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".

Actor Eva Longoria, who appears in the film Dora and the Lost City Of Gold, in which the principals are played by Latinxs, said she took the part because of what the film represented "for my community and for people who look like me".

Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, in 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, said: "John Hughes made several movies that depicted the rich interior lives of young white Americans... I just want the same for people who look like me."

Comedian Ali Wong inspired writer Nicole Clark to confess that she "didn't think she liked stand-up until a few years ago, when I realised 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. The emotions it speaks to are real.

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.

What the visual metaphor usually signifies, then, is a kinship of social identity. That was apparent in July when US 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.

Writer Zenobia Jeffries Warfield explained, in this spirit, that she decided to watch films and shows only by film-makers and performers of colour "because who can tell our truths better than we can?"

Here, the cultural conversation is about the comedians whose jokes you "get". 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" fervour that blockbusters like Crazy Rich Asians and Black Panther inspired in Asian-and black-identified audiences. That fervour points to the other cultural conversation about representation.

Crazy Rich Asians is about a 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, says writer Jiaying Fan, when it comes to "Asian-Americans, a largely made-up group that is united, more than anything else, by a historical marginalisation". Paradoxically, then, a film like this appeals not by depicting that marginalisation but by inverting it. We want our dreams, not just our realities, to be represented.

The same goes for Black Panther. What made the film so important, 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 colour 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, 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 fuelled and was furled 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 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 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 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, 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 galvanises the kid from Luton. Would he be truer to himself if he gave up Springsteen's songs for the Bhangra-disco music that his sister favours?

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.

NYTIMES

• Kwame Anthony Appiah is a professor of philosophy at New York University and the author, most recently, of The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.