The heck you say
Inside the online world of people who think they can change their 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.”
Impossible to change your race? Kinda like it’s impossible to change your sex? Remember, NBC, like so many in the Credentialed Media, lauded grifters like Rachel Dolezal Shawn King for a bit, until Activists decided this was “blackfishing“. Look, if it’s not OK to “identify” as another race, why is it OK to identify as another sex? Don’t expect an actual reasoned, literate, cogent, adult answer to that one.
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.
Oh, good grief. There are three races, as called originally: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid, with a small classification of Dravidians through the India region. Is this biology? Some will argue that it is, some will argue that it isn’t. Especially with all the inter-breeding over time. It’s definitely biological that some races are more susceptible to certain medical conditions. Regardless, we won’t solve this. But, if race is cultural construct, why can’t you change it. “Systemic inequalities?” Horseshit. Total copout answer. Gender is biological. You cannot change it. Even if you cut your tallywacker off and get breast implants and take all sorts of drugs, you are still a man.
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.
Why, yes, the article, which is long, does continue to get wackier and wackier.
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.
Instead of using words like that, just call them nuts. You may appreciate a culture, you may want to live the culture, but, you cannot be that race. But, everything is crazy these days, because there really are not big issues, like a world war or Cold War.
But, not one mention or consideration that this all applies to gender, as well.
Our distinguished host wrote:
We use race as a kind of shorthand for describing different concentrations of characterizations in the human gene pool, but in a lot of ways, it is misused for many things. The lovely Rachel Dolezal decided that she was black, perhaps as a scam, or perhaps she felt ‘culturally’ black. There really is a ‘black culture’ in the United States, something heavily concentrated in our larger cities, but that culture is not dependent upon the members of it being black; under other circumstances, it could have been adopted by whites or Asians. Just as easily, our American ‘white’ culture could have been generated among black people, had circumstances been different.
But here’s more to it than that. The entire, if never stated, purpose behind integration was to homogenize the American culture among all Americans, white and black alike. The assumption, by the white liberals who pushed it, was that that homogenized culture would have been the white American culture, with either no or very little ‘contamination’ by the black culture. Integration would eventually result in some very dark-skinned white Americans, with race being an insignificant concept socially.
Brookings published an article entitled “Are Asian Americans people of color or the next in line to become white?“, discussing the term “white adjacent”, and a Google search for “white adjacent” returned roughly 43,800 returns. Americans of Asian descent are ‘white adjacent’ because so many of them have been successful in our American culture and economy, in ways that black Americans have not, and every bit of that can be explained by the greater — not total — adoption of white American culture by Asian immigrants.
It’s actually pretty simple, but it is simple in a way that the left are loathe to accept: certain behaviors and cultural norms are just more economically efficient than others. Working hard and staying in school, trying to get the best grades and win the best collegiate admissions is a way to get ahead, and Asians — as well as American Jews, who are predominantly white — not only do this well, but they have been doing it even better than whites as a whole. But black Americans, as a group, have not. Obeying the law, to not wind up in jail, and not devastating your neighborhood, is an economically efficient behavior, and even though Mr Elwood P Dowd of St Louis County will be appalled to admit it, black Americans have not adopted this behavior to as large an extent as Americans of Asian or European descent.
The result? A significantly larger percentage of black Americans with felony convictions, and spending time behind bars. And a felony conviction, something far more probable at a young age, late teens or early twenties, is a mostly unrecoverable-from error.
[…] My good friend William Teach wrote: […]