what does it mean to look like me
What Does It Mean to 'Look Like Me'?
Minorities can find it gratifying to run into people who resemble them onscreen. But resemblance is a tricky thing.
Mr. Appiah is a philosopher.
Information technology's a formula that nosotros turn to over again and again to affirm the value of inclusion, especially in the realm of popular culture: the importance of people who "look similar me."
The player Eva Longoria, who appears in the film "Dora and the Lost City of Gilded," in which the principals are played by Latinx actors, has said she had to take the function because of what the picture represented "for my community and for people who look similar me." The playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, explaining what collection him to create the new television drama series "David Makes Homo," which follows the life of a blackness boy in a public-housing project, observed: "John Hughes fabricated several movies that depicted the rich interior lives of immature white American men and women. I only desire the same for people who look similar me." The comedian Ali Wong inspired the author Nicole Clark to confess that she "didn't remember she liked stand up-up until a few years ago, when I realized the problem was the lack of comedians who wait like me and tell jokes that I 'get.'"
The "look like me" formula appeals because it feels so unproblematic 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, similar tin can cans tied to a newlywed's car.
For i matter, nobody ways information technology literally. Asians don't imagine that all Asians look alike; blacks don't think all blacks look akin. Among Latinx celebrities, Eva Mendes doesn't look like Cameron Diaz; Sammy Sosa doesn't expect like … Sammy Sosa.
What the visual metaphor usually signifies, and 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 wait similar me." She didn't hateful extremely fit white women; she meant lesbians and gays.
But the complexities don't end there. When information technology comes to representation, 2 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 picket films and shows but by filmmakers and performers of color "because who can tell our truths improve than we can?"
Hither, the cultural chat is about the comedians whose jokes you "get" — the in-grouping references that resonate with you, that trigger a knowing "nailed information technology!" grinning. Information technology's virtually the sparks of recognition that some black viewers get watching comedies similar "Insecure" and "Black-ish," and some Asian-American viewers become from entertainments like "Fresh Off the Gunkhole" and the Netflix characteristic "Always Be My Peradventure."
That's i way of "looking like me." But it doesn't quite explain the "expect similar 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 most representation.
"Crazy Rich Asians," for all its shrewd social observations, is near 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 female parent is whisked abroad by a billionaire to an enchanted kingdom of unfathomable richesse in Singapore has the same realism level equally "The Princess Diaries." What matters is that it'due south a Hollywood film most Asians in which Asians dominion. This has special significance, the author Jiayang Fan says, when it comes to "Asian-Americans, a largely made-up grouping that is united, more than anything else, by a historical marginalization."
Paradoxically, then, a film similar this appeals not by depicting that marginalization merely by inverting it. Nosotros desire our dreams, not simply our realities, to be represented.
The same goes for "Black Panther." Let me become 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 fabricated the film so of import, 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. Yep, actors of colour are frequently stars of such movies, but that usually feels similar a casting selection, not an indelible feature of the character. Information technology 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'southward every bit much about aspiration every bit identification. Nosotros say that their characters wait similar usa; maybe what we mean is that we wish to await like them.
Lil Nas 10, whose song "Old Boondocks Road" galloped to the top of the charts and prepare a homestead there, wasn't exactly speaking his "truth" when he rapped, "I got the horses in the dorsum." A immature blackness man from Atlanta, Lil Nas Ten had never been on a horse. The "yeehaw calendar" — the trend of black cultural figures in rancher attire that fueled and was fueled by his country-trap hit — is importantly an aesthetic, the cowboy counterpart to the tech-infused offerings of Afrofuturism. Information technology proceeds in defiance of social realism, that default manner of early-stage minority representations. Information technology'due south a mash-up of memes, an exercise in cultural unbundling. That's why Lil Nas X didn't call back twice about releasing a remix with a Korean rapper titled "Seoul Town Route."
Or consider Tessa Thompson, the mixed-race actor who played the superhero Valkyrie in "Thor: Ragnarok." "I call back it's actually cracking that young comic book readers that look like me can come across themselves in a movie," she said. The Valkyries are an inheritance from Norse mythology, no incertitude signal-boosted by the cliche 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 similar? It's not a representation of identity so much every bit it is a renegotiation of it.
How identity relates to identification is, of course, a complicated matter. Consider Gurinder Chadha's recent moving-picture show "Blinded by the Lite," based on a memoir past the journalist and broadcaster Sarfraz Manzoor. Set in the belatedly 1980s, the film is about a teenager from a Pakistani family in the working-form English boondocks of Luton. His father loses his job at the automobile institute; racist hooligans pose a regular menace. Then our protagonist discovers the albums of Bruce Springsteen. The lyrics — about restive dreams amid disappointment, virtually a agony to exit the hardship town of his childhood — hit him with the force of revelation.
How does Mr. Manzoor'due south story chronicle to the "looks like me" conceit? You could debate that in some meaningful sense, Bruce Springsteen does await like him; class, too, is a dimension of identity. Only a sensibility — a matter of personal identity, non a collective identity — is what really galvanizes the kid from Luton. Would he be truer to himself if he gave upwardly Mr. Springsteen'southward songs for the Bhangra-disco music that his sister favors?
The truth is that our all-time stories and songs frequently gain potency by complicating our received notions of identity; they're less a mirror than a canvas — and everyone has a brush. Information technology takes nothing away from the thrill of feeling represented, then, to signal out what the most ambitious forms of art and entertainment are ever telling united states of america: Don't be so certain what you lot look like.
Kwame Anthony Appiah (@KAnthonyAppiah) is a professor of philosophy at New York Academy and the author, most recently, of "The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/21/opinion/sunday/minorities-representation-culture.html
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