What Does 'RCTA' And 'ECTA' Mean On TikTok? The Controversial Slang Acronyms Explained
It seems like every week there's a new slang term going around on TikTok, but that's not always a good thing. Right now, the terms RCTA and ECTA, which stand for "race change to another" and "ethnicity change to another," are gaining virality among users who identify as transracial. Some people are calling those who use them racist. Here's why.
What Does 'RCTA' Mean?
RCTA stands for "Race Change to Another." It is essentially another term for "transracial," which refers to the idea that you can transition to another race. One of the most infamous examples of transracial people is Oli London, a British influencer who, for a time, claimed to be Korean and was undergoing plastic surgery to resemble K-Pop singer Jimin. Another is Rachel Dolezal, who sparked controversy when she claimed to identify as Black.
While it's not clear when exactly the term RCTA was coined, it started to gain popularity on TikTok in September 2022. That month, TikTokers started posting videos under the hashtag "#RCTA" claiming to come out as another race. The majority of videos seem to be white people coming out as Korean, Chinese or Japanese, explaining why they want to do so and what strides they're taking to become more like the race they identify as.
How Is 'RCTA' Used Online?
Since the term took off on TikTok, people who claim to be RCTA are posting "introduction" videos where they essentially come out as transracial and explain why. Most of these videos feature text explaining the transition and what they're doing to transition over videos of people representing their race. Others are posting videos that help people through their alleged racial transitions.
The term is also being heavily criticized on TikTok and across social media as racist. Many people find the idea of transitioning race to be offensive. Sometimes, the people claiming to be RCTA base their alleged newfound racial identity on stereotypes, essentially becoming a walking stereotype of the race they claim to identify with most. This criticism has inspired lots of trolls and bait accounts that appear to be RCTA-only to make fun of the people actually claiming to be RCTA, such as TikToker @hellmarifromspace, who posted a video pretending to help RCTA people with their makeup only to apply clown makeup and tell RCTA people to get help.
What Does 'ECTA' Mean?
The term ECTA, meaning "ethnicity change to another," has also been going viral alongside RCTA videos. Being ECTA means you're transitioning ethnicity rather than race. For example, a Chinese person claiming to transition to Japanese. ECTA users are posting similar videos to RCTA users and are gaining just as much hate for being perceived as racist. They've also inspired a lot of troll and bait accounts, effectively muddying the waters and making it hard to tell what's genuine and what's not.
For the full details on RCTA, be sure to check out our entry on the meme here for even more information.
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Panuru
During the Rachel Dolezal incident, I tried to get my arms around why "transracial" isn't a thing. Apparently it's because your race is determined by the people around you, so you don't have agency to define your own race. For example if you're half white half Japanese, walking around Tokyo people will call you white but walking around Dubuque people will call you Asian. Or if you're half white half black, you'll be called white if you go to the deepest blackest parts of Africa but called black in much of the US or Europe.
It's kind of like how the same person can be conservative in California but liberal in Alabama. Call yourself whichever you like, but it's the people around you who will judge which you are.
Sumarios
And this is why colorblindness was always the better way to deal with race at the individual level. If the people around you don't care what race you are then it doesn't matter what race you are.
It was always grifters and their useful idiots pushing the "If you don't see race then you perpetuate systemic racism" schtick. Forcing everyone to be aware of their individual differences actually just makes people more tribalistic. The endless memes about "13/50" didn't go mainstream until AFTER it became the progressive cause to make everyone focus on racial differences.
But also, no, you don't have agency to determine your sex either. Nature picks that for you.
Panuru
Well, I disagree with pretty much everything you said. It's human nature to cluster in "us" vs "them" so although color blindness can be taken as a rational position, it's not going to be an instinctual thing any more than gender blindness will. Whether it's how you use your language, how comfortable you are talking about certain topics, or how comfortable you are getting nude, people naturally adopt different behavior around different genders. The same goes for race for exactly the same reason.
For the second point, it's totally the case that "let's be color blind here" has been used as an excuse to wave away historical discrimination. As an example, look at legacy admissions to universities. Sure we give preference to people whose parents or grandparents came here at a time when black people were not admitted, but we don't actually take the race of applicants into account. We're color blind.
I almost don't even want to touch the third point because that gets into a whole new can of worms, but I honestly haven't heard any definition of male / female that unambiguously covers things such as XY chromosomes with a fully functional uterus.
Revic
For what it's worth, with regard to sex, that's at least part of why the preferred term is "transgender" rather than "transexual" now I think. Sex is pretty immutable under current medical science (although subject to a lot of various weird grey areas). That's not really changeable. But people can change the social roles and expectations they're associated with. For example: Nothing about a cute skirt and a nice pair of heels for instance is inherently "female". They're just inanimate objects. But socially we expect men to wear them. That expectation they're tied up in is gender – not biology, but sociology. And social roles are a lot more changeable. Now, does this run into the same problem as "transracial" stuff with how it's decided by the people around you? One could argue that I suppose. Separate matter from what I'm driving at here, just one that I wanted to acknowledge so the two don't get mixed together.
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Nox Lucis
You will never be Japanese. You have no ancestry, you have no citizenship, you have no skills that would make Japan ever want you. You are a shut-in self-hating white man twisted by delusions of mythical Japanese superiority and exposure to Japanese media into a disgusting mockery of nature’s perfection. All 'validation' you get from other people in this position couldn't be worse in making you believe that spending years of your life learning a globally useless language to a first-grader's level was a worthwhile use of your time, but one can't expect that an individual as pathetic as you will ever know the value of the youth you threw away in doing that. Actual Japanese are utterly repulsed by you. Thousands of years of linguistic evolution have allowed natives to identify frauds from mannerisms and vocabulary alone. Even if your written text of self-hatred and attention begging akin to a stray dog's somehow passes as normal (it won't), any Japanese person will immediately cut all ties when they hear the voice and accent of someone who is not only a basic Japanese speaker at best, but worth no more than garbage in skills, accomplishments, and likeability.
Nox Lucis
You will never be happy. You wrench out a fake smile and laugh to yourself believing that watching a content creator that you understand 20% of at best is somehow superior than watching your own kind, as you project your disgusting traits onto your entire kind. However, deep inside you feel the depression creeping up like a weed, ready to crush you under the unbearable weight, and you know that. You know that all you do now is have an entirely new linguistic medium in which to be ignored, and not even the exotic trait of being foreign makes up for just how uninteresting of a person you are. Eventually it’ll be too much to bear – you’ll buy a rope, tie a noose, put it around your neck, and plunge into the cold abyss. Your parents will find you, heartbroken but relieved that they no longer have to live with the unbearable shame and disappointment. They’ll bury you with a headstone marked with your birth name, and every passerby for the rest of eternity will know a Western man is buried there. Your body will decay and go back to the dust, and all that will remain of your legacy is a skeleton that is unmistakably Caucasian. This is your fate. This is what you chose. There is no turning back. Hate yourself and apologize for being white to some Japanese entity that exists only in your mind while actual Japanese people put in effort to learn English for the valid reason of it being the global language.
Revic
And would you like fries with that?
Nox Lucis
Yes. Super-size that order, please.
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