I Have To Admit I Still Don't Fully Understand Why You Can't Change Your Race. By Jesse Singal

jessesingal.substack.com

8 - 10 minutes

A couple weeks ago NBC News ran an article by Emi Tuyetnhi Tran, a summer intern there, headlined “Inside the online world of people who think they can change their race.” Subheadline: “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.”

It’s a very of-the-moment story, and it includes some fascinating details. Here’s how it starts:

    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.”

Wild stuff! But I also found it interesting how much effort the article spent to make it clear that you really can’t change your race. It’s such an important point that Tran deployed Experts to make it.

The article continues:

    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.”

    …

    Experts agree race is not genetic. But they 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.

    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.

    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.

This all seems confusing. . . or maybe confused. For one thing, we have “race is not genetic” coming merely one paragraph prior to the assertion that race is, in part, “inherited characteristics.” For another, we have those experts — sorry, Experts — telling Tran that “it is impossible to change your race because of the systemic inequalities inherent to being born into a certain race.” The second half of the sentence doesn’t really latch onto the first; it can certainly be true both that a certain identity brings disadvantages with it, but also that that identity can be changed! Genuinely don’t understand the logic here.

Maybe I’m an ignoramus on this subject, but it certainly seems like race can be “changed” in a sense in certain outlying instances, at least. A Sephardic Jew who traces his recent lineage to Iraq might “look” “blacker” than a light-skinned African American whose grandparents are all from Nigeria, by the standards of the made-up racial category of American blackness. The Sephardic Jew could perhaps “change his race” by simply starting to claim to people he’s just met that he’s black (when the subject comes up), and the African American could pass as white by doing something similar. In this situation, haven’t they effectively “changed their races,” regardless of the particular “systematic inequalities” they face?

That being said, I can’t even tell whether my example applies, because the article doesn’t really define what is meant by “changing race” in the first place. If race is just a social construct — supposedly the progressive orthodox understanding — why couldn’t you change it? If, on the other hand, all Tran is saying is that the “listen to this subliminal audio to change your DNA” part of this online trend is nonsense, then sure, of course that’s true, but wait, I thought race isn’t genetic anyway, so of course that can’t be what’s meant by “changing race,” except race is somewhat genetic (“inherited characteristics”), and. . . well, I’m kind of lost. It’s hard even to hold this all in your head at the same time.

But despite all this confusion, the article is very clear that whatever race is, and whatever changing your race is, you can’t do it — it’s impossible. That very term is used twice. It’s very important that people recognize that while race is (mostly) a fiction (except when it isn’t, because it has a partial genetic footprint), you just can’t change yours.

Why? I’ve never quite understood that. The article contains a lot of somewhat perfunctory-seeming moralizing about how some people are offended by the idea of someone changing race, the overarching theory, I think, being that you can’t “identify into” an oppressed group, but “this thing offends people” is obviously not the same as “this thing is impossible to do.”

The obvious comparison here is another instance in which we do let people identify into an oppressed category — male-to-female transgender folks — but Tran doesn’t really address that comparison either. She simply cites an activist who says that transracialism “is fetishizing, and it’s objectifying, and it reduces the beautiful and complicated cultures of people of color,” without mustering any argument as to why someone couldn’t say the same thing about transitioning gender. (I wrote about this parallel before in my defense of Rebecca Tuvel, a philosopher who got in trouble for authoring an article arguing that the logic used to support gender transitions should, if we’re being consistent, lead us to support some forms of transracialism. Tuvel wrote her article from the perspective of someone who does support individuals’ right to transition.)

I don’t want to be too harsh here: Emi Tuyetnhi Tran is, again, a summer intern. And the article does have some genuinely interesting reporting on these wacky wannabe Asian kids. But it was published in NBC News, which is very much a major outlet, and it’s interesting to me how much of the article is dedicated to making sure readers are not led into temptation: into believing you can change your race (or can’t change your gender). Let’s be SUPER clear about this; NBC News is telling us: You cannot change your race. It’s impossible. You can change your gender. These are treated as indisputable facts rather than foggy and contested battlegrounds.

It’s all part of the broader sacralization of race that has gone on in progressive spaces in recent years. It seems pretty obvious to me that the only way out of racism, in the long run, is for people to recognize that race is mostly made up. Even if it’s not a complete fiction (see haplogroups), of course it’s bad to see people as “black” or “Asian” or “Latino” rather than, first and foremost, individual human beings. These categories are much too broad and they’ve done far more harm than good.

But this view feels moribund in progressive spaces. Instead, it’s important to talk about race all the time. Someone with dark skin is capital-b Black, and this is a very important part of their identity, because race is an essential component of each individual’s identity. Race is so important that we don’t dare violate its sanctity by crossing boundaries that are best left alone.

Doesn’t it seem obvious that this obsession — that’s what it is, at this point — is going to have downsides, in the long run? Shouldn’t mainstream journalism outlets demonstrate some appetite to actually investigate this worldview? Or is the point of mainstream journalism to simply remind everyone, over and over and over, what good progressives are supposed to believe?

Questions? Comments? Ideas for how I can switch to a much cooler race, perhaps by quaffing some sort of tonic? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jessesingal. The lead image, of Cartman effectively changing his race, is from here.