"Good evening. I see you've been surveying some of our previous work. Let me introduce myself, I'm Dr. Ray Shell and I work for the institute doing Racelifts. Have you ever considered a race lift? I'm mean, I see that you are obviously white and well boring. Ever thought about maybe going Chinese; you know get a little better in math or maybe you've though about being a better dancer and being a better ladies man….maybe going Black?"
I say all this from behind s surgeon's mask while standing in a room full of paired photographs of participants before and after their Racelifts as a conversation initiator. I have three responses to this pushy opener. I receive the dull "huh?" look. The playfully satiric souls jump right in with a, "Well I always wanted to be X, because X always Ys" and then the very few but determinate, blurt our "I don't want to change what I am." The last ones are the ones I pounce upon with every racial stereotype I can whip up. Their comfort level is near zero and they are lashing back with the defensive response that they think will kill the conversation, but hardly do they know this is exactly what we are looking for. A scan of the room produces two other Racelift doctors running similar rackets: Tony Collins aka Dr. Ham Skipti and Aaron aka Dr. Eugene Nix. In the center of the room is the creator of the Racelift Project and senior BFA student at the California College of Arts, Amanda.
I'm sure if you've made it this far your wondering, what is a Racelift? Like anything of human creation Racelift can be talked about as its parts and by its projection and function. For analogy lets talk about a vacuum. A vacuum is an electrical powered motor that creates a suction and tends to have wheels and hoses and other accessories. The function of a vacuum is to suck up stuff and the ultimate projection of a vacuum is make things clean, because humans in our culture tend to like things clean. Like most things the function and projection are the most interesting aspect about the things humans create, because to a large degree this is where the motivation and emotional layers of the human creative process lives. The function of a Racelift is to change the race of the individual it is being enacted upon. Hence if you are Black you could go White, Asian, etc. The projection is to get people talking about what race is and isn't, what stereotypes are associated with each race, and to step into this conversation through the door of satire. Satire is a powerful tool, because often times in joking we let our guards down or we let ourselves go further on a taboo subject that we normally would if we were serious. Possibly even more importantly for this project it allows us to interact with others in a playful manner that opens up dialogue that would for no other reason exist. In this playful conversation space the Racelift doctors use the word race as much as possible, because by over using the word it starts to stand for everything and nothing all at once. By the end of some of the doctor-perspective-patient conversations, consults if you will, race has well worn itself out. If you can change your race by altering things like skin color and stereotypes and you can do this all the time, what is race? Was race ever real? What can we learn by having this conversation? –its hard to say, but having the conversation is better than not having it.
In its parts Racelift is simply Amanda photographing people before and after extensive amounts of makeup work that changed the participants from being one race into another race. As a doctor of the institute though this was not the line we would tell our perspective patients. Instead we would sell that Racelift was a simple one day operation where using the latest technologies we could change your race. In the institute we also offer coaching, so the transition into your new race goes smoothly, because lets face it nothings more awkward than being the person that doesn't live up to the stereotypes. The great thing about a Racelift is you could always change back or change to another race. Some of the more scrupulous perspective customers would ask me if I had ever had a Racelift. "Of course I have, every time I go on vacation I get one. Have you ever been a white male in a travel destination? You're the biggest target for getting robbed etc. I usually pick the race that looks most like the place I'm going and then when I get back I get my race change back to white, because come one everyone trusts a white male doctor right…its just good for buisiness?"
To apply for your own Racelift, you can go to. Special discounts may apply you tell them Dr. Ray Shell refered you:
http://racelift.com/
For those of you that know Tony. Here is his racelift from Fillipino to Black.
before 
after
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