Contrary to this theory, I had Malcolm. I had my mother and father. I had my readings of every issue of The Source and Vibe. I read them not merely because I loved black music - I did - but because of the writing itself. Writers Greg Tate, Chairman Mao, dream hampton - barely older than me - were out there creating a new language, one that I intuitively understood, to analyze our art, our world. This was, in and of itself, an argument for the weight and beauty of our culture and thus of our bodies.

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.

The world is a wild and wondrous place, it cannot be mastered, but within the dimensions of a painted picture, large or small, some of its complexity can be contemplated and some of its strangeness can be enjoyed.

Our education—I mean the kind of university education many of us here today have—has encouraged us to think of art as something requiring great care. We know not to touch objects in museums. We are all obsessed with preservation and we revere scholarship and curation. But we have not been concurrently taught to value the life-worlds of others, their autonomy,their ancestral rights. Particularly if the people in question are from the African continent, their ingenuity can be appreciated, their artifacts can be acquired and subjected to analysis, but their actual lives cannot be valued. What does it mean to care about art but not about the people who made that art?

Similarly, when Zia Jaffrey asked Morrison about the intelligence of the criticism of her books, Morrison noted:

Once I was reviewed in the New York Review of Books, with two other black writers. The three of us, who don’t write anything alike, were lumped together by color, and the reviewer ended by deciding which of the three books was the best. And she chose one, which could have been [the best], but the reason it was the best was because it was more like “real” black people.

Here, Morrison was referring to Johnson’s “The Oppressor in the Next Room,” which reviewed Song of Solomon, White Rat, and James Alan McPherson’s Elbow Room, books that had nothing in common except the author’s race. Morrison rightly described that kind of reduction as absurd. That Johnson thought Song of Solomon was the “best” was besides the point.

Johnson’s review revealed two problems. One, that Black books that ventured beyond realism were likely to have their authenticity questioned. And, two, that books by Black authors, no matter how different they are one from another, were negligently pitted against each other, with one of them being designated as “the best.” Since she was aware of this tendency, Morrison tried to avoid releasing more than one book in the same season for fear that critics could put them in competition with each other rather than give them individualized attention.