Beyond Biological Essentialism: White Nationalism, Health Disparities Data, and the Cultivation of Lay Agnotology

Abstract

Scholars and practitioners position health disparities research as an important tool for redressing race-based inequities and re-conceptualizing racialized health outcomes in non-essentialist terms. Given this context, we explore a peculiar phenomenon, which is the circulation of such research among white nationalists. We discover that white nationalists incorporate and respond to health disparities research not solely to defend racist and essentialist reasoning, but also to project a discourse that indicts the science establishment for ostensibly incorporating liberal politics, corrupting inquiry, and obfuscating understanding of biology in the name of anti-racism or social constructionism. We term this practice “lay agnotology,” as it involves white nationalists capitalizing on their role as non-specialists to charge the health disparities field and its expert contributors with an alleged set of institutionalized biases that produce ignorance about the ‘truth’ of race. We connect this finding to the literature on racialized ignorance, as it demonstrates how stories about the institutional nature of science can be as central to myth-making about race as stories about the scientific nature of people.

When visiting white nationalist websites, alongside content that decries immigration or social justice, one also finds frequent coverage of health disparities research, a form of scholarship that documents persistent gaps in health outcomes across various demographic categories. This pattern is puzzling for multiple reasons. First, health disparities research is part of a turn in medicine to understand how structural conditions, like sexism, racism, or inequalities in health care, produce embodied health experiences (Gómez and López 2013). Within this context, white nationalists’ focus on health disparities research is odd, especially given that they have no shortage of ‘scientific’ arguments to draw from to claim white superiority or that biology determines racialized outcomes (Fallin, Whooley, and Barker 2019; Jackson and Winston 2021; Tucker 2007). Second, health disparities findings do not always lend themselves to a story about white superiority. Researchers do unearth findings about relative white disadvantage and, perhaps surprisingly, such findings are sometimes highlighted in white nationalist discourse. One article on a prominent site tells readers¹: “…whites are by no means the healthiest Americans. Asians and Pacific Islanders…outlive whites by an average of seven years – exactly as long as whites outlive blacks.”

Why do white nationalists foreground health disparities research to discuss race, when such research implicitly and even explicitly draws conclusions antithetical to their racist, bio-essentialist positions – positions for which they have forms of academic research available if what they seek is scholarly support? On the whole, existing sociological accounts would offer the following speculations. First, health disparities research sometimes validates beliefs about whites’ and ethnoracial minorities’ placements in ethnoracial hierarchies (Golash-Boza 2021). Second, regardless of the status of specific racial groups, such research validates important ontological (e.g. physical, biological) assumptions about race generally (Emirbayer and Desmond 2015:51–55). And though aspects of these two goals sometimes undermine one another, white nationalists continue to engage with health disparities research, one would speculate, because it services “the making of difference” (Goldberg 1993:150). Thus, through commitment to these positions, white nationalism like other racial projects becomes an unstable yet meaningful social formation (Omi and Winant 1994).

We find that white nationalists engage with health disparities research for a reason beyond beliefs about ethnoracial hierarchies and biological differences. While white nationalists do twist health disparities research to popularize such ideas, their deeper aim is to facilitate a different consciousness-raising project: to demonstrate how distorted understandings about race allegedly thrive thanks to the taken-for-granted encroachment of liberal politics within science. In sum, white nationalists engage with such research because it provides exhibits with which they can ostensibly demystify how contemporary or mainstream racial politics has become contingent on the science establishment’s proactive cultivation of ignorance and distortion of biology.

This paper theorizes and empirically dissects this practice. By repeatedly incorporating health disparities research and writing commentary pieces about the science establishment’s obfuscation of race, white nationalists cultivate a practice that we term lay agnotology. Agnotology, derived from the Greek ‘agnosia’ (a state of ignorance or not knowing), itself is a relatively nascent scholarly field, overlapping with other emergent literatures like the sociology of ignorance and ignorance studies (Mueller 2020; Proctor and Schiebinger 2008). This literature focuses on the active production of ignorance or absence of knowledge, and the ways such forms of non-knowledge drive social relations as much as arrangements based on comprehension and understanding. Our analysis shows that white nationalists are doing their own version of agnotology, but one that flips the terms of study, by charging the broad health disparities field with a set of institutionalized biases that leads to the production of ignorance about the ‘truth’ of race.

In the findings, we illustrate three facets of this practice. The first involves metapolitical reframing, by which white nationalists ostensibly expose the role of misbegotten commitments affecting science. These are political commitments, such as egalitarianism or political correctness, which metacontextually precede actual research and analysis and thereby corrupt the interpretation of data. Second, white nationalists advance ideas about science reclamation, in which they position themselves as agents best-suited to recover understandings of health from liberal, politically correct orthodoxies. The third involves data juxtaposition, in which white nationalists curate published research to find gaps or contradictions that beckon scrutiny. Altogether, our analysis demonstrates the need for the literature to re-think what folk wisdoms about race entail, by illustrating how stories about the institutionalized nature of the world can sometimes be more salient and central to myth-making about race than ideas about the essential nature of people.

LITERATURE, BACKGROUND, AND ARGUMENT

Health Disparities: Overview, Concepts, and Concerns

Health disparities research documents persistent gaps in health outcomes across various demographic categories (Barr 2019). The simple difference in life expectancy between ethnoracial groups – notably that black Americans can expect to live multiple years less than white Americans – often serves as a paradigmatic example (Barr 2019; Epstein 2007; Krieger 2005b). Though, much research also tracks other health outcomes, including rates of various cancers, illnesses, and other conditions (Gomez and Lopez 2013). The first wave of such research focused on how inequalities in health care produce disparities (Epstein 2007:68–69; Smedley, Stith, and Nelson 2003), but successive research has broadened to incorporate “social determinants of health” beyond health care (Barr 2019).

