VSpastel pink hair, dyed glowy with these rosy cheeks popularized by makeup douyinadopted by Asian influencers, the American tiktoker Carley, in her twenties, explains in a tutorial video how to create monolid eyes, with eyelids without creases, very common among Asian populations. To do this, she pulls her double eyelid using two fingers to remove a layer of skin. The result – a sort of surgery without surgery – is stunning: suddenly, the young girl’s origins are less obvious.
In other videos, the influencer advises her Race Change to Another (RCTA) community, which brings together those seeking to assimilate into an ethnic group other than their own, using montages photos, makeup or having cosmetic surgery. Most often, the objective is to obtain physical features found in Korean women, a new ideal of beauty disseminated in particular by K-pop music and K-drama series.
If “transracialism” remains a marginal phenomenon, Carley is far from being the only one interested in the issue: #rcta already has 388 million views, and #rctakorean 5.4 million on the Chinese social network. While it is difficult to clearly define the origin of this trend, the American Rachel Dolezal, who made headlines in the American press in 2015, is undoubtedly one of its leading figures.
Same vocabulary as in gender transition
As told in the Netflix documentary Rachel Dolezal, a contrasting portrait, this National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) activist, also known as Nkechi Amare Diallo, passed as African-American for more than a decade. In 2015, her own parents denounced the deception, creating a huge scandal pushing her to resign. But Rachel persists and signs, claiming to have felt black since she was little, and claiming to be the first person identified as “transracial”. This is where this term, previously used to designate children adopted by parents of ethnicities or cultures different from theirs, takes on another meaning.
Years later, Discord servers dedicated to the practice of RCTA emerged, before the term gained popularity on TikTok. These are generally young girls, often white, who say they want to “change race” to become Korean, but also Japanese or Chinese, origins with which they identify more. We also find the same vocabulary as in gender transition, such as that of deadnaming (“morinommage” in French), an expression designating the fact of not wishing to be called by your old first name, with which you no longer identify.
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