By Jason Lim
I recently read a fascinating NBC news article titled, “Inside the online world of people who think they can change their race.” The subtitle nicely encapsulates the first part of the article: “Practitioners of ‘race change to another,’ or RCTA, purport to be able to manifest physical changes in their appearance and even their genetics to truly become a different race.”
I guffawed at the word, “practitioners.”
Apparently, this is a phenomenon that’s becoming quite the subculture on YouTube, with RCTA “creators” producing videos that play a combination of soft music along with some type of visualization of which race the listener wants to look like. If you fall asleep watching these types of videos, you can incrementally transition into the target race. One video had the photo of Jennie from Blackpink and some wording next to it that exhorts the audience to look exactly like her. It’s actually creepy. The article quotes one 14-year-old Egyptian girl who claims to have developed monolid eyes and lost 2 pounds overnight after listening to such subliminal messages to rewire her DNA to be Japanese and Korean.
Seoul is the cosmetic surgery capital of the world famous for transforming the traditional East Asian face into one more resembling the Western ideals of beauty. Double eyelid surgery and rhinoplasty, as well as more extensive surgery to reshape the contours of the face to be slimmer and more convex, are almost the norm in certain demographics. Now we have non-Asians desiring monolid eyes and flat faces to look Asian. I am giddy with irony.
I don’t make any claims to know what’s going on here with these folks. As a 1.5 generation Korean American who lived in Seoul, Asuncion and the Bronx before the age of 12 and ended up going to an overwhelmingly Jewish school in NYC, I have had my share of identity crises. This included the wish to look more like my white, Jewish classmates, which probably isn’t an unusual desire among teenagers who are desperate to fit in with the dominant crowd. However, it never occurred to me that this would mean changing my race.
But it’s the second part of the article that got on my nerves with its typical pseudo-intellectualizing of what should be merely an amusing and minor trend in the subculture of YouTube videos. It quotes academics who argue that biological race is not real. What we know as race is a social construct, consisting of inherited characteristics and cultural traditions. Therefore, it’s impossible to change one’s race because it’s not a real thing. This is all fine, and I largely agree with it. But it doesn’t end there.
The RCTA phenomenon becomes a pretext to bring in the boogeyman de jour of today’s prevailing collective angst: white privilege. The article quotes Kevin Nadal, a professor of psychology at City University of New York, who says: “There is a privilege in being able to change your race or to say that you’re changing your race. There are many people who would be unable to ever change their race. Particularly, Black people in this country would be unable to say all of a sudden ‘I’m white’ and be treated with the same privileges that white people have.”
Talk about a stretch.
While I agree that biological race is not grounded in any genotypes, there is a noticeable difference in the appearance among the major racial groups today as socially constructed. Whites look white, blacks look black, Indians look Indian, and East Asians look East Asian. There are always exceptions, of course, but we can usually tell by just looking which race someone belongs to. Then, if race is primarily about distinguishing differences in appearances, then it’s a real classification that has real impact and consequences in today’s world, socially constructed or not.
In that sense, maybe these RCTA folks are just young people with low self-esteem who want to imagine themselves looking different and are using the tools they have (i.e. YouTube, TikTok) to engage in such fantasies. The fact that the vast majority of the RCTAers want to turn into East Asians may speak to the popularity and trendiness of K-pop today. Rebranding the traditional and insecure rites of passage for many young people with a new acronym may be a way to garner clicks and get your Ph.D. dissertations noticed, but nothing more than that.
Also, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. How do you integrate discussions of white privilege into this phenomenon? It’s not just whites who can’t change their race. It’s everybody. Whites don’t have special powers that allow them to become a member of another race by changing their appearance. They are not chameleons. Left-wing media seems to be so obsessed with pointing out structural inequalities in today’s society that they bring talk of white privilege into everything. Add to this the inevitable accusations of cultural appropriations and fetishization for wanting to look East Asian, now you have the perfect war cry of the far left. Even being popular is somehow an expression of victimhood in today’s world.
Just leave the kids alone. They are alright.
Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect The Korea Times’ editorial stance
Race change to another (RCTA)
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12.11.2023
By Jason Lim I recently read a fascinating NBC news article titled, “Inside the online world of people who think they can change their race.” The subtitle nicely encapsulates the first part of the article: “Practitioners of ‘race change to another,’ or RCTA, purport to be able to manifest physical changes in their appearance and even their genetics to truly become a different race.”
I guffawed at the word, “practitioners.”
Apparently, this is a phenomenon that’s becoming quite the subculture on YouTube, with RCTA “creators” producing videos that play a combination of soft music along with some type of visualization of which race the listener wants to look like. If you fall asleep watching these types of videos, you can incrementally transition into the target race. One video had the photo of Jennie from Blackpink and some wording next to it that exhorts the audience to look exactly like her. It’s actually creepy. The article quotes one 14-year-old Egyptian girl who claims to have developed monolid eyes and lost 2 pounds overnight after listening to such subliminal messages to rewire her DNA to be Japanese and Korean.
Seoul is the cosmetic surgery capital of the world famous for transforming the traditional East Asian face into one more resembling the Western ideals of beauty. Double eyelid surgery........
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