Reading the Experts on the Rise of Transracialism

Race Change to Another

NBC News published an article on the rise of “race change to another” (RCTA) on TikTok and Instagram. RCTA refers to the belief that one can change one’s racial identity and seems to be rooted in the usual superstitions, pop psychology, and magical thinking that undergirds most identity communities, be they racial, religious, or otherwise. The pervasiveness of RCTA isn’t clear but it was sufficiently popular for NBC News to investigate and reach out to the “experts.”

According to NBC, RCTA practitioners

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.”

RCTA is clearly relevant for the Touch Base and the metaphor of Group Narcissism. To understand the metaphor, imagine a person exhibiting the traits typically ascribed to narcissists, such as selfish grandiosity, an inability to confront and acknowledge harsh realities about themselves, Machiavellianism, and private identity insecurity or vulnerability.

Historically, psychodynamic theorists described these traits in terms of a grandiose and abstract concept of the self, which distorted a person’s engagement with reality. Narcissists excessively rely upon fantasy and distorted representations of themselves to achieve psychic relief, resulting in a confused, episodic existence based upon conflicting situational self-protective rationalizations and representations.

If you imagine yourself as a sort of abstract and grandiose concept, your interpretations of and interactions with the real world will be distorted. In general, the narcissist is always tending to and tailoring this abstraction with defensive behaviors and verbal rationalizations to preserve the abstraction’s perceived grandiosity in the face of countervailing evidence. His self always has traits that render him exceptional, special, unique, and desirable in every instance, and he struggles to maintain this illusion against a world which he perceives to be hostile and conspiratorial to the extent it does not immediately validate those traits.

In other words, the direction of causation in identity formation for a narcissist is reversed, and is mostly unidirectional such that the grandiosity or omnipotence of the self-concept dictates the narcissist’s behavior and experiences instead of the narcissist’s behavior and experiences dictating the nature of his self-image.

People routinely point out that psychoanalysis isn’t a science and that these concepts are false or pseudoscientific. That’s true. However, so are the everyday concepts people use to speak of human behavior. Even the most rigorous, empirically oriented genius speaks in terms of a self with desires, reasoning capacity, a will, empathy, and unconscious instinct or bias, i.e., he uses folk psychological concepts analogous to the convoluted Freudian scheme of ego, id, superego, and so forth.

It is for this reason that the concept of narcissism remains prevalent among the most prominent opinion and taste makers in the west. If you don’t believe me, just google “Trump & Narcissism” and review the millions of results from the west’s most trusted experts and media outlets.

Because metaphors drawn from popular concepts are useful for communicating about complex issues, using narcissism as a metaphor for talking about group identity in the west is salutary. Indeed, as we’ll see below, NBC experts are not averse to using metaphors from individual psychological functions like “shame” to describe group identity.

In the context of NBC’s article on RCTA, group narcissism is useful for explaining the incoherence of expert opinions on racial identity. If narcissism is characterized by distorted interpretations and interactions with the world to preserve a fanciful identity, then one would expect experts beholden to abstract and grandiose group self-images to offer distorted interpretations of RCTA.

The point of the NBC article is to convey that, notwithstanding the self-expressed intentions of RCTA practitioners, experts believe RCTA is a harmful delusion likely rooted in negative motivations. Sometimes RCTA is merely an impossible delusion while other times it’s a harmful possibility.

Throughout the article we’re treated to undefined labels like “fetish” and “appropriation” to justify negative conclusions about RCTA. The narcissist expects you to admire him and validate his self-image, but he does not want you to engage in behavior that suggests his self-image and traits are common to an outside world he perceives to be threatening and beneath him. For example:

“There’s also the underbelly of that where we want to be careful,” [Margaret Rhee, assistant professor of media studies at the New School] 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.”

Margaret isn’t saying it’s bad to be revered for good characteristics. Indeed, noticing good traits and validating them is good. Appropriating them for oneself is bad. Noticing other traits that might not be good is wholly unacceptable, of course. Such negative observations are deemed “stereotypes.” Rhee suggests but does not define a distinction between appreciation and appropriation:

The intense fixation on and enamoration with East Asian traits and appearances has led some members of the East Asian community to criticize RCTA as fetishistic and harmful. Some scholars say it is another case of cultural appropriation, rather than appreciation. “Maybe this isn’t the way to respectfully engage with the culture,” Rhee said.

