Though science is not much in evidence when white nationalists take to the streets chanting slogans like “You will not replace us,” scholars of racist ideology say contemporary white racism draws on the trope of “natural” racial hierarchy used to justify the enslavement of African-Americans, the American eugenics movement in the early 20th century and Nazi “racial hygiene” laws.

The topic has been much discussed on the side at the group’s annual meeting this week.

“As human geneticists, we cannot ‘just focus on our research,’” one geneticist, Melissa Wilson Sayres of Arizona State University, said Thursday night on social media. “We cannot pretend that our research isn’t being misused. Doing so is being actively complicit with white supremacy/nationalism.”

The statement by the genetics association came after an article in The New York Times examined how scientists who study human genetic diversity were struggling to respond to the racist misuse of science, even as their tools to discover how human populations vary genetically become more powerful.

In a widely read Op-Ed in The New York Times earlier this year, the Harvard geneticist David Reich wrote that “arguing that no substantial differences among human populations are possible will only invite the racist misuse of genetics that we wish to avoid.”

[Read: Why white supremacists are chugging milk, and why geneticists are alarmed.]

The genetics group’s statement is a step toward trying to equip the public with the tools to understand the evolutionary processes that give rise to patterns of human genetic diversity, geneticists said. It explains that genetic variation between human populations is linked to patterns of migration and the mixing of populations throughout history. Given how much mixing has occurred, it says, the white supremacist notion of racial purity is “scientifically meaningless.”