Every video Donna Briggs posts to her half a million followers on TikTok and Instagram opens the same way: “Hello everyone, it’s Donna Briggs!” she chirps in a saccharine singsong. Her eyes squint, lids burdened by her fake eyelashes. There’s something uncanny about her combination of platinum blonde hair, porcelain skin, and painted-on eyebrows. Plus, there’s her voice. Donna Briggs — the bubbly, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Karen in Lilly Pulitzer — sounds like a black woman, which is just to say unmistakable rhythm and drawl that’s been stereotyped as black.

Of course, that means nothing on its own — stereotypes aren’t reality. But still… it makes you pause.

Briggs should, in theory, be forgettable — another would-be manifestation guru whose posts are laden with hashtags like #liveinabundance. But there’s just something… off. It’s like Donna Briggs hasn’t finished rendering yet. Even the contact information on her non-profit’s website, Make Every Day A Great Day LLC, leads nowhere. Google the 888 number she lists, and through some weird glitch, the results list 988, the suicide prevention hotline.

TikTok user Tea with Ladii was among the first to connect the dots, piecing together what viewers had sensed but couldn’t articulate. Donna Briggs wasn’t just the victim of bad fillers or heavy filters. Donna Briggs felt so strange because, only a few years prior, she’d been a black woman. Now, she’s white.

“A handful of people from her family reached out to me,” Ladii reveals in one of her “deep dive” videos, “Every family member who’s reached out has let me know she’s a black person.”

The evidence mounted. Marshall Bell, a former colleague who’d allegedly dated Briggs in the early 90s, posted a photo collage on TikTok. In another life, she was a black radio host who’d sat across from Mary J. Blige, Tyler Perry, and Wendy Williams. Then, she lightened her skin until she appeared white.

Briggs isn’t the first person who’s been caught changing their race on TikTok.

In fact, racial “reveals” are a recurring source of shock on the platform. Beauty influencer Lisa Yo stunned viewers who discovered the woman many assumed was Korean, and then Mongolian, was white and Austrian. Like Briggs, there’s something unusual about the way Yo looks, but it’s hard to tell exactly what’s off.

It’s bad plastic surgery, sure, but it’s more than that.

As with Briggs, online sleuths took it upon themselves to investigate Yo. Eventually, they uncovered an old YouTube channel where she appeared with a markedly different face and spoke in German. Yo has since admitted to undergoing rhinoplasty, aegyo sal (love band) filler, ear pinning, and what she describes as double eyelid surgery — though some viewers have pointed out that she already had double eyelids and likely had another procedure to make her eyes appear more East Asian, rather than less.

Both women deny accusations that they’re misrepresenting their race.

Briggs claims she used to “tan” despite repeatedly being referred to as a black woman during her radio career. Yo has come up with elaborate stories about how she is Mongolian but was bullied relentlessly because of her appearance, which, according to Yo, served as the impetus for her plastic surgery.

While Briggs and Yo pursued physical transformation, they’re part of a larger phenomenon. Thousands of people identify as transracial — though most don’t or can’t seek medical intervention.

“I just feel so out of place in my body and in general,” a user who goes by PageofCups tells me in a Discord server for transracialists. The 24-year-old, born white, has identified as East Asian — “primarily Chinese and some Japanese,” in their words — since they were 15. They’ve tried learning Japanese, attempted Chinese cooking, and consulted plastic surgeons across the country, none of whom would perform cosmetic surgery to help them look more Chinese.

Online, transracialists like PageofCups share “subliminals” and hypnosis videos promising to help viewers “manifest perfect Korean DNA.” They trade makeup tips and commiserate about family and friends who dismiss their identities as fantasy. These online communities are more than internet curiosities; they’re windows into how technology has fundamentally reshaped how we conceive of our bodies.

RCTA (race change to another) became a viral TikTok trend in 2023, generating breathless headlines about Gen Z’s latest identity disturbance (essentially, teens thought they could manifest a new race simply by believing it hard enough). Or perhaps you remember Spokane NAACP chapter president Rachel Dolezal’s unmasking in 2015 (she was revealed to be a white woman passing as black). Yet these sensationalized moments represent only glimpses of a much larger ecosystem.

