I was thinking about this another day and it occurred to me that this is such a first world problem. Now I personally think that the amount of representation minorities get in the media can absolutely tell how much representation they get in more politically important places and institutions as well as existing systemic biases. Having said that, I am not convinced that an other wise lovingly raised children will have a big chunk of their identity missing or a hole in their childhood gouged out if they do not see someone like them in the media growing up. So many people around the world grew up with American action movies, Japanese animes, K drama etc, and they are fine. I am Thai and our cartoon mostly aren't amazing, our movies are lower budget. I hadn't heard of any Thai kids who want a Thai Marvel character equivalent or a brown John Wick. I am also blind and I fell in love with hot New Orleans jazz since high school. Never once I thought I have to listen to blind Thai players. Those black guys from the southern US are just fine to be my heroes. Personally I am not against any attempts to make media more representative, but I think if we suggest hard enough that kids really need people with their identity to be their heroes, we are just teaching them to think like that and adding needlessly to the divisiveness of identity politics. Now I see so many westerners suddenly get it into their heads that they need this and that growing up now that they read about the need to be inclusive. Even though more representation is good in many ways, should we really be teaching kids implicitly that the most noble and empowering thing is to have someone with the same skin color or disability as your hero? Now one explanation I could come up for this is that the US is sort of unique because it is so diverse. I'm not going to look up numbers, but say I can imagine some Latino or black kid wondering why their demography, which is like a 10th or an 8th of the population are hardly seen in the media. Where as people who grow up in more homogenous places may just see the media as an outside spectacle and thats all. It doesn't say anything about their representation in their own country.