Looking up the protocols around the Australian advisory notes, Tunde finds a different concept, also used by some Aboriginal people. Because it can be hard to tell if white people are happy or sad, if they are jealous or angry or moody, because the notion of a stiff upper lip is believed to make these public displays of emotion unwelcome for them, some Aboriginal people say “white people have no face.” A startling phrase and he can’t help but like it. White people have no face. An unwritten poem.
And it is this droll moment that makes him realize what else it is about the computer-generated faces that is bothering him: those faces are almost all white. A very few of them could be read as Asian or Latinx but in thirty minutes of clicking he has landed on not a single black face. White people have no face and that face is everywhere. It is probably a simple instance of algorithmic bias in this case. But he knows these things are never simple. In one sense the people in the photographs can be said to have no race at all, as they are fictional creations, not real people. But that is a language game since these are intended to be taken as people or as photographs of people. The project is implicitly a representation of the world. Why then does this imagined world, a world made by certain technologically minded Americans, have very few black people in it? He is not one to insist on black representation in every context. He is not aware of himself trying to keep score and he finds it fatiguing to even have to notice such things. But that is not entirely true. He does notice, in fact he notices automatically and he finds the absences egregious. It would be more exhausting to shut his eyes to such erasures.