It also robs minority parents and communities of power. If ethnic “identity” means anything at all, it means socializing children into the values and norms of that community. But someone selected by American media to “represent” us doesn’t necessarily have any connection to a group’s culture or values. When kids are encouraged to look to such “representation” as role models, that undermines the ability of these communities to socialize their children as they want. It puts the white people who run schools and the media in charge of defining what it means to be Asian or Latino or whatever, displacing parents from that process.

It also reduces ethnic identity to something extremely shallow. I’m Bangladeshi because of what my parents taught me and the norms and attitudes I’ve absorbed from the community. Kamala Harris shares almost none of those things with me. But the media says she “represents” me because of her skin tone. It’s offensively reductionist.