Q: I often hear Blacks speak of “people who look like me” in referring to opportunities or possibilities. When I hear the expression, I think of doppelgangers or lookalikes. Any thoughts about this?
A: As far as we can tell, the expression “people who look like me” first appeared in the late 19th century and did indeed refer to a doppelgänger—in this case, an imagined rather than a ghostly counterpart of a living person.
The earliest example we’ve found is from “The Chain of Destiny,” a short story by Edith Robinson in the August 1894 issue of Outing, an illustrated monthly magazine in Boston.
A man claims to have seen a woman at a boarding house, but when she denies being there he backs down and says “the figure was merely the result of my own imagination.”
“Then how could you have conjured up a face and figure the counterpart of mine?” the woman asks “Do you often see people who look like me?”
A similar expression, “someone who looks like me,” showed up in the early 20th century and also referred to a person who looked like another. The earliest example we’ve seen is from A Tax on Bachelors, a 1905 comedy by the playwright Harold Hale.
When a man tells a woman that he’s seen her meeting with a criminal suspect, she replies: “Oh, no, sir. You may have seen someone who looks like me, but I am a stranger in this part of the country.”
In the usage you’re asking about, the two expressions are used figuratively for a racial, ethnic, sexual, or other group, not literally for an individual who looks like someone else.
The usage is an illustration of synecdoche, a figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole, as in “the American woman” standing for all American women.
In the figurative use of “people who look like me,” the speaker represents an entire group. The usage appears to date from the late 1960s, and the earliest example we’ve seen uses it in a racial sense:
“Most of the islands of the West Indies have a majority of whatever the term is now—I hear Negro and I hear black, but people who look like me.” From remarks by Dr. Karl A. Smith at a conference of the Milbank Memorial Fund, New York, Oct. 28-30, 1969, published the following year in Demographic Aspects of the Black Community, edited by Clyde V. Kiser.
The figurative usage became increasingly more common in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, according a search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books. Here are a few examples:
- “I will be sexist, ageist, and ethnocentric as I decide to accept a ride from a white middle-class woman with two little children. I will overgeneralize that all mothers are trustworthy and that someone who looks like me will indeed behave as I would in a similar situation.” From “ ‘Vive la Difference!’ and Communication Processes,” a paper by Alleen Pace Nilsen in The English Journal (March 1985).
- “It’s sad to me that the new books of the Nancy Drew series still consist of an all-white world where other people who look like me are still on the fringes of society.” From “Fixing Nancy Drew: African American Strategies for Reading,” a chapter by Njeri Fuller in Rediscovering Nancy Drew (1995), edited by Carolyn Stewart Dyer and Nancy Tilman Romalov.
- “It is when the land [Antigua] is completely empty that I and the people who look like me begin to make an appearance.” From My Garden (Book), 1999, by Jamaica Kincaid.
- “The people who look like me at the conferences I attend are often the ones serving the dinner or the ones cleaning up the room.” From an interview with Pat Mora in A Poet’s Truth: Conversations with Latino/Latina Poets (2003), by Bruce Allen Dick.
The writer and educator Ben Yagoda notes that the figurative usage “picked up speed with the election of Barack Obama in 2008.”
In a Jan. 21, 2021, post on his blog, he says Obama “inspired two similarly titled books: The President Looks Like Me & Other Poems, by Tony Medina, and Somebody in the White House Looks Like Me, by Rosetta L. Hopkins.”
“But as with much else,” Yagoda adds, “it was probably Michelle Obama who cemented the phrase in the national consciousness,” with her remarks at the opening of the Whitney Museum’s new building in New York on April 30, 2015:
“You see, there are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and concert halls and other cultural centers and they think to themselves, well, that’s not a place for me, for someone who looks like me, for someone who comes from my neighborhood.”
We’ll end with the opening lines of “Brown Girl, Brown Girl,” a 2017 poem that Leslé Honoré updated in 2020 after Kamala Harris was elected Vice President:
Brown girl Brown girl
what do you see?
i see a Vice President
that looks like me
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