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What Does It Mean to ‘Look Like Me’?

Minorities can find it gratifying to see people who resemble them onscreen. But resemblance is a tricky thing.

Credit...Jun Cen

Mr. Appiah is a philosopher.

It’s a formula that we turn to again and again to affirm the value of inclusion, especially in the realm of popular culture: the importance of people who “look like me.”

The actor Eva Longoria, who appears in the film “Dora and the Lost City of Gold,” in which the principals are played by Latinx actors, has said she had to take the part because of what the film represented “for my community and for people who look like me.” The playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, explaining what drove him to create the new television drama series “David Makes Man,” which follows the life of a black boy in a public-housing project, observed: “John Hughes made several movies that depicted the rich interior lives of young white American men and women. I just want the same for people who look like me.” The comedian Ali Wong inspired the writer Nicole Clark to confess that she “didn’t think she liked stand-up until a few years ago, when I realized the problem was the lack of comedians who look like me and tell jokes that I ‘get.’”

The “look like me” formula appeals because it feels so simple and literal. We can think of a black or Asian toddler who gets to play with dolls that share her racial characteristics, in an era when Barbie, blessedly, is no longer exclusively white. The emotions it speaks to are real, and urgent. And yet the celebratory formula is trailed by jangling paradoxes, like tin cans tied to a newlywed’s car.

For one thing, nobody means it literally. Asians don’t imagine that all Asians look alike; blacks don’t think all blacks look alike. Among Latinx celebrities, Eva Mendes doesn’t look like Cameron Diaz; Sammy Sosa doesn’t look like … Sammy Sosa.

What the visual metaphor usually signifies, then, is a kinship of social identity. That was apparent in July when the soccer star Megan Rapinoe declared that “Trump’s message excludes people that look like me.” She didn’t mean extremely fit white women; she meant lesbians and gays.

But the complexities don’t end there. When it comes to representation, two cultural conversations are happening at the same time. One is about “speaking our truths” — about exploring in-group cultural commonalities. The writer Zenobia Jeffries Warfield has explained, in this spirit, that she decided to watch films and shows only by filmmakers and performers of color “because who can tell our truths better than we can?”

Here, the cultural conversation is about the comedians whose jokes you “get” — the in-group references that resonate with you, that trigger a knowing “nailed it!” smile. It’s about the sparks of recognition that some black viewers get watching comedies like “Insecure” and “Black-ish,” and some Asian-American viewers get from entertainments like “Fresh Off the Boat” and the Netflix feature “Always Be My Maybe.”

That’s one way of “looking like me.” But it doesn’t quite explain the “look like me” fervor that blockbusters like “Crazy Rich Asians” and “Black Panther” inspired in Asian- and black-identified audiences. That fervor points to the other cultural conversation about representation.

“Crazy Rich Asians,” for all its shrewd social observations, is about group of people who are anything but representative. It’s no criticism to say that a story in which the American daughter of a single working-class mother is whisked away by a billionaire to an enchanted kingdom of unfathomable richesse in Singapore has the same realism level as “The Princess Diaries.” What matters is that it’s a Hollywood film about Asians in which Asians rule. This has special significance, the writer Jiayang Fan says, when it comes to “Asian-Americans, a largely made-up group that is united, more than anything else, by a historical marginalization.”

Paradoxically, then, a film like this appeals not by depicting that marginalization but by inverting it. We want our dreams, not just our realities, to be represented.

The same goes for “Black Panther.” Let me go out on a limb and say that the fictional land of Wakanda isn’t a very representative picture of black life on any continent. What made the film so important, the writer Allegra Frank tells us, is that “an entire group of people that look like me” got to be heroes in a big-budget blockbuster. Yes, actors of color are often stars of such movies, but that usually feels like a casting choice, not an indelible feature of the character. It mattered that the characters in “Black Panther,” not to mention the film’s Afrofuturist vibe, were specifically and not contingently black.

What such films deliver is a way of “looking like me” that’s as much about aspiration as identification. We say that their characters look like us; maybe what we mean is that we wish to look like them.

Lil Nas X, whose song “Old Town Road” galloped to the top of the charts and set up a homestead there, wasn’t exactly speaking his “truth” when he rapped, “I got the horses in the back.” A young black man from Atlanta, Lil Nas X had never been on a horse. The “yeehaw agenda” — the trend of black cultural figures in rancher attire that fueled and was fueled by his country-trap hit — is chiefly an aesthetic, the cowboy counterpart to the tech-infused offerings of Afrofuturism. It proceeds in defiance of social realism, that default mode of early-stage minority representations. It’s a mash-up of memes, an exercise in cultural unbundling. That’s why Lil Nas X didn’t think twice about releasing a remix with a Korean rapper titled “Seoul Town Road.”

Or consider Tessa Thompson, the mixed-race actor who played the superhero Valkyrie in “Thor: Ragnarok.” “I think it’s really great that young comic book readers that look like me can see themselves in a film,” she said. The Valkyries are an inheritance from Norse mythology, no doubt signal-boosted by the cliché of the Wagnerian soprano wearing horns. Should black girls be encouraged to identify with the ultimate Nordic icon? Well, why not?

What these fantasies ask is, Who gets to tell you what you look like? It’s not a representation of identity so much as it is a renegotiation of it.

How identity relates to identification is, of course, a complicated matter. Consider Gurinder Chadha’s recent film “Blinded by the Light,” based on a memoir by the journalist and broadcaster Sarfraz Manzoor. Set in the late 1980s, the film is about a teenager from a Pakistani family in the working-class English town of Luton. His father loses his job at the auto plant; racist hooligans pose a regular menace. Then our protagonist discovers the albums of Bruce Springsteen. The lyrics — about restive dreams amid disappointment, about a desperation to leave the hardship town of his childhood — hit him with the force of revelation.

How does Mr. Manzoor’s story relate to the “looks like me” conceit? You could argue that in some meaningful sense, Bruce Springsteen does look like him; class, too, is a dimension of identity. But a sensibility — a matter of personal identity, not a collective identity — is what really galvanizes the kid from Luton. Would he be truer to himself if he gave up Mr. Springsteen’s songs for the Bhangra-disco music that his sister favors?

The truth is that our best stories and songs often gain potency by complicating our received notions of identity; they’re less a mirror than a canvas — and everyone has a brush. It takes nothing away from the thrill of feeling represented, then, to point out what the most ambitious forms of art and entertainment are always telling us: Don’t be so sure what you look like.

Kwame Anthony Appiah (@KAnthonyAppiah) is a professor of philosophy at New York University and the author, most recently, of “The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.”

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A correction was made on 
Sept. 27, 2019

An earlier vision of this essay misspelled the given name of a writer who made a comment about the movie “Crazy Rich Asians.” She is Jiayang Fan, not Jiaying Fan.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: What Does It Mean to ‘Look Like Me’?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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