Non-group members are supposed to validate the positive racial traits that aggrandize another group’s self-image, but are not supposed to engage in any sort of activity that suggests those traits can be the general property of mankind, i.e., they cannot suggest that those traits are not special or unique to the group, which wounds the group’s narcissism. If just anybody can appear Asian, especially a downscale white girl from Ukraine like one of the subjects in NBC’s article, then appearing Asian isn’t very special and doesn’t entitle an Asian to any unique or higher degree of respect from non-Asians.

And what are the “East Asian traits and appearances” that these non-Asians are “fetishizing” and enamored with? It’s not clear. In fact, the only reason for NBC’s experts to notice East Asian traits is to inform RCTA practitioners that noticing them is bad because they’re not real, and that adopting them is impossible:

Subliminals that aim to make someone more East Asian can also inadvertently use antiquated, erroneous stereotypes. One subliminal, which has been viewed over 200,000 times, says watching it will give a viewer a “mongoloid skull” — an outdated and harmful anthropological category, according to a 2019 statement by the American Association of Biological Anthropologists. Another subliminal, viewed over 100,000 times, claims to be able to give a viewer a “flat face.”

Assistant professor Jamie Cohen at Queens College suggests that another problem with RCTA is that practitioners are adhering to the abstract identity too intensely:

Cohen said: “The problem, to me, isn’t the curiosity; it’s the obsession. Some of them go too deep; they get lost in the sauce. They’re really in it to the point where it’s unhealthy, and they start owning an identity that isn’t theirs.”

This is humorous because, as everyone knows, America’s civil religion promotes going “too deep” and getting “lost in the sauce” with abstract identities, to the point where people identify with other genders, animals, and ancient, extinct, or otherwise constructed ethnic and racial groups.

America is so invested in getting lost in the sauce on racial identity that many of its Supreme Court Justices believe racial identity shouldn’t be separated from the evaluation of a student’s qualifications for education. As I observed in my supplement on the Supreme Court’s recent affirmative action opinion, Justice Sotomayor endorsed the conclusion that “racial self-identification was an important component of” student applications, “because without it they would not be able to present a full version of themselves.”

The ultimate reason that RCTA is harmful for NBC experts is that it involves mostly white people trying to become other races, and that can’t be allowed. White people didn’t earn being born into another race, didn’t earn the trait ascribed to them at birth. To unpack this expert opinion, let’s look at the mixture of moral and factual reasons NBC experts adduce to argue that people can’t change their 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.”

This sounds like a description of every group level identity that is based at least in part upon miraculous and metaphysical claims. For example, some groups believe that by performing certain rituals, one can convert to the group and gain special qualities in the universe. Other people beholden to grandiose group self-images believe that they are special because of a real or imagined connection to a real or imagined unique historical event like being the first people to set foot in a territory, winning a war, or suffering an injustice.

How is RCTA different? Maybe one cannot miraculously change one’s DNA or appearance through meditation, but plastic surgery is enormously advanced now, and even Michael Jackson achieved a miraculous transformation.

It turns out that race is something a bit different from these other identities, a bit more special for these experts.

NBC helpfully reminds the reader that while “[e]xperts agree race is not genetic,” experts also “contend that even though race is a cultural construct, it is impossible to change your race because of the systemic inequalities inherent to being born into a certain race.”

However, NBC’s experts don’t exactly believe this.

David Freund, a historian of race and politics and an associate professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, corroborates the idea that a “biological race” does not exist. What we know today as “race” is a combination of inherited characteristics and cultural traditions passed down through generations, he said.

What are “inherited characteristics”? Apparently, they’re not genetic. The features that RCTA people notice in Asians aren’t inherited by Asians, but you also can’t “fetishize” those traits, which are inherited, because they’re the property of Asians. This convoluted “reasoning” only makes sense if there is a more primitive conviction about over-arching specialness driving these rationales.

