Tuesday, October 12, 1994
           I can still remember Mr. McGuire’s face as he strode back and forth across the room, bowlegged and sausage-fingered, as if knowledge weighed him down and swelled him up red behind his round spectacles. It was an ordinary fall day in Rochester High School. Yet the words I heard on this day changed my life. This was the day I finally knew what I wanted to study in college.
           Mr. McGuire never warned us when he was about to drop a nuclear bomb that would leave us somewhere between dazed and floating and giddy. It kept us on the edge of our seat. There were the salacious secrets of Henry VIII, the private pains of Napoleon, the fascinating life of Queen Elizabeth I. His classes were never lectures. It felt more like a contact sport. Ideas tossed around that could knock you down.
           One thing I learned early on: the most problematic ideas are ordinary-looking. Today, the ordinary thing was held aloft by magnetic clips over the blackboard: a large map of the world. Twenty of us sat at our desks looking at the same perfectly innocent map you’ve seen hundreds maybe thousands of times, hovering over the shoulder of Dan Rather on the news, in the atlas that came with the encyclopedias my grandmother gave me for my birthday, a map as familiar as the lines of my right hand. And as intimate as the lines of my right hand — so funny how a thing seen so often is absorbed in this way, practically a part of your body. A thing that just is, and is not questioned.
           McGuire unfurled another map and hung it next to the first map. This new map didn’t have the artistic blue and green and orange colors of the first map. It was stark blue lines and white. Something about it felt stretched and compressed at the same time. The unbalanced feeling you get when your look at something printed askew.
           McGuire talked as he unfurled and smoothed out the edges. “This one isn’t as pretty as the first one, the map that we all know and love.” McGuire turned and gave us one of his meaningful looks over the rim of his glasses. “I had to copy it out of a book and enlarge it so you could compare them. It’s called the Gall-Peters Projection. There aren’t any stores around here that sell this particular map in this size. In this map, if we place the state of California over the United Kingdom,” he held up a cutout the shape of California over the United States, then he moved to hold it over the UK, “we can see they are about the same size. On the old map, the map that we all know and love, which we call the Mercatur Projection, it looks like the UK is much bigger. ” Another meaningful look.
           Aravinda giggled uncomfortably as we started to look around at each other, registering the shock in each other’s faces.
           And of course Elena — well, I’m sure you know an Elena. That one person who is always leaning over the edge of her desk, fascinated, eyes wide, on the brink of orgasm. Always first to raise her hand.
           She whispered: “Wow.”
           Knowing he’s got us in the palm of his hand, Mr. McGuire was in the throes of passionate knowledge-sharing now. He lived for these moments. “You could fit fourteen Greenlands in Africa, if this was drawn to the correct scale.” He holds up a small cutout over the land mass of Africa.
           Ok hold up. Now something is tingling in the back of my head. I feel like I’m witnessing a crime. Why has Africa been diminished in the map we all know and love? Don’t tell me that maps are assholes too? C’mon now!
           Sometimes I think McGuire can hear my thoughts. He said, “And all of this traces back to the fact that it’s impossible to accurately depict a spherical planet on a flat plane. But this particular map, the Mercator Projection, was the one we all settled on for what reason?”
           “Money,” says Elena.
           “Trade,” says Ben’yamin.
           “You’re both right,” McGuire claps his hands. “So people in ships could use it to draw straight lines to their destinations. So people didn’t get lost trying to follow the constant angle changes of a curved line around the world. You may have watched the video screen that shows your airplane’s path over the Earth when you fly. It’s never a straight line, because, of course, the Earth is round. What this Mercatur Projection does is reduce the size of land masses closer to the equator, so Africa looks smaller while places like Greenland up near the North Pole, appear ridiculously large.”
           Jean-Michel and I raise our hands at the same time. This happens from time to time, as we are the only two Black people in the room. Mr. McGuire wraps up his flow by stating: “We have to remember that this map is not accurate, and that it reinforces the importance of these economically richer Western countries, and of the philosophy of colonization,” he sweeps a hand over Europe, Russia and North America, “making them more prominent and larger in comparison to other countries closer to the equator.”
           Jean-Michel and I put our hands down. His tongue sticks out a little as he scribbles notes in his notebook.
