One Drop of Reality

A white supremacist scheming to take over a hamlet in North Dakota got a nice reality check on national television in the form of a DNA test result:

Craig Cobb, 61, who has tried to create a white enclave in tiny Leith, N.D., submitted a DNA sample to Trisha Goddard's talk show and got the results back during a recent taping.

The UK's Daily Mail newspaper got a copy of the segment of the show, which is nationally syndicated by NBC, and posted video of the moment Goddard read out the results to Cobb in front of a studio audience.

"Eighty-six percent European and," Goddard said, pausing as the audience started to cheer before she continued, "14 percent sub-Saharan African!"

Let's pause for a moment to consider the deterministic premise behind racism, which Ayn Rand once spelled out so well:

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage--the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Ayn Rand, who held that men have free will, vehemently disagreed with this notion, of course. Amusingly, but not surprisingly for someone with so much invested in the idea that virtue is genetically determined, Cobb is in deep denial. Dismissing the aforementioned results as "noise", he has vowed to avail himself of "real science" -- to have himself tested three more times and publish the results. I'm almost certain that we'll soon be hearing about a conspiracy among scientists -- who everyone knows are all Communists (and in cahoots with Barack Obama) anyway -- to discredit Cobb by libeling him with cooked-up results.

Of course, I could be as wrong about Cobb as he is about people of black ancestry. Maybe he will own up to being mixed race like so many other Americans are. And maybe he will reconsider how he judges character. But my evidence about him is more limited and points in quite the opposite direction than that I have about the members in general of any particular racial group: I won't be holding my breath.

-- CAV