This research has been transformative for medical fields for many reasons (Gómez and López 2013). Among them, it provides a conceptual framework for understanding race and biological conditions in non-essentialist terms (Krieger 2005a). In short, one need not think that the conditions which produce these disparities are primordial biological properties residing within members of groups. Rather, human bodies transform in response to the environment and context in which they reside, and like other features of human biology these transformations involve various likelihoods of being transmitted down generations. The term “embodiment” has become a shorthand for this framework (Krieger 2005a).

Some scholars and stakeholders, however, caution that such research may nonetheless act as a double-edged sword, ultimately reifying race and other demographic categories in biological terms (Duster 2003; Epstein 2007; Gómez and López 2013). This is because as researchers take stock of disparities and investigate other patterns in how populations experience health, they are increasingly unearthing other gaps in outcomes without easily discernible links to inequality or investigating inequalities solely at a molecular level through genomics research without a co-current investigation into social determinants. Such findings become noteworthy, and part of the academic and public narratives pertaining to disparities in health, but in a way that is impressionistic and vague about the role of inequality or embodiment or defers such analyses to other researchers at a later point in time (Gómez and López 2013).

As Epstein puts it, in this situation, when insights about embodiment are not contextualized properly, statistics about varying illness or mortality rates may come across as unfortunate health destinies rather than unjust health disparities (Epstein 2007:286; Graves and Goodman 2021). From there, it does not take much effort for audiences and stakeholders to lose sight of the interactive processes captured in the embodiment concept and instead begin to conceptualize the causal processes as “biological ones unfolding inside the bodies of those who are ‘different’” (Epstein 2007:301). In sum, scholars have raised the possibility that health disparities findings can be interpreted, misconstrued, or glossed over in ways that re-inculcate a biological essentialist understanding of race.

Problems of Knowledge and Ignorance

We connect this idea to the emerging fields known as agnotology or the sociology of ignorance (McGoey 2012; Proctor and Schiebinger 2008). These literatures illuminate the flipside of the adage that all knowledge is partial, by studying inattention, misunderstandings, and even deception. These forms of ignorance are not simply absences of information, impediments, or precursors to knowledge (McGoey 2012:3). Rather, they are “social facts,” or conditions with a “productive force” of their own, and scholars have begun to theorize the ways ignorance contributes to the apperception of reality (McGoey 2012:3) as well as the ways ignorance constitutes racial projects. In particular, writings by Mueller and Mills lay out the gambits for this scholarship: at the same time racial projects create the conditions by which “racialized subjectivities are invented, maintained, and manipulated” (Mueller 2018:8), they also cultivate a kind of ignorance that makes whites in general “misinterpret” or “unable to understand the world they themselves have made” (Mills 1997:18).

To appreciate how ignorance unfolds in our empirical case, we engage with Medina’s (2013:45) distinction between first-order and second-order racial ignorance. Concerns about possible misinterpretations of health disparities research largely fall within the bounds of the former. First-order racial ignorance is what happens when “things we should know about the racialized subjects we interact with” fail to materialize because our “social perception of racial others” is predicated on “specific distorted beliefs or epistemic lacunas.” The idea that health disparities research may reinscribe biological essentialist accounts is a prototypical concern about first-order racial ignorance (Mueller 2020:148) – rather than understand racial groups and race relations as products of sociohistorical processes, a variety of myths and sometimes misuses of science intercede to construct these as biologically destined.

There is good reason to speculate that this is the epistemic role health disparities research plays within white nationalism, as there is a long tradition of organized white supremacists employing ideas about health in such ways. For instance, medical understandings drove slaveholders’ and segregationists’ beliefs that Afro-descended peoples were destined for servitude (Savitt 2002). Furthermore, eugenics reformers advocated for immigration policy that restricted “socially inadequate persons,” who were defined by their likelihood to be feeble-minded, epileptic, diseased, or disabled (Ordover 2003:29) – a sentiment echoed by nativist think tanks today (Ordover 2003; Stern 2005). Last, many contemporary white nationalists appropriate various kinds of behavioral research (Stern 2019; Tucker 2007), to claim that ethnoracial minorities have some kind of biologically-rooted propensity for low intelligence, high criminal activity, and poor psychosocial dispositions (Fallin et al. 2019; Jackson and Winston 2021). Thus, according to the existing literature, across history, ideas about health hold a specific function for organized white supremacists. They serve the hypothesizing and making of difference (Goldberg 1993:153), particularly in ways that justify “the disenfranchisement of the most politically, socially, and/or economically vulnerable groups in the United States” (Ordover 2003:208).

However, there is one important factor that complicates this reading of why white nationalists turn to health disparities research: whatever its limitations, such research is part of a maneuver to rectify first-order racial ignorance. Whether by making explicit the oft-ignored relationship between social context and health, such that adverse health conditions among whites are sometimes showcased, or by commenting on how medicine has historically neglected ethnoracial minorities, health disparities research is part of a program that challenges simple bio-reductionist accounts or theories of ethno-hereditary superiority. Though such research, as described earlier, does implement these insights unevenly in practice, they are far from incidental in this world of research. Thus, to properly understand the ignorance that accompanies manipulation or systematic misappropriation of health disparities research, we need to also study how actors relate to the meta-scholarly aims that accompany it.

To do so requires exploring the role of second-order racial ignorance – the epistemic dimension by which racial domination makes actors “blind to their own blindness,” “insensitive to their own insensitivity,” or indifferent to the problem that “distorted beliefs or epistemic lacunas” may pose (Medina 2013:45). Here, actors focus on efforts to create awareness and knowledge of ethnoracial others, and engage not with the veracity of the informational content that accompanies these efforts, but instead the relationship to consciousness-raising that these efforts entail. In Medina’s formulation, second-order racial ignorance captures the conceptual space with which colorblindness constitutes racialized ignorance – as actors do not exactly dispute awareness or knowledge of race, but rather seek to minimize the role such understanding plays in daily life. Our analysis will reveal a markedly different modality that produces second-order racial ignorance: one that strives for critical engagement instead of minimization.