           Without looking like I was looking, I watched the other students taking notes or staring at the board. It didn’t seem like they were experiencing the moment like I was. Elena sat poised, as always, listening with her whole body. Gabe sat with his arms crossed and his back straight, with no expression on his face. Briefly his eyes lowered but it was only to prepare for a cough that came out of his mouth. The only thing different about him were the three bright red pimples on his cheek.
           While I was…how to say this accurately…catastrophically bothered.
           I wondered if McGuire would sense what I was feeling, since he had guessed my question. A useless hope. He was too caught up in his presentation, as good teachers do. He walked back and forth talking and gesticulating with his arms as any other day. He was on a tight schedule. There were more facts to be shared. We had a lot to cover before the big test.
           I wanted to scream. I closed my eyes, drew in a deep breath, and swallowed my urge to howl. Just as when we watched that documentary about sex trafficking and the girl in the movie looked just like me with short hair. When my pastor at church would start railing against ‘men who lie with men.' When Mr. Hapshire asked me if I was in the right classroom when I walked late into Advanced Placement Physics on the first day of school, staring not into my eyes but at my hair blown out into a curly afro as though he expected it to jump off of my head and bite him. I was familiar with this drawing of breath ritual.
           But in this case, it wasn’t enough. I had to go to the bathroom and splash water on my face to return to a calm state. To steel myself to hear the facts, the dates, the right names I needed to write down in my notebook so I could read them later and actually absorb the information.
           Still I wondered: how then could any map be trusted? Any chart? Any dataset? It was impossible to separate the author from the content. You can’t create something without a purpose or a motive. Without a purpose, there is no reason for you to create a chart or any representation. It just wouldn’t get done.
           And every purpose has an idea behind it, a hypothesis, a flash of inspiration, some kind of a desire. Desire that is shaped by your history, environment, even your hair texture. I was not within Mr. Hapshire’s dataset of ‘teenage women who study college-level physics.’
           That evening, I went to the library and looked up the maps, read through the history. Under a green light in the back of the public library on Washington Avenue, I decided to study art and statistics and sociology. I decided I wanted to work in data visualization.

Friday, October 12, 2018
           A bunch of us, almost thirty people if I remember right, posed in front of a restaurant after my best friend Talia’s birthday dinner. I asked her mom to use my phone camera and I caught the message from her look. If I use yours then everyone will want me to use theirs and we’ll be here all day, hun. “Hun” is her way of saying that I should already know these things.
           “Dark skin shows up better with my camera,” I said, smile-blinking in that way that says: trust me on this one.
           She looked down her nose at the camera, then at me, and smile-blinked back. Message received. Glad I wouldn’t have to go into any more explanation.
           Once the pictures were posted to the group share online, the difference was clear. Well they were clear to me, I should say.
           “How are they different?” Nadia asked.
           “Hmm. I can see your lip gloss more in this one,” Thanh said.
           They didn’t really see any difference between one phone pic and the other taken with my phone. My experiment was yielding expected yet irritating results.
           But there was one dissenting voice, thank goddess. “No — they’re totally different,” said Jean-Michel. “You’re completely washed out in this one. Like someone stole all the colors from your face except for a flat brown. Some kind of interior wall paint color.”
           Boom. Did I tell you I love me some Jean-Michel? He paints pictures that are so lifelike they make you shudder. He knows color. And he’s not the type to just tell me what I want to hear. Jean-Michel is famous for delivering uncomfortable truths.
           It was painful to me that this, this simple thing, a camera’s image processing algorithm, which is supposed to reflect images as clearly as we see them, clear as our own eyes, was coded in a way that drained the colors of my skin. The oranges the blues the greens and yellows that lie between the shadow of my nose and my lips, my cheekbones, the curve of my ear. The dozens of browns around my eyes. Even this seemingly incorruptible phone camera was washing out my color while providing a full spectrum for lighter skin, because the algorithm was created by coders who had lighter skin. They translated their perception of what they saw and thought to be accurate: a generic blackness, an abstract idea of the Other that was formless except for shadows and a dull brown. This looks fine, they said, one day. And they all agreed.
           My camera was different, and there was intention behind the difference. I’ll be honest: I was suspicious of the intent at first. I was suspicious of the marketing campaign. A website for my new VT phone featured a whole lot of Black faces — artists it turns out — in the Camera Features section. You have to be careful when big companies start to suddenly parade a bunch of Black faces in front of you. All those Pay Day Lending ads with actors so overjoyed to get some fast money, eventually ending up in crippling debt. McDiabetic supporting “Black communities and diversity” while doing nothing to address the