Transracialism takes several forms. Environmental cases involve adoptees navigating displacement between birth and adoptive cultures (which is where the term “transracial” originates). Sexual motivations drive members of Signal groups like “the Cult of Winterianism,” which promises racial transformation through “depigmentation methods, surgery, ivf/genetics” and “racial bimbofication.”¹ Lastly, trauma and internalized racism can lead some to reject or dissociate from their race after experiencing abuse or discrimination.

But not all transracialism is downstream of sex or trauma. Opportunist academics like Jessica Krug (once a tenured professor of African history at George Washington University) and C.V. Vitolo-Haddad (a former grad student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) fabricated black and other nonwhite identities to embed themselves within academic and activist spaces where racial identity conferred credibility, influence, and professional advantage.² And, across the incelosphere, young men blame their romantic isolation on racism, seeking to “transition” into whiteness or in some cases blackness (“racemaxxing”).³

Finally, and perhaps most commonly, some people identify so strongly with the media they consume that they believe they were born in the wrong body: the k-pop fan that feels, intuitively, they are Korean; the otaku who senses in themselves an internal Japaneseness; the hiphop lover who declares themselves black.

Though transracialists exist globally, the phenomenon is imbued with a distinctly American philosophy. In a nation built on both the promise of self-reinvention and the reality of racial categories, transracialism emerges as a peculiar symptom of these contradictions. And when America’s promise of self-transformation collides with the internet’s capacity for identity experimentation, the results produce communities convinced they can “manifest” new DNA through hypnosis, or Discord servers where teenagers confess they know they’re not white — or black — or Asian — or Latino — or indigenous — even if they’re still searching for their “real race.”⁴

In 1995, Lisa Nakamura documented “identity tourism” in early internet spaces where white users would temporarily roleplay as samurai warriors or geishas. Users experimented with gender, too, in these text-based environments, and research suggests these roleplays left lasting impressions on how people perceived themselves.

“I think the internet has afforded this capacity for people to pretend or perform to be an identity that they don’t have,” explained André Brock, an associate professor at Georgia Tech who was mentored by Nakamura. He pointed to cases like “A Gay Girl in Damascus,” a popular blog which claimed to chronicle the life of a Syrian lesbian during the Arab Spring, that captivated readers in 2011 before being exposed as the work of a white American man.

Yet while cases of calculated deception exist⁵, today’s transracial communities represent something different. Unlike bloggers who knowingly fabricate identities, many of these individuals genuinely believe they are internally another race. They’re not lying in any conventional sense.

This sincerity comes through in the spiritual language these communities employ. They speak of “quantum jumping” and “reality-shifting” — borrowing heavily from New Age beliefs that consciousness creates reality. Just as their spiritual cousins believe thoughts can manifest wealth or fame, some in these communities believe focused intention can alter their very being.⁶

“Maybe I was Japanese in a past life,” PageofCups muses over Discord. “That would explain why I feel this way.”

These feelings bewilder even those experiencing them.

For those whose transracialism emerges from media consumption, the mechanism appears to be what André Brock calls “parasocial relationships to other races and ethnicities.” Essentially, media consumption forges bonds so powerful that love becomes identification.

When I asked people about their media consumption habits, I heard recurring themes. Ronnie Gladden, a black man who wrote the memoir White Girl Within and identifies as a white woman, cited Full House and Punky Brewster as formative influences.

“I watch a lot of TV,” he told me, describing how television offered models of whiteness that felt more authentic than his lived experience, though he emphasized that he also related more to his white female classmates than black boys and men. But without television, he told me, he wouldn’t have had the language or framework to understand himself as white.

During our interview, I described my own inexplicable connection to Khmer music — how the language itself moves me to tears, creating a fabricated nostalgia. I suspect it’s a diluted version of what transracial people experience. The difference is that transracial people feel this sensation so strongly, they interpret it as proof of belonging. They don’t know what else to do with those feelings or how to interpret them.

Documents circulating in transracial spaces attempt philosophical justification.