Argument and Analytic Approach

In brief, we discover that white nationalists engage with health disparities research not simply because such research contains data points they seek to misappropriate. Rather, they also engage with such research because it involves statements about how to contextually cognize race in order to reconstruct one’s scientific outlook – all of which they seek to contest. Through contestation, white nationalists develop a specific way of becoming “blind to their own blindness” or “insensitive to their own insensitivity” (Medina 2013:45): they defend themselves as acting in the true interest of science and argue that the science establishment is beholden to non-scientific principles that occlude inquiry into race and health. Thus, in an ironic turn, they uncannily mirror the agnotology and sociology of ignorance literatures, by charging science insiders for being corrupt, compromising themselves intellectually, and producing ignorance about both biology and race.

What we observe is essentially a form of lay agnotology. To convey what we mean, we need to first clarify the term agnotology, which has at least two different uses in the literature. In some cases, it’s a term to designate a field of scholarship – the academic study of ignorance. In others, it’s a term to label the cultural or institutional apparatuses that produce ignorance in the world. One prominent volume on the topic uses both meanings interchangeably in the introduction (Proctor and Schiebinger 2008). For this paper’s purposes, we adopt the first meaning. Thus, lay agnotology refers to non-expert, non-credentialed, or non-academic actors claiming a unique kind of competency (cf. Epstein 1996), which is their ability as non-specialists to identify and decode what they perceive as ignorance or obfuscation in the way specialists handle data. Though this form of non-expert critique has yet to be named or elaborated, some scholarship offers insights as to why such claimsmaking may become its own phenomena: when actors position ‘doubt’ and ‘skepticism’ as meaningful tools in public argument (Oreskes and Conway 2011), the ability for actors to claim that others are in the dark while they and their allies are truly enlightened gains discursive appeal (Kempner, Merz, and Bosk 2011; Stern 2019). Thus, the kinds of critique captured by lay agnotology can become ends in themselves; as demystification of science becomes a knowledge goal, appeals to an idealized cognitive state can become drivers of critical engagement of science as much as assessments of factual veracity.

This style of critique is part of the family of epistemic maneuvers that allow actors “to bypass racial awareness, re-establish ignorance, and justify ongoing domination” (Mueller 2017:225), though operating with a different logic than ones previously articulated by scholars. Here, lay agnotology revitalizes racial ignorance by portraying scientific-cum-professional understandings of race as products of a corrupt environment. After discussing methods, we identify and elaborate three manifestations of this in the findings.

METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Site Selection

We focus on American Renaissance (henceforth, “AR”), a white nationalist news and commentary website². The site’s content dates as early as 1990, when AR started as a monthly, mail-delivered publication, before transitioning fully online in 2012. Aside from health research, visitors can find daily updated coverage of a range of issues tailored for a white nationalist audience, such as immigration, crime, scorn for politicians, racial preservation, and others.

White nationalism is in many ways a varied phenomenon, with differences in tactics, political aims, religious orientations, and other features. Nonetheless, one often finds across subgroups many similar positions, which are well-expressed at AR:

…race is an important aspect of individual and group identity…different races build different societies…it is entirely normal for whites (or for people of any other race) to want to be the majority race in their own homeland. If whites permit themselves to become a minority population, they will lose their civilization, their heritage, and even their existence as a distinct people.

As the quote alludes, among white nationalists, race is often treated as the dominant social category in human history, determining politics and forms of social domination. Additionally, race is also transmitted genetically, with the implication being that fighting against social hierarchies and race-based collective identities amount to futile denials of biology. As another AR quote claims: “…racial solidarity is no different from – and just as necessary as family solidarity. The genetic underpinnings of ethnic consciousness are as strong as those of the love parents have for their children.” Therefore, while AR may not reflect the political priorities, religious views, or tactical philosophies of all white nationalists, the content nonetheless captures common strands of racialized thinking that most participants within this social world are invested in.

We follow the approach of many recent sociological studies of digital media and start by carefully selecting “an online research site or corpus of digital texts” to analyze (Recuber 2017:52). For such purposes, our focus on AR is analytically strategic for two reasons. First, the site has a race and health tag for content, which brings up more than 600 entries that date from the site’s origins to the present. These include multiple forms of content, such as original essays and health news from mainstream outlets that the site has reposted. The availability of this tag, as the literature on “folksonomies” instructs (Recuber 2017:53; Vander Wal 2007), allows the practices of white nationalists to craft the corpus for us, as we follow them to the things that they have designated as relevant.

Second, the site plays an influential role within the online world of white nationalism. One Southern Poverty Law Center report concludes that Jared Taylor, AR’s founder and president, and his content are often identified by online white nationalists as their first-stepping stone into white nationalist ideology³. Elsewhere in our research, we have seen other white nationalist sites and message boards link to content produced at AR⁴. For instance, on Stormfront⁵, a white nationalist message board, at the same time users complain that AR is “pretty tame,” users will also link to AR content when providing advice on “how to help a friend” find racial consciousness, responding to requests for “best articles, studies, and essays about race,” or advising others on how to get past removal of “search results for race science material” from search engines. In sum, the detailed focus on this site enables us to grasp a high volume of health-related content, communicated in a way meaningful to many if not most white nationalists.

Data Analysis and Interpretive Considerations

Our coding and analytic process was iterative, drawing on multiple moments of abduction to refine our contribution (Tavory and Timmermans 2014). We began with an interest in the social tropes for which white nationalists might use health disparities research – such as to portray immigrants as disease-prone or minorities as physiologically inferior (Kraut 1995). Very quickly, we discovered that though such ideas were present, just as salient was another use of such research, in which white nationalists fixated on the institutions of science and medicine. This facilitated one of the first abductive maneuvers and allowed us to rethink what our data represented: we identified that such material was being used to facilitate a more familiar, well-studied mode of biological essentialist reasoning as well as a less studied mode of scientific commentary.