Freund continues by substituting history for genetics. In analyzing a girl’s desire to be Korean, he reverts to the genealogy of the concept of race to throw cold water on her spirit:

In addition, Freund said, the modern concept of race is inseparable from the systemic racial hierarchy hundreds of years in the making. Simply put, changing races is not possible, because “biological races” themselves are not real.

What this means is that while the biological essence of race is a false ideology constructed to justify fixing social hierarchy in the blood, race has a historical essence that justifies fixing social hierarchy in the blood. Race is a trait ascribed to someone at birth by virtue of a “systemic racial hierarchy hundreds of years in the making,” similar to the traits of hereditary nobility or social caste, which the modern world explicitly holds are not heritable.

Freund added that the idea of changing one’s race operates differently depending on a person’s racial background and that white people who seek to “transition” to other races can often sidestep the harms of racism.

What this means is that Freund wants to fix racial identity at a certain point in the past, much as religious critics want to fix religions at a certain point in the past. Non-white racial identities are defined by white-on-non-white racism, which means white racial identity is also defined by racism. Any attempts at redefinition are unacceptable for unexplained reasons.

As I recounted in a recent post on Catholic-American identity, one protestant theologian dubbed this arbitrary and cynical approach to criticism in the religious context “Walter Kaufmann Syndrome” after the English translator of Nietzsche, because Kaufmann found it difficult to polemically engage liberal and reform variants of Christianity with his brand of anti-Christian atheistic moralism. Kaufmann preferred to pretend that Christianity as a whole was forever locked in the era of the Inquisition, that is, that Christianity had an essence locked in a period favorable to a specific construction of his identity.

This goes to the general problem of American racial identity: it wants to preserve the essence of group identities it maintains are false and were constructed by acts of injustice. Non-whites are non-whites in a good and special sense and whites must be whites in a bad sense.

While many whites pretend this is a temporary “remedy” for past injustices, such a pragmatic belief has the effect of rendering the group identity arbitrary, which paradoxically devalues the identity. Believing non-white racial identity to be a mere salutary fiction is unacceptable to group narcissists. This paradox causes the experts, either as vicarious group narcissists or group narcissists themselves, to construct additional rationalizations to preserve historical racial identities, albeit through an inversion of values.

Their primary rationalization is that the false construct of race is not just an arbitrary historical identity but an essence imposed upon some but not others by the hostile external world:

Kevin Nadal, a professor of psychology at City University of New York, said: “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.”

We already know this isn’t strictly true, as I documented in my series “Why We Remain Blacks.” Here’s one example I provided in that series:

In “They look white but say they're black: a tiny town in Ohio wrestles with race,” the Guardian’s Khushbu Shah tells the story of a white family that carries around the birth certificate of a black great-great-grandfather to proudly demonstrate their black ancestry.[ix]

Shah explains that this town’s population could easily choose to be white despite being Black:

most of Shreck’s generation and the generations before her here in East Jackson, on the edge of Appalachian Ohio, were raised to believe they are black. Never mind that they might register to most as white by appearance, or that there is hardly a trace of black ancestry left in their blood. This inherited identity most East Jackson residents still cling to and fiercely protect is based on where they were born and who they were told they are. It comes from a history rooted in racism and an identity placed upon their ancestors – and now many of them – without their consent.

Given what we know about white admixture in American Blacks, a panoply of racial identities is available to people with Black ancestry, with the most obvious being mixed-race. Yet, people with this mixed ancestry choose to be Black, as the editor of The 1619 Project, Nicole Hannah-Jones, illustrated by her conceptual self-definition, “I consider myself as Black with a white mother.”

The rejoinder to my point is that these mixed people can’t escape being Black because their identity is wholly determined by the way people perceive them, which ultimately is a cultural construct rooted in a history of racism. In other words, NBC experts are trying to say that a person without the physical features of a European would not be able to identify as racially European.

