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.
Since before she hit double digits, Alisa, 15, said she has felt a special connection with Japan. The high school student, who asked to be anonymous for fear of being doxxed online, was born in Ukraine and lives in Maryland, but she now goes by the Japanese name Miyuki and listens to “subliminals” that promise she will wake up and be Japanese. So far, she believes that by listening to YouTube videos with lo-fi music and photos of East Asian facial features while she sleeps, her vision has cleared, her eyelids have become smaller and her hair is just a bit darker.
Practitioners of what they call “race change to another,” or RCTA, purport to be able to manifest physical changes in their appearance and even their genetics to become a different race. They tune in to subliminal videos that claim can give them an “East Asian appearance” or “Korean DNA.”
But experts underscore that it is simply impossible to change your race.
“It’s just belief,” said Jamie Cohen, an assistant professor of cultural and media studies at Queens College, City University of New York. “It doesn’t ever really work, because it’s not doing anything, but they have convinced themselves that it works because there’s other people who have convinced themselves, as well.”
Though they do not constitute a full-blown trend, a number of racial subliminal creators have popped up on YouTube in recent years, with videos racking up on average over a half-million views apiece. On TikTok, dozens of accounts have emerged in recent weeks sharing similar goals and aesthetics and documenting what people describe as their race-change journeys.
Media experts also point to the potential dark side of the exocitization of Asian culture, saying it could be a form of modern yellowface, or the act of non-Asian people’s making their appearance more “Asian-like.”
Korean American poet Margaret Rhee, an assistant professor of media studies at The New School in New York, said the RCTA phenomenon reflects the current media climate in which East Asian media enjoys widespread popularity internationally and in the U.S.
“There’s also the underbelly of that where we want to be careful,” she said, “because there’s always problems around fetishization or objectification that East Asian cultures have always been subjected to, meaning being revered for these kinds of exotic characteristics but not really fully seen.”…
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