To explicate the latter, we shifted the aims of the project, from traditional content analysis to concept-building. Similarly, our analytic strategy shifted as well. Rather than pre-identify tropes based on the literature and then code for their frequencies, we subjected the material to a theory-minded form of the constant comparative method (Tavory and Timmermans 2014; see also Lichterman and Reed 2015), drawing from the subject matter literatures on white nationalism, extremism, and conservative politics and the sociological literatures on race, knowledge, and ignorance (Medina 2013; Mueller 2017; Stern 2019; Tenold 2018). The former alerted us to a specific culture wars maneuvering within white nationalism. Here, themes about blindness, awakening, and revelation are deployed to broaden the tenor of one’s political commitments, from defending and projecting political values to also interrogating and sharpening the epistemic basis of one’s values. We launched tentative hypotheses to analyze whether the use of “political correctness,” “egalitarianism,” and similar excoriations present in the data reflected this focus on epistemology rather than, or in addition to, traditional culture wars emphasis on values. As this interpretation began to take shape, we recognized the need to theorize this particular intersection of politics and epistemology in relation to the literature on racialized ignorance.

To provide granularity to our account, we coded for different ways in which white nationalists practiced this epistemic work. We traced the inner-workings of this claimsmaking as it related to health disparities research, being particularly attentive to the dimensions of conditions, actions/interactions, and consequences as suggested by Strauss and Corbin (1998:128). This process was also abductive; we leveraged continuities and discrepancies with white nationalism scholarship to drive dataset variation (Tavory and Timmermans 2014:73), understanding that themes about grievance, domination, nostalgia, or perceived loss may relate to this epistemic work. We developed metapolitical reframing, science reclamation, and data juxtaposition – elaborated in the empirical section – as three sensitizing concepts to apprehend the intellectual maneuvering at play. As the reader will note, these concepts are highly interlinked. We encourage readers to treat them as heuristics for understanding the epistemology that informs this appropriation of health disparities rather than as discrete frames.

One last consideration worth noting is that the claims that we study sometimes involve a mixture of genuine argument and unscrupulous practice. An early entry in AR, covering a study co-authored by epidemiologist Nancy Krieger, succinctly demonstrates:

Working class black men who said they suffered no racial discrimination had higher blood pressure than those who reported discrimination. Nothing daunted, the researchers decided that any blacks who reported no discrimination had “internalized oppression” and were, in fact, suffering from racism worse than anyone. The study also concluded that complaining about racism lowered blood pressure for working class women but raised it for working class men. White collar men showed a different pattern from working-class men. As one of the researchers, Nancy Krieger, explained in a burst of candor, “One approach to our results is that to say that they don’t intuitively make sense, and to ignore them.”

By pointing out counter-intuitive findings and the “internalized oppression” reference, the entry demonstrates a common argumentative form, which involves depicting one’s opponents as nonsensical. On the other hand, a halfway discerning reader will notice that something is amiss in the handling of the Krieger quote, particularly that the contrasting, follow-up explanation that a rhetorical phrase like “one approach” sets up is missing. Indeed, the original Washington Post article which AR cribbed for this entry has the following quote from Krieger only three words later (but omitted in AR’s entry): “The other way is to say that they raise provocative questions that accord with other understandings about how racial discrimination works and may affect health, and may vary by gender and socioeconomic position.” We do not focus on this latter aspect of appropriation, a point which we clarify here since this kind of practice is sometimes the focus of other ignorance scholarship. While this practice is noteworthy, we leave it to future scholarship to study with depth. Given our interest in how health disparities fit into the white nationalist cosmology, we focus on the other aspects of claimsmaking demonstrated in the block quote above.

HEALTH DISPARITIES AND FIRST-ORDER RACIALIZED IGNORANCE

Both health generally and health disparities specifically appear in ways that reflect first-order racialized ignorance, in efforts to shape ideas about the physicality and biology of ethnoracial groups. We briefly describe this, as doing so will illustrate differences found in the next approach.

Health topics feed two key ontological assumptions about race. First, they support the impression that humanity involves biologically distinct groups of humans. Some health stories root the etiology of these distinctions in behavioral properties, with the idea that racial groups have different capacities for making choices about their health. We see this with stories about HIV rates and other sexually transmitted infections among black Americans, as well as coverage of smoking rates, alcoholism, and diet among black Americans and other minorities. Others suggest these distinctions are unrelated to choice and constitutionally locked in. This is where many core health disparities findings, such as life expectancy and mortality rates, come into play. One early entry from the site’s history asserts:

Life expectancy for American blacks has dropped for the fourth year in a row. Blacks can expect to live to age 69.2 while whites can expect to live to age 75.6…Blacks are also far more likely than whites to die from curable diseases. Appendicitis, pneumonia, gallbladder infection, asthma, tuberculosis, influenza, and a number of other diseases are rarely fatal if they are treated early. Blacks account for 80% of the 20,000 or so deaths from these diseases that are recorded every year, which means that they are more than 25 times more likely to die from them than Americans of other races.

In later years, this kind of coverage multiplies in terms of quantity and the disease subjects involved, as we see AR report to their audience about differential rates of cancer, obesity, heart disease, and other conditions across demographic groups. Furthermore, as researchers begin to identify molecular pathways that are implicated in such disparities, we also see entries about candidate genes, fat metabolism, vitamin absorption, protein absorption, and others – all circulated for what they say about the ostensible origins of such differences.

Second, health discussions reinforce the notion that blackness is by nature the most debilitating racialized status. While articles sometimes combine statements like “there are clear genetic differences between the races that affect health” with caveats like “and whites do not always fare the best,” writings are quite decided about which individuals fare the worst. After listing multiple ways “the races differ so obviously from each other,” one essay proclaims:

Most of the known medical differences, however, seem to disadvantage blacks. Black women are twice as likely to have strokes as white or Hispanic women, and they suffer more damaging aftereffects. Blacks are three to four times more likely to have dangerously underweight babies. This could be due to bad diet, poor health, or scant medical care, but some studies indicate that even when these factors are equalized, black babies are more likely to be underweight.