However, the experts concede this doesn’t entail that Blacks must identify as Black. NBC explains that,

Certain people of color throughout history have been able to “pass” as white to survive. Walter Francis White, the son of two enslaved people, for example, used his ability to blend in as “white” to champion civil rights for African Americans as the leader of the NAACP. But most people of color are not afforded the same opportunities.

As I described in “Why We Remain Blacks”, this phenomenological perspective is not unique to Black identity but can also be seen in the literature surrounding Jewish identity. I used Leo Strauss as a relevant example but Jean Paul-Sartre’s book on anti-semitism is another. In each case the author concluded that Jews could not help but be Jews because of how the outside world perceives Jews. This approach to group identity raises several contradictions.

The most obvious contradiction is that a definition of race based upon how the external world perceives people implies that non-race members can be treated as race members if they betray a certain appearance. For example, an Andamanese Islander could certainly pass as Black in America, and we know from this post that the non-Jewish logician Kurt Goedel was briefly persecuted for appearing Jewish in Nazi Germany. If external perception and treatment determines racial identity, then the Andamanese Islander is Black and Kurt Goedel was Jewish.

Further, if external perception is the essence of race, then Walter Francis White cannot be Black, since he cannot be perceived as such by the outside world. How did he remain Black if Black is an essence determined by the perceptions of an outside world that perceived him as white?

The implication of NBC’s Walter White example is that race isn’t wholly determined by the perceptions of the outside world and that there is an inner world of racial identity that is inaccessible to the hostile external world. This is where the comparisons to transgenderism become relevant, much to the chagrin of gender identity narcissists, as NBC illustrates:

RCTA and transracialism — which came to the forefront because of controversial figures like Rachel Dolezal — have been compared to being transgender. However, psychologists and activists push back against comparisons.

Tiq Milan, a Black transgender activist and writer, said it is a disservice to transgender people to compare the two. Race historically emerged as a social construct to establish a racial hierarchy with the white race at the top, whereas variances in gender identity have existed for thousands of years, he said.

So race is a social construct but gender isn’t because “variances in gender identity have existed for thousands of years.” Of course, variances in racial-ethnic identity have also existed for thousands of years, as I illustrated in my response to Sohrab Amari’s critical race theory.

Milan recapitulates the same confused, externally-determined definition:

“When it comes to who we are as racialized people, it is how we present to the world, but it’s also how people treat you,” Milan said.

Noticing the contradictions this produces, Milan buttresses their conclusion with another defensive conclusion that invokes the nebulous “fetishizing” and “objectifying” narrative discussed above:

“It’s not just putting on the hair and the makeup and talking and walking [in] a kind of way. That is fetishizing, and it’s objectifying, and it reduces the beautiful and complicated cultures of people of color.”

Therefore, race identity is determined by the hostile external world but it’s also not just determined by the hostile external world. Race contains a hidden essence, a special chosenness, that is inaccessible to people who merely pass as another race in the eyes of the public. While one cannot escape being a race because of how one is perceived, those who are not perceived as a member of the race still remain a member of the race and thereby retain “beautiful and complicated” features inaccessible to the RCTA impostor.

Professor Cohen, presumably embracing this facially absurd definition, then paradoxically delegitimizes those who believe they can change this hidden essence, claiming that RCTA

emerged as part of a larger trend in which people hope to manifest changes and bend reality to achieve certain goals, similar to meditation

(Indeed, while America’s race experts unscientifically maintain trauma can alter genes at the germline, they are convinced that the soothing sounds and meditation of RCTA impostors cannot alter somatic traits.)

Like the traits of the narcissist’s abstract self, race is something special and internal that cannot be shared with the outside world, which is of low value and generally inferior to the racial group. Race is something earned by virtue of being born. Thus, although the desire to change races originates with a constructivist view of identity espoused by these same authors, and although it originates with positive intentions toward other races, RCTA must be bad. One RCTA practitioner explains their innocent motivations:

Some people said they were initially drawn to RCTA because of a special connection with a race or an ethnicity different from their own. Alia, who goes by the Japanese name Sayaka Hashimoto online, said that she has always felt connected to Japanese culture and that she was elated to discover RCTA last year. Her TikTok account, @5starbunny, is full of reflections on her progress toward becoming Japanese and dreaming about being in Japan.

