Push to get rid of their low status traits usually comes from low status people, or parents who don't want their children to stay low status (or people who sell them the treatment).
People already use some highly harmful substances to make their skin paler. Paler skin requires doesn't give even a tiny fraction of benefits of being really "white", and side effects are far greater than what I proposed. By extrapolation if there was a magic pill you could take to make yourself permanently Caucasian without any significant side effects, plenty of black people would take it, what would increase status gap even further, until only tiny fraction of people stayed black.
Nobody says blackness is an illness now, because you cannot change it. If it ever became easily changeable, that would change very quickly. Of course we are unlikely to see this being tested, as such procedure seems unlikely to occur.
Here's data on how being "White" as opposed to "Black" drastically increases your mate selection opportunities. There's earnings gap, lifespan gap, larger chance of being a crime victim when you're "Black". It's naive to think that people would stay "Black" voluntarily if it was a matter of choice.
There are certainly some blacks who value lighter skin and straighter hair, but saying that they really want to become white makes as much sense as saying that a white woman who gets a tan really wants to become black. Two other major problems:
plenty of black people would take it, what would increase status gap even further, until only tiny fraction of people stayed black.
This does not follow. It would depend on what subgroup took it and which did not. I also think you seriously need to go talk to some actual black people before you make this claim.
...T
There was some talk here about height taxes, but there's a better solution - redefine shortness as a treatable condition and use HGH to cure it. They even got FDA on board with that, at least for 1.2% shortest people.
Unsatisfactory sexual performance became a treatable condition with Viagra. Depression and hyperactivity became treatable conditions with SSRIs. Being ugly is already almost considered a treatable condition, at least one can get that impression from cosmetic surgery ads. Being overweight is universally considered an illness, even though we don't have too many effective treatment options (surgery is unpopular, and effective drugs like fen-phen and ECA are not officially prescribed any more). If we ever figure out how to increase IQ, you can be certain low IQ will be considered a treatable condition too. Almost everything undesirable gets redefined as an illness as soon as an effective way to fix it is developed.
I welcome these changes. Yes, redefining large parts of normal human variability as illness is a lie, but if that's what society needs to work around its taboos against human enhancement, so be it.