As the reference to “Hispanic women” indicates, health disparities statistics allow white nationalists to make pronouncements about blackness by incorporating data points beyond the black-white binary. Along these lines, white nationalists often invoke data involving Asian Americans too – for instance, by generalizing that “[b]lacks have the highest disease and death rates, followed by whites, followed by Asians.”

Together, these figures allow white nationalists to foster antiblackness in a particular way. By citing figures that indicate that “whites are by no means the healthiest Americans,” white nationalists profess more relativist viewpoints about whiteness, claiming agnosticism about white superiority or where whites occupy the racial hierarchy. However, by citing stories about higher likelihoods of preventable deaths, curable deaths, or poor maternal and infant health among black Americans, white nationalists construct a rigid viewpoint about blackness; whatever shape the racial hierarchy takes or whatever variability it inhabits, it’s clear who in health terms occupies the lowest status or is least “biologically designed” for longevity.

HEALTH DISPARITIES AND SECOND-ORDER RACIALIZED IGNORANCE

Analyzing the role of biodeterminist reasoning helps explain why white nationalists may consider health disparities research appealing, as it connects to aspects of first-order racialized ignorance that they hold. However, this does not fully explain why such research is ultimately appropriated by white nationalists, as such research aims to conceptualize health disparities in terms of inequities. Incorporating it only risks amplifying the structural analysis that is often interwoven into such research.

Actual practices only deepen this peculiarity, as white nationalists not only incorporate such research but also directly foreground the structural analysis:

On average, blacks are less healthy than whites and die sooner. They are more likely to die in infancy, get serious diseases, or die from accidents and murder. All of this is usually attributed to ‘racism’ – either to direct harm caused by a prejudiced medical establishment or to the effects of the poverty and ignorance that are said to flow from racism.

In instances like this, white nationalists showcase that the actual experts responsible for the research they find fascinating are drawing conclusions inconvenient for a white nationalist perspective. Rather than run away from or obscure such conclusions, they are brought to the fore.

However, these practices also begin to contextualize this peculiarity and illustrate why white nationalists see such research as worth engaging. It provides opportunities to illustrate how basic points of information about race and its essential nature are systematically undermined. Sometimes, like the excerpt in the paragraph above imputes, this happens because of distortion, as experts find it “fashionable to claim racism.” In other cases, this happens due to social quiescence, as one article claims that “society generally keeps quiet about physical differences between the races, but information about them occasionally surfaces in news stories about disease.” To recuperate the knowledge potential of these findings, white nationalists do more than continue to invoke such data points in their favor. They also proceed to refute how the broader science establishment handles such data – thereby creating the conditions for second-order racialized ignorance, or the ways actors develop blindness about their own blindness or insensitivity towards their own insensitivity.

This refutation, when practiced, results in white nationalists’ production of lay agnotology, a type of claimsmaking in which they as non-specialists impute what they see as ignorance or obfuscation in the ways specialists handle data. In the remainder of this section, we detail three ways by which white nationalists execute this approach: metapolitical reframing, science reclamation, and data juxtaposition.

Metapolitical Reframing

Metapolitical reframing involves conveying to audiences a foundational assumption, which is that science is broken. Here, ‘science is broken’ for reasons that people do not even realize: it has become occupied by certain preconceptions which distort how people can even perceive facts and reality in the first place, or it is increasingly governed by political, non-scientific considerations that are taken for granted. To label this aspect, we draw on the notion of metapolitics – which in political theory captures the social, cultural, and political discussions that people produce about the broader field within which political actors, processes, and institutions reside (Stern 2019). Similarly, this practice is oriented more towards the environment of scientific claims and less towards the claims themselves.

Much of metapolitical reframing takes the shape of three sets of claims. The first focuses on the nature of the intellectual problem, which is that a variety of forces have interceded to make scientists and non-scientists see “racial disparities in society [as] exclusively the result of socioeconomic forces that adversely impact blacks and other racial minorities.” One AR editorial analyzing New York Times coverage of maternal health care disparities illustrates:

The crisis is that black women are three to four times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy related complications. The causes are, to use the Times’s words “societal and systemic racism” and “pervasive, longstanding racial bias in health care.” The New York Times couldn’t think of any other explanation.

I can. There are conditions that make a mother more likely to die from childbirth complications, and here are some of the racial differences.

After listing a series of health disparities – re-branded with the term “racial differences” – implicated in black maternal health, the author finishes:

All these things contribute to higher black maternal death rates, but there was not one word out of all 10,000 in this article about any of them. The Times wants you to think the only problem is racism.

Passages like these represent a common form of metapolitical reframing. In them, writers accumulate statistics, which allow them to not only convey that black women are essentially weaker compared to white women, but also to prompt awareness of the fact that “[t]he New York Times couldn’t think of any other explanation” or “The Times wants you to think the only problem is racism.” With statements like these, white nationalists demonstrate for their audiences how truncated the environment of inquiry surrounding racialized health knowledge has allegedly become.

White nationalists often augment this with a second set of claims, focused on elaborating the sources of this omission or distortion. Sometimes, the source is attributed to some kind of elite-orchestrated arrangement, as writers charge that “society’s egalitarian gatekeepers have established perimeters of acceptability when confronting stubborn racial inequalities” or that “societal elites manipulate rational perspectives on the subject of race.” At other times, this is attributed to more diffuse but still powerful processes, like a “racial taboo” or an “egalitarian orthodoxy,” which require that we imagine “all races have the same genetic potential for good health and long life” or that “there’s only one official, obligatory answer – racism” to questions about disparities. Along these lines, AR writings sometimes impugn the social construction of race as the culprit. As one article puts it, “the term ‘social construct’ is usually used as an excuse to stop thinking: just announce that scientists have proven that race is socially constructed and you can shut down all cognitive processes without worry that you’ll get in trouble for crimethink.”

