Race Change to Another (RCTA)

About

Race Change to Another, abbreviated as RCTA and sometimes misspelled RTCA, is a slang term referencing people who were born as one race but now identify as another race. The term was popularized on TikTok in late 2022 as users posted videos claiming they're RCTA and describing their race change. The most common RCTA videos document people changing to Korean and Japanese. While some of the videos appear to be genuine, many others are trolls and bait, leading to debate over the legitimacy of the RCTA community. The rise in RCTA videos in late 2022 resulted in videos criticizing the participants as racist. As RCTA spread, another term, ECTA (Ethnicity Change to Another) also spread alongside it, referencing a change in ethnicity (for example, Japanese to Korean).

Origin

It is unclear when the term RCTA was coined. Some of the earliest videos using the term RCTA were posted to TikTok in September 2022. For example, on September 11th, 2022, TikToker^[1] @shinobusorali posted several videos tagged "#rcta" claiming they're noticing "subliminal results" after becoming RCTA Japanese (shown below, left). On September 18th, TikToker^[2] @sakuraluvsyouu posted a video of a dancing Japanese woman, describing how they identified as American and are now identifying as Japanese. In the video, they claim they are learning Japanese and go by Tskui or Sakura now, gaining over 43,000 views in four months (shown below, right). The term was defined on Urban Dictionary^[3] as early as September 23rd.

Spread

RCTA videos increased in frequency on TikTok between September and December 2022. Many users took issue with the idea of being RCTA, calling it racist. For example, on September 15th, 2022, TikToker^[4] @rctah8 posted a video calling it racist and invalid, garnering over 100,000 views in four months. On October 3rd, TikToker^[5] @hellmarifromspace posted a video claiming to be a makeup tutorial for RCTA people but actually applying clown makeup to her face, garnering over 1.6 million views in three months (shown below). On October 19th, Distractify^[7] published an article about the term. Some people have accused RCTA and ECTA videos of being bait and trolls.^[8] Some TikTokers^[9] claiming to be RCTA have also made videos announcing that they were bait, including TikToker @soupy.dumpling.

ECTA

The term ECTA, meaning "Ethnicity Change to Another," also went viral alongside RCTA. ECTA is used to describe people who want to transition their ethnicity (for example, from Chinese to Korean) rather than race. For example, in December 2022, TikToker^[6] @iwayuzu posted several videos announcing their ECTA transition from Chinese to Japanese (shown below, left and right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References