For NBC experts, the motivations are likely more negative. For example, NBC helpfully informs us that RCTA for whites can be motivated by “racial shame” (what about racial narcissism?):

For white Americans, racial trauma can take the form of being ashamed for engaging in racism, having failed to stop others from engaging in racism or not having lived up to a nonracist ideal, said Naomi Torres-Mackie, a psychologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. That racial guilt is what she calls “white shame,” and it can lead white people to want to escape from the guilt through RCTA or transracialism.

“If you hold a highly privileged position in society and that is brought to your awareness, it can give you feelings of guilt or shame,” Torres-Mackie said. “A lot of people try to find refuge from that shame.”

This may be the case in certain instances but it certainly doesn’t explain older, declasse variants of RCTA like the identity known as “wigger”, which certainly does not signal privilege (except perhaps in the case of Tom Hanks’s son).

Further, NBC expert analyses artfully fail to address the current identitarian ideology of America, which holds that “white” is a false construct, that being white is inherently harmful (evil), and that other racial identities are real and not harmful. Given that scenario, how might an impressionable white youth choose to identify? NBC experts don’t have an answer but I think we can all muster our folk psychological concepts to offer an explanation.

A Korean tiktok creator and ethnonarcissist tiptoes around this issue as well:

“[RCTA practitioners] are exercising their privilege when they say they want to change races,” she said. “When I was younger, I wanted to be white, because I was sick of facing all the racism, but they’re not changing their race because of racism. They’re changing their race because they think it’s cool.”

Of course, nobody –- especially Korean girl tik tokers -- would ever want to be white because they admire traits ascribed to white people, because whiteness is a false construct and those traits are not the exclusive property of whites. Being Korean on the other hand is unique and the corresponding traits are the exclusive property of Koreans.

In summary, the NBC experts proceed from the assumption that there exists a subset of races that are real and possessed of traits that distinguish them from the outside world, and then adduce conflicting rationales for proving the reality and uniqueness of these identities while devaluing the outside (mostly white) world which strives to embody them.

NBC experts act surprised that this incoherent, dead-end ideology of group narcissism isn’t persuading ordinary people who’ve been submerged in a bath of cosmopolitan universalism since birth, which convinced them that all human individuals have been differentiated by progress such that they are individuals who can achieve anything without the parochial fetters of outdated ascriptive ties like race and caste:

However, concerns about the problematic implications of changing their race seem to have fallen largely on stubborn ears. Addressing the criticisms of racism, Alisa said those who practice RCTA are not harming anyone: “We only live once, so I think we should do everything we want to do in life, even if others think it’s not OK or you can’t achieve it.”

Professor Nadal does offer some helpful advice at the end of the article, however.

“I would say the same thing that I would say to somebody who’s struggling with any part of their identity,” Nadal said. “Talk about what it is that makes you want to change that part of you.”

This is helpful advice because following it will allow individuals to see the radical incoherence into which the American civil religion has fallen. From there they can feel empowered to challenge group-narcissistic demands for validation and fealty.

As for the RCTA people, I encourage them to not give up on their dreams. Nobody can lay exclusive claim to being superior to you by virtue of an identity ascribed to them at birth. Superiority is earned by the actions and character of a person during their lifetime. The successful urban imperial citizen has always been a chameleon, proselytizing to this or that religion, adopting this or that culture etc., to protect themselves and enhance their status, as Nietzsche wrote in his meditation on “The Actor” in The Gay Science.

While you might not be able to change your DNA (unless you’re traumatized, in which case maybe you can subject yourself to trauma to change your race!), you can always change how you’re perceived, and the technique of plastic surgery only continues to improve.

Not only is it possible for you to change how you’re perceived, you can hone your internal understanding and experience of the identity, including its lachrymose history, such that you may even become, for example, a superior Korean to the Koreans themselves by virtue of your dedication to reading and interpreting the identity.

How would one do this? Empathy of course. Empathy is the capacity to inhabit the identity of another and experience their suffering and joy.