But caveat auditor: Let the listener beware. Representing an identity is usually volunteer work, but sometimes the representative is conjured into being. Years ago, a slightly dotty countess I knew in the Hampstead area of London used to point out a leather-jacketed man on a park bench and inform her companions, with a knowing look, “He’s the head gay.” She was convinced that gays had the equivalent of a pontiff or prime minister who could speak on behalf of all his people.

Because people’s experiences vary so much, the “as a” move is always in peril of presumption. When I was a student at the University of Cambridge in the 1970s, gay men were très chic: You couldn’t have a serious party without some of us scattered around like throw pillows. Do my experiences entitle me to speak for a queer farmworker who is coming of age in Emmett, Idaho? Nobody appointed me head gay.

If someone is advocating policies for gay men to adopt, or for others to adopt toward gay men, what matters, surely, isn’t whether the person is gay but whether the policies are sensible. As a gay man, you could oppose same-sex marriage (it’s just submitting to our culture’s heteronormativity, and anyway monogamy is a patriarchal invention) or advocate same-sex marriage (it’s an affirmation of equal dignity and a way to sustain gay couples). Because members of an identity group won’t be identical, your “as a” doesn’t settle anything. The same holds for religious, vocational and national identities.

And, of course, for racial identities. In the 1990s the black novelist Trey Ellis wrote a screenplay, “The Inkwell,” which drew on his childhood in the milieu of the black bourgeoisie. A white studio head (for whom race presumably eclipsed class) gave it to Matty Rich, a young black director who’d grown up in a New York City housing project. Mr. Rich apparently worried that the script wasn’t “black enough” and proposed turning the protagonist’s father, a schoolteacher, into a garbage man. Suffice to say, it didn’t end well. Are we really going to settle these perennial debates over authenticity with a flurry of “as a” arrowheads?

Somehow, we can’t stop trying. Ever since Donald Trump eked out his surprising electoral victory, political analysts have been looking for people to speak for the supposedly disgruntled white working-class voters who, switching from their former Democratic allegiances, gave Mr. Trump the edge.

But about a third of working-class whites voted for Hillary Clinton. Nobody explaining why white working-class voters went for Mr. Trump would be speaking for the millions of white working-class voters who didn’t. One person could say that she spoke as a white working-class woman in explaining why she voted for Mrs. Clinton just as truthfully as her sister could make the claim in explaining her support for Mr. Trump — each teeing us up to think about how her class and race might figure into the story. No harm in that. Neither one, however, could accurately claim to speak for the white working class. Neither has an exclusive on being representative.

So we might do well to ease up on “as a” — on the urge to underwrite our observations with our identities. “For me,” Professor Spivak once tartly remarked, “the question ‘Who should speak’ is less crucial than ‘Who will listen?’”

But tell that to Joe, as he takes a sip of kombucha — or is it Pabst Blue Ribbon? All right, Joe, let’s hear what you’ve got to say. The speaking-as-a convention isn’t going anywhere; in truth, it often serves a purpose. But here’s another phrase you might try on for size: “Speaking for myself …”

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a professor of philosophy at New York University and the author of the forthcoming book “The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity,” from which this essay is adapted.

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