“The Transethnic Document,” shared on Tumblr by a “trans-Japanese” teenager, argues through frantic rhetorical questions: “What makes someone a specific race? Is it living there, or being born there?” The document draws extensive parallels to transgender experience, asking why ethnic transition couldn’t follow similar logic.⁷

That logic extends to other identities — there’s a whole world of trans identification that receives little attention, and when it does, that attention is mocking. Transid.org catalogs an ever-expanding encyclopedia of identity categories: transtime (identifying with specific decades), transharmed (desiring to be harmed or to be a victim of crime or abuse), and dozens of others. Each category reads like a media preference, or at the very least, a deep affinity mistaken for an identity — which is likely what they are. My theory is that these hyperspecific labels emerge when people, especially teenagers, lack other frameworks for processing intense parasocial connections. That inexplicable pull toward 1980s aesthetics, or intense empathy for a character on a TV show who doesn’t look like you, is then interpreted as evidence of being born in the wrong decade or as the wrong race.

Transracial adoptees are an interesting parallel to how someone’s environment can instill racial confusion. As Brock explained, “There’s a spate of research about children who are adopted, struggling to figure out what their racial identity is.” These children, raised by people who don’t match their appearance, experience genuine identity confusion. Media immersion may create the same effect through psychological rather than physical displacement.⁸

The gap between our internal worlds and physical reality generates profound suffering. The rapper Nuka Zeus (a white man) claimed he would die if he couldn’t present as black. Rachel Dolezal, now Nkechi Diallo, lost everything yet continues to live as a black woman. PageofCups grieves the body that doesn’t match their inner truth.

“My dad once asked me if I was going to identify as a monkey next,” they told me.

What makes this suffering particularly complex is the contradiction at its heart. These are people who desperately wish race wasn’t such a taboo topic and that we could treat race with the same fluidity some people treat gender. But to believe you can transition between races, you must first believe races are real, fixed categories — even as your transition challenges that very idea. You need the category to be stable enough to move into, yet the act of moving destabilizes it.

The only way to resolve this paradox, for many transracialists, is simply to deny the transition ever occurred — to insist they’ve always been who they claim to be now. Yo is “Mongolian.” Briggs is “white.”

Andy Warhol once said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” But perhaps the real prophecy is stranger and more intimate: in the future, everyone will be seen exactly as they want to be seen for 15 minutes. Exactly as they feel on the inside.

Briggs, in her relentless positivity and steadfast denial, exemplifies this promise taken to its extreme — the American dream of self-reinvention where you can become anyone you want, as long as you never admit what you’ve left behind.

—Katherine Dee

FOOTNOTES

¹ These cases are expanded upon in the controversial work of Phil Illy, author of Auto-Heterosexual. Illy argues that much of trans identity is downstream of a sexual desire to see oneself as the target identity, be it a different race, age, or, and perhaps most fraught, sex.

² Krug, a white Jewish woman from Kansas City, spent years misrepresenting herself as Afro-Caribbean and North African, adopting various aliases and became deeply involved in black liberation politics in New York City. Her deception unraveled in 2020 when she published a Medium post confessing to what she called a lifetime of “cultural appropriation.” Similarly, Vitolo-Haddad, who is also white and of Italian descent, positioned themselves as black or Latino in academic and leftist organizing spaces. After being confronted by members of the community, Vitolo-Haddad issued a public apology and resigned from their teaching role, admitting to having deceived others about their racial background to gain acceptance, authority, and access within racial justice movements.

³ This is particularly common among South Asian men who variously lighten and darken their skin, buying and selling drugs on Facebook and Reddit.

⁴ The stability of transracial identities varies. Discord conversations reveal individual members shifting between identifying as Korean, Japanese, or broadly “Asian” based on current interests — it could be years, months, weeks, days, or hours. Yet cases like Gladden, Lisa Yo, and Rachel Dolezal demonstrate decades-long commitments.

⁵ Influencers “blackfishing” or “asianfishing” for clout and cash is another, related, phenomenon.

⁶ As Tara Isabella Burton writes in her 2023 book Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, the modern self is something we actively construct rather than inherit. Burton traces how we’ve shifted from understanding identity as something given by community or tradition to something we create through our own choices. Transracialism is very much underpinned by this idea.

⁷ This comparison sparked fierce academic debate in 2017 when philosopher Rebecca Tuvel published “In Defense of Transracialism” in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia. The article, which explored theoretical parallels between transgender and transracial identities, prompted hundreds of academics to demand its retraction, arguing that such comparisons failed to account for the distinct histories and mechanisms of racial oppression.

⁸ Brock offered the example of Asian children raised by white families in the Midwest genuinely struggling with belonging, their identities shaped by their environment rather than their birth.