wish the concept of “representation” didn’t feel increasingly tied to cynical, algorithmic streaming service content with little to no actual insight into any real minority experience

I term this attitude “messianic visibility”: an overinvestment in the idea that insistently normative cinematic identification possesses transformative, even curative, political and personal potential. Messianic visibility offers up cinema as a public fantasy site for identification and self-completion—for “feeling seen”—not just through visual pleasure but through what Sylvia Chong describes as “the reification of a neoliberal consumer category.” The media surrounding CRA cruelly encouraged the idea that a minoritized group or person achieves full psychic personhood only upon their recognition as a market—and as marketable. Messianic visibility diverts race consciousness from political resistance into an overidentification with capital.

— Melissa Phruksachart, “The Bourgeois Cinema of Boba Liberalism”