Having established that multiple forces are “airbrushing racial differences out of racial disparities” (emphasis in original), metapolitical reframing often involves a third set of claims, focused on illustrating the downstream consequences that ensue. In some cases, white nationalists appropriate health disparities research to convey that such forces are creating what can be considered inaccurate medicine. One recent illustration involves coverage of health disparities concerns in relation to vaccine development:

The Centers for Disease Control advised states to consider non-whites a critical group for vaccine distribution…“Historically, the committee relied on scientific evidence to inform its decisions,” said the New York Times. “But now the members are weighing social justice concerns as well.” So much for “trusting the science”…

Vaccines are about biology, not ideology, and they may not work the same for all people. A study from MIT found that the vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer may be less effective on blacks or Asians. Is the vaccine ‘racist?’ Of course not. However, we can’t discuss race, so we can’t make rational policy choices on healthcare…

As in the Chernobyl disaster, those who control information twist the truth to uphold ideology. The ideology may hurt the people it claims to help, but it doesn’t matter. The lie is more important than lives.

By arranging tidbits of info in this way, white nationalists allege that authorities practice science in a way that, as another author puts it, “fails to notice the importance of the active ingredients in various composites – whether the role of DNA or the importance of eggs, flour, milk, and baking powder in making pancake batter.” In sum, the way health disparities research is handled produces medicine that is not grounded in fundamentals.

In other cases, health disparities research is assembled to show that such orthodoxies are not necessarily creating inaccurate medicine, but turning medicine into a self-contradicting institution. Upon proclaiming that “I have come to realize that the ethos of egalitarianism has corrupted my profession,” one physician, writing an article titled “Multiculturalism and Medicine: A Deadly Combination,” proceeds to explain. He begins by describing entries in medical journals that describe whites at greater risk of osteoporosis in comparison to African-Americans or African-Americans at greater risk for kidney disease than whites, before telling readers:

Now the bad news. After honest discussion about varying racial predispositions to disease, most health care articles descend into obligatory diatribes about discrimination, bias, and needed government programs. It is ominously reminiscent of the quasi-Marxist race/gender/class deconstructionism that now goes on in English departments across the country after reading one of the Western classics.

In moments like these, writers use health disparities research as proof of how modern medicine has become either two-faced or otherwise subordinated to contemporary social politics. The recurring sentiment is that even though the medical establishment may admonish its practitioners that “race-based medicine is wrong” or that “race is merely a social and political construct,” a close look at physicians’ practices belies the ways that physicians otherwise accept an essentialist understanding of what health disparities signify (i.e. the “honest discussion about varying racial dispositions,” as the quote puts it). Physicians accept the essentialist premise because, as different writings argue, “the claim that all people are created equal doesn’t hold up in the hospital room” or “few would wish to deny anyone proper medical care in order to maintain the pretense that race is a social construct.”

Indeed, as the latter statement indicates, white nationalists often use health disparities research to demonstrate how the social construction of race specifically has intellectually compromised medicine. Separate from the previously alluded to point, that health disparities knowledge requires doctors to practically reject social constructionism, or otherwise risk malpractice, writings often conjoin health disparities research with snarky statements to charge that experts refuse to see what is right in front of them. For instance, one can find the refrain “and yet race is still a ‘social construct’” tacked on to stories to illustrate a common theme: because health conditions cannot be understood as social constructs⁶, one must stop seeing related racial variations as social constructs.

In conclusion, by suggesting that public health conclusions are wrong-headed, authors convey that there is something earlier in the decision-making chain facilitating such illogical thinking. Thus, among the three maneuvers that comprise the empirical section, metapolitical reframing takes on particular significance. It operates in a manner akin to what Corbin and Strauss term a “central category” (1998:147). It provides the central premise to which other maneuvers relate: science has an upstream problem, which cannot be dealt with by simply debating facts and instead necessitates indicting the conditions of research and knowledge production. Subsequent diagnoses of conditions or strategies of action flow from the gestalt switch that this meaning flips for white nationalists, as we begin to see next with science reclamation.

Science Reclamation

While white nationalists describe science as broken, they also project a vision of the inverse: what it takes to fix science and reclaim it from orthodox, political correctness. Three recurrent features characterize white nationalists’ understanding of what this will involve. The first is a sense that scientific progress will actually require regress. On the one hand, reclamation sounds like a future-oriented goal, one that involves emerging from the present with a better understanding of science. As one section of AR puts it:

race realists have a great advantage over those who push egalitarian orthodoxy: We accept what science says about race and genetics, and are eager for further discoveries. The more progress science makes the more secure our positions become.

On the other, in practice, reclamation is often backwards-looking:

Just as it was once universally accepted that races differ in intelligence, so the study of physical differences was once entirely respectable. Some 19^th century investigators, however, hoped to find justifications for slavery and not all were good scientists. Therefore, in the revolt against “racism,” good data from the past has been thrown out along with the bad, and the study of physical differences has languished. The modern data now becoming available confirm many 19^th century views. The best evidence suggests that races differ markedly in such things as maturation rate, brain size, bone density, susceptibility to disease, and perhaps even personality.

Thus, health disparities data provide white nationalists with an opportunity to question whether the racialized understandings of yesteryear ever were truly discarded. In doing so, they shore up the impression that science advancement requires more than a faith in “progress,” which, as Stern (2019:43) puts it, in the white nationalist imagination amounts to no more than a fairytale. Instead, science advancement requires what one white nationalist thought leader refers to as “an archaic mindset,” which “harks back to the ancestral,” or envisions “techno-scientific progress” as occurring in tandem with “a return to the traditional answers that stretch back into the mists of time” (quoted in Stern [2019:43])

The second feature involves assumptions about the origins, locations, or nature of the data best suited for reclamation. As white nationalists see it, there are pieces of data in the wild, so to speak, waiting to be reinterpreted, and health topics often provide such data. As one essay puts it, “our society generally keeps quiet about physical differences between the races, but information about them occasionally surfaces in news stories about disease.” In this mode, health topics provide a way of vigilantly looking out for the “further discoveries” that will confirm the mantra that race is real. Another essay concurs, with more depth, as it describes the state of race research:

…One of the consequences of the absence of work in this field is that there is a gold mine of data about the biological realities of race. Actually a gold mine is probably the wrong image because it implies one must dig and work to collect the prize. It’s really more like a riverbed strewn with gold nuggets. Race biology data have accumulated all around us and are lying there waiting to be picked up and publicized.

