this all the time — not out of conspiracy, but because there’s no hard rule for exactly who to include. Reference groups are real, but they’re built by people with practical limits, funding constraints, and sometimes political pressures.
So if “whiteness” becomes a legal gate, one company might say you’re 95% white, another says you’re 80% — both are “true” for their version of the cluster. Which result does the border guard trust? The court? The politician?
If people can shop for whichever test certifies their “whiteness,” companies have every reason to compete: stretch the reference group just enough to cover more customers. Or a government might tighten it, slicing off edge cases it doesn’t want. Same DNA — different line.
The real lesson
The fundamental catch is that while there is an objective way to measure how close your DNA is to the center of a population cluster — that center is not some timeless, fixed point. It shifts depending on who gets sampled, which regions are included, and how far the cluster’s edges are allowed to stretch.
Ancestry tests were never designed to measure “whiteness” like a pass/fail stamp. They estimate how similar your DNA is to a reference group — but that reference is a moving average, not a natural border.
Your score can change as companies update their panels, add new regions, or adjust the math.
DNA tests are amazing for exploring how humans migrated, mixed, and built new cultures. But they’re terrible at drawing neat, final lines between people.
Race is a story we map onto the messy, flowing web of human genes. You can’t carve that flow into perfect boxes with a lab kit and a probability score.
Our genomes don’t carry flags or borders. They carry patterns, overlaps, and reminders that people have always moved and blended more than any story about “pure” types likes to admit.
So next time someone claims a DNA test can say who deserves to belong — remind them: there’s no “white gene.” Just blurry clusters, ancient trade routes, wandering tribes, and a global family tree that refuses to fit inside neat boxes.
DNA can tell us where our ancestors might have walked — but it cannot decide who gets to stand here now.
NOTE: This is revision of an earlier article and I will likely make further revisions as this is tricky topic and easy to leave out important details or oversimplify things.
Obviously, “white” means WASP. Not even Norwegians are white. 🤣
"First, your DNA doesn’t contain segments labeled “European,” “African,” or “Chinese.” There’s no genetic switch for “whiteness.” Nearly all human genes exist in every population — we’re 99.9% the same species-wide.
What ancestry tests really measure is statistical similarity."
Well firstly we are not "99.9% the same species-wide" just because 99.9% of the genes have SOME representation in any particular ethnic group. All it means is that there are anomalies in each group that are similar to non-anomalies in other groups.
Secondd sufficient amount of statistical similarlity would prove someone was white (or another race) beyond any rational person's doubt. Take the probability a person of a particular race will have that allele divide it by the probability multiply it by the same thing for all the other alleles the person has*. The take that number and divide it by it's reciprocal plus itself. Do that for each race. Unless you have two high or more probabilities you have identified the race. If you do they you've identified what races they are a mixture of. This isn't finding the Higgs Boson it's basic statistics. I needed literally no more than high school statistics to figure this out.
Your problem is you think a statistical relationship can't be proof, when of course it can. Not proof in the Mathematical sense where by definition something must be true, but proof in the sense that you can literally bet your life on it. If the dice comes up "6" three times in a row that's not proof it's crooked. But if comes up "6" forty times out of sixty, yeah that's a crooked dice.
"You are not literally measuring quantities of Spanish and North African genes in people because genes do not belong to specific populations. They are not unique or labeled. Some genes are just more common in some populations than others. But they are very rarely, if ever, unique."
But the fact that they are more common in some populations than others very much does mean we can measure quantities of Spanish and North African genes. We can establish with certainty exceeded only in mathematics that someone has Spanish, North African or other ancestry.
"History books tell the story: North African Moors ruled parts of Iberia for centuries; Sicily and southern Italy were crossroads for Greeks, Arabs, North Africans, Normans.
As a result, many people in these regions today carry 5–20% North African or Near Eastern ancestry. So what happens now? Are they “less European”? "
Yes they are less European, at least in ancestry. Next question.
"It gets messier. Flip it around: if you test a North African with historic ties to Andalusia, they might show a moderate “Spanish match” — not because their family lived in Spain recently, but because these regions mixed so thoroughly in the past."
Yes, you've discovered races mix. Congratulations. That doesn't mean races don't exist or can't be genetically determined. It just means there are edge cases.
"Put in another way, if we made a North Dakota reference population and matched Norwegians against it there would be a strong match. That doesn’t mean those Norwegians came from North Dakota."
And now you've discovered reverse causation. Congratulations you really are learning.
"Let us look at the North instead of the South. Modern Finns and Estonians carry noticeable Siberian and Uralic ancestry — genetic traces that come from ancient migrations of peoples from the northeast. Does that make them “less European” than, say, a Swede or a Dane? Are they 50% white and 50% something else? Of course not — they’re just Finnish or Estonian."
No they are less white. The fact that you don't want to call them that because you think it must have political implications is just you putting your desires over facts.
"Push this logic to the present: imagine you build a California cluster today."
But that's the point, you can't build it. There is no statistical clustering between Californians similar to the ones between the Whites, Africans, Native Americans, Australians and other actual clusters. If you feed the genetic information of humans into a computer and told it to find clusters you wouldn't find one corresponding to California.
"If you tie rights — immigration, citizenship, office — to a DNA percentage, you create an incentive to game it. Companies would quietly stretch the clusters to match more people — like schools inflating grades to keep students and funding. Or a government could tighten the clusters to exclude whoever they want."
No they wouldn't because the maths wouldn't lie. You can identify white people, or Australian Aborigines or any other race rigourously and discriminate on that basis in an objective (if stupid) manner.
"If one company says you are 95% white and another says you are 80% which one should the government agency deciding if you may enter listen to?"
The one where the maths is actually correct.
"If people can pick any ancestry company to certify their “whiteness” then these companies will race to create more diverse reference groups so that more people will get over the required “whiteness” threshold."
Except again, race is real. The statistical relationships are knowable with certainty.
"The fundamental problem is that there is simply no objective measure to determine how “white” someone is. "
Let me rephrase this for you. "There is no objective way to determine whether someone's ancestry was in one particular group or not despite this ancestry being almost completely isolated from other groups for literally thousands of generations.". Now when I say it like that, does it seem likely? Or does it seem like the stupidest thing you've ever heard?
"So next time someone claims a DNA test can say who deserves to belong — remind them: there’s no “white gene.”"
Nobody said there was. Saying this will only make you look ignorant.