August 2013. The blatantly false description of now arrested Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as “white” on his FBI wanted poster during the recent manhunt for him, has raised two pertinent questions: (1) what racial group are Chechens exactly, and (2) how does the US government define race?
To answer the first question: Chechens are in the present day a mixed-racial population. The location of their region, at the crossroads of east and west, has meant that various racial groups have passed through the country—and left their genetic traces—at different stages in history.
In ancient times, the region appears to have been first populated by the oldest European racial types (called “Mediterraneans” today) and then by Indo-Europeans. However, these European racial groups were then devastated by a series of non-European invaders.
The north of the country was held by the European Circassians while the Asiatic Avars invaded from the east, and a number of other smaller Turkic invaders penetrated the region, especially during the era of the great Muslim invasions of the Middle East.
The most dramatic non-European invasion was that of the Mongols in the 13th Century. This had a devastating impact on the region which was repeated once again the next century under the Asiatic-Turkic invader Tamerlane. (It is no coincidence that one of the Boston bombers, suspect 1, was named Tamerlane, as it became a widely-used name in Chechnya since the 14th century.)
After that period, Chechnya fell under the influence of the mixed-race Ottoman Turkish empire, particularly in a series of wars against the Russian Tsars who were expanding southward. After the Russians finally conquered the region, it was incorporated into greater Russia and then into the Soviet Union, a move which brought a fresh input of genes from European Russia.
As is to be expected from this historical mélange, the DNA of present day Chechnya reflects the wide diversity of racial origins.
According to the most recent survey of Chechen genetics, “Parallel Evolution of Genes and Languages in the Caucasus Region,” (Oleg Balanovsky et al., Molecular Biology and Evolution 2011), 56.7% of male Chechens display the Haplogroup J2, which is associated with the Semitic populations today found in Israel, much of the Middle East and southern Italy.
Other male haplogroups found in Chechnya include the Semitic J1, the European L (7%); the Middle Eastern and non-Semitic G2 (5.5%); the northern European R1a (3.9%), the Asiatic Q-M242 (3%) and the western European R1b-M269 (1.8%).
On the female side of Chechen DNA, as is also to be expected, there is a much closer correlation to European DNA. This is because invading armies are almost always male, and the female population of a conquered territory almost always survives an invasion—at least for one generation—and are taken up as wives by the male newcomers.
Overall then, it is safe to say that although there is a small European element present in Chechnya, the region is largely of mixed race, with an accent on a Middle Eastern and Semitic input.
Why then, leading on to question two, did the FBI announce that “Suspect 2” was “white,” especially when his picture clearly shows that he is not?
The answer lies in the pathetic—to say the least—racial categorizations used by the US government in all official census returns.
According to the official guide, the US Census uses the following categories of racial definitions:
“American India/Native Alaskan;
Asian;
Black/African American;
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander;
White (divided into non-Hispanic white and Hispanic white); and
Two or more race.”
White is officially classified as “Caucasians from any part of the world (including the Middle East) that do not identify with any of the other racial groups.”
In addition, “the US Census Bureau does not classify Muslims or Arabs as racial categories” saying these are “ethnic and religious categories.”
In these “definitions” lies the answer to question two: in a nutshell, the racial definitions used by the US government are unscientific and bear no relation to racial realities.
This has, of course, important ramifications beyond the misclassification of a Chechen bomber in Boston.
It means that white population figures in the US (according to the 2010 census) appear greater than what they actually are, due to the inclusion of who knows how many people such as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as “whites.”
Secondly, it artificially inflates the official US crime figures for “whites” by including Hispanics and Middle Eastern crime rates among European Americans, making them out to be far more criminally inclined than the reality.
Generally speaking chechen people are white and have been in their mountainous wooded terrain for over 8000 years, they defeated the Mongols twice the first time the great hord, then later Tamerlane ( who incidentally had blue eyes and red hire and beard) they have a strict clan based system and if you want to join you must assimilate completely to Chechen customs and learn their language to become a teips. Some Germans from the war did this and are a part German teips by ancestry, but this is small. The native Chechen’s are ancient Europeans by their DNA, of cause some not so European looking people are there but the overwhelming majority look European a little like the welsh. Many blooms and red haired people and green eyes is very common as is blue.