Some of these so-called “gold nuggets,” the essay ends up identifying, come in the form of data that illustrate that “the African-American population suffers a very wide range of health problems.” The essay devotes its final section to this, describing health disparities indicators like life expectancy and infant mortality and concluding that they indicate “genetic incompatibilities” among African-Americans. Though the essay describes these health problems as “one of the best reported phenomena in present-day America,” the essay ultimately frames such data as in need of reclamation, pronouncing that “needless to say, there is no research now being done in this field.”

Finally, to whatever degree these “nuggets” are strewn about, the third key idea behind science reclamation is that white nationalists rather than insiders are uniquely positioned to accomplish this. Even if many within science and medicine operate under racial essentialist assumptions, as ideas in the previous section allege, these individuals cannot be counted on to fully open their eyes. One example of this comes in a review of Sally Satel’s PC, M.D: How Political Correctness is Corrupting Medicine. The reviewer begins by commending Satel’s analysis of how “indoctrinologists” have “hijacked the entire health profession” and “put ideology before all else – before science, commonsense, and even patients.” Yet, this is not enough, as the review later adds:

PC, M.D. also attacks the claims that the medical establishment mistreats non-whites. Although the book is a little light in this area, it does touch on outright racial differences in disease and mortality rates that suggest different outcomes have biological causes. For example, Dr. Satel cites the usual charge that black infants die more frequently than white infants because black mothers don’t get the pre-natal care they deserve…Dr. Satel notes that Hispanics, who get even less pre-natal care than blacks, have lower infant mortality than whites. She hints there may be biological reasons for this, but also talks about “Mexican heritage”…Just as intelligence differences cause racial gaps in academic achievement, biological differences cause health differences. Perhaps it is asking too much of the good doctor to make this point, but until she does, her opponents can always argue that “racism” makes blacks sicker than whites.

As the critique of Satel suggests, white nationalists are appreciative when insiders demonstrate awareness of how race is tied to biology and how political correctness obstructs understandings of those ties. However, there is also a conviction – “perhaps it is asking too much of the good doctor” – that insiders do not have the wherewithal to ultimately abandon deference to environment and culture in promoting racial essentialist understandings of health.

Data Juxtaposition

Ultimately, science reclamation involves becoming a practitioner of some kind or at least demonstrating action of some sort. As much as white nationalists may pronounce that “the more progress science makes the more secure our positions become,” the other arguments made in service of lay agnotology undermine the sense that such progress will simply arrive. Much of the actual reclamation work involves the practice of editorializing or offering commentary. Lacking the training or position to conduct professional research, most white nationalists resort to flexing their critical thinking skills, by which they assemble mainstream reporting regarding health disparities research and offer reflections, punditry, or assessments about the state of health research. One common tactic used in service of this is juxtaposition of data. This is done in such a way that it allows white nationalists to argue that in the medical establishment’s handling of information there is some ostensible gap or contradiction that requires scrutiny.

One of the ways data are juxtaposed comes in a form we have seen previously, which is to illustrate that some ethnoracial minorities experience more favorable health conditions, either in comparison to one another or in comparison to whites. For instance, AR articles frequently point out in their own words what essentially has come to be known as the Hispanic paradox or Latino paradox in epidemiological and social science circles – that on average Latinos living in the United States have health outcomes similar to or better than white Americans, despite lower average socioeconomic status (Franzini, Ribble, and Keddie 2001). One entry assembles such pieces of information – pointing out higher life expectancy statistics among Latinos, despite their higher likelihood of being uninsured – before concluding:

…if the stress of white racism causes negative health outcomes for blacks, one would expect the same for Hispanics…The long life expectancy of Hispanics undercuts the ‘racism’ explanation, just as high Asian SAT scores demolish the claim that standardized testing is designed to serve white interests.

By comparing these statistics, white nationalists are able to communicate what they see as their version of a paradox – as the article concludes, “Unless Hispanics and Native Hawaiians are somehow immune to ‘white racism,’ the theory that ‘stress caused by bigotry leads to negative health outcomes’ does not appear to explain differences in maternal mortality.”

Juxtaposing statistics has a second function, which is that it also allows white nationalists to illustrate what they see as simply biological curiosities that make up the human species. To cultivate this theme, white nationalists compare statistics in a way that allows them to finesse counterintuitive findings, in a way related to, but also separate from, their aim at debunking the role attributed to racism in health disparities accounts. One entry, for instance, uses data about Native Americans and Asians:

Indians also smoke more than everyone but Southeast Asians, but have the second-lowest cancer rates. They die from smoking-related cancers (lung, esophagus, larynx) at about half the white rate. Indians may well have a genetic resistance to lung cancer just as they have a predisposition to alcoholism…

Asians are less likely than whites to suffer from serious diseases, but there are a few exceptions. One is diabetes. Asians are more likely than whites to have the disease but less likely to die from it. Asians seem to get a less deadly or slower-acting form.

The goal in moments like these is to convey that “science is steadily demolishing the view that races are genetically equivalent,” as AR puts it. This point about genetic equivalence, here, is a specific one. While this phrase certainly echoes some of the ideas manifested by first-order racialized ignorance – in that some ethnoracial groups can be scientifically identified as inferior – here it is being used to project an appreciation for genetic differences. Namely, the point is that different ethnoracial groups, for whatever biological reason, have advantages and disadvantages for different outcomes, all of which need to be documented. This use of statistics downplays some of the hierarchical notions that white nationalists associate with race, but in doing so it provides another way of using the science establishment’s data against itself – to scrutinize the assertion that there are no genetic differences among racial groups.

The last way we will illustrate how white nationalists juxtapose data to indicate gaps in knowledge involves the subject of white health. Here, white nationalists leverage some of this data, in particular the ones that indicate certain ethnoracial groups have better health outcomes than whites in regards to specific conditions, to suggest that certain “disparities” are marked as off limits for investigation. Responding to a Department of Health and Human Services announcement from the Obama administration, one writer argues that the proposal focuses on “racial/ethnic differences, not the actual level of illness.” The writer further develops the point:

Minorities are clearly less healthy than whites as indicated by indices of heart disease, diabetes, infant mortality, certain cancers, asthma, and kidney disease. But, disentangling this race/ethnicity/income/health relationship is a nightmare and entails some awkward unspeakable PC issues that warrant attention…And, how do we address health problems like osteoporosis that disproportionately afflict whites?

The latter data point begins to illustrate what white nationalists suggest is some kind of fraud in the broader health disparities venture; whites on occasion do have poorer health, yet this kind of condition is, in a sense, systematically overlooked due to the politics of the health disparities approach. A recent article, focused on coronavirus data, offers another version of this:

The other aspect of this that I find particularly frustrating is that to the extent that we have data, Asians and Hispanics appear to be dying at something around half of the white rate. But that doesn’t matter! The fact that whites are more likely to die than Asians or Hispanics – the Washington Post is certainly not going to say ‘White Americans Dying at an Alarmingly High Rate.’ No!

In short, white nationalists editorialize the concern for the health of ethnoracial minorities into evidence of lack of concern for white health. While the latter point may be offensive in and of itself to white nationalists, the specific point that they make here, in service of lay agnotology, is that these instances betray the fact that the health establishment does not follow health concerns as they manifest, and instead follows them based on politically motivated considerations.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

What role does health play in the white nationalist imagination? We demonstrate that health is not limited to biodeterminist reasoning or coercive social policy ideas. Instead, it also fosters an auxiliary discourse that politicizes non-essentialist, contextual understandings of race as liberal incursions into science, forms of intellectual domination, or conceptual fictions. This creates the context for a different kind of knowledge project within white nationalism – one which scans research for not only signs of scientific support for racist thought but also evidence of science’s complicity in the distortion of reality. If “agnotology is the study of ignorance, the lost and forgotten,” then the processes analyzed here represent a form of lay agnotology, as it involves mostly uncredentialed or non-academic actors taking it upon themselves to develop “tools for understanding how and why various forms of knowing have ‘not come to be,’ or disappeared, or have been delayed or long neglected” (Proctor and Schiebinger 2008:vii).

Our exploration of lay agnotology points to an insight for the developing agnotology and racialized ignorance literatures beyond the specifics of our case. What we discover is that ignorance does not just exist either through proactive practices that facilitate one inaccurate impression about a subject, or through taken-for-granted practices that disincentivize inquiry and create non-knowing about a subject. Instead, it may also come in the form of reflexive practices, which yoke together grievances about one’s epistemic position with skepticism or doubt about the institutions charged with knowledgeability about a subject. Thus, in keeping with the reflexive modernity perspective (Beck, Giddens, and Lash 1994), our analysis also illustrates that social scientists need to continue understanding the public as a reflexive public, capable of suspending authoritative institutions of their taken-for-granted status by using such institutions’ own knowledge and practices as a basis for scrutiny. It also suggests that the perspective is due for revisitation, as the defining trait of reflexivity may mean that modernity is just as defined by reflexive ignorance as it is by reflexive knowledge.

Our finding has significance for the substantive literatures on white nationalism and extremism. Here, we gain an important lesson about how white nationalists have broadened the repertoire of contention surrounding race politics. For white nationalists, the authority of biodeterminist reasoning does not only emerge from their ability to defend essentialist thinking or articulate group-based animus. It also emerges from their ability to portray science as compromised or suggest that non-essentialist accounts of race become authoritative only through intellectual concessions or superficial posturing from experts. Importantly, this suggests that race science is not an endeavor always defined by the refinement or advancement of essentialist thinking or even appeals to its soundness (see also Dasgupta, Panofsky, and Iturriaga 2022). Rather, fortifying the impression that scientists, researchers, or the media are unsound or questionable in their handling of race, health, and biology can be as central to the project of race science. In this regard, the role of metapolitical reframing specifically is noteworthy, as it demonstrates how white nationalists have transformed what might seem like another iteration of the culture wars – decrying about political correctness and egalitarianism – into the entry point for a counterknowledge project. It beckons sympathizers and adherents to recognize that a racist, hierarchical worldview requires more than political attacks or ideological commitment. Instead, it requires epistemic vigilance, which may begin with things like skepticism towards or denunciations of science, but can transform into more elaborate beliefs and practices if one is inclined.

Finally, our finding has significance for the theoretical literatures on race, knowledge, and ignorance. Without disputing the centrality of biological essentialism or colorblind racism to the modern racial order, we illuminate another conceptual space that develops our understandings of racialized ignorance. Fundamentally, what we have discovered is that ideas about the institutional nature of the world can be as central to myth-making about race as are ideas about the essential nature of people or groups. From the perspective of this paper, stories about how institutions have developed racial affiliations or become proxy battles for a multiculturalist agenda may distort understanding of race relations as much as folk wisdoms about biology and heredity – or, relatedly, folk wisdoms about biology and heredity may become recalcitrant in part due to stories about institutions and actors that inhabit the social world. In this regard, we extend Mueller’s (2020:157) point that the epistemic maneuvers that constitute racialized ignorance are “powered by a militant commitment to ignorance.” We demonstrate that such militance does not only come from actively choosing time after time to ignore racial understanding or invoking evasive ideas about meritocracy and colorblindness. Rather, it can also come from a confrontational and critical posture that indicts others as lacking understanding about race. Though we have explicated these practices by studying white nationalism’s relationship to racist thought, there is good reason to think that much of what is detailed here is applicable beyond this space. In an era in which many institutions are making moves to recognize the role of racial inequality, organizations are crafting programs to minimize bias, and books devoted to antiracist thought are hitting bestseller lists, there is a strong possibility that the kinds of lay agnotology maneuvers explored in this paper may become common within the public, if not already, and shape how actors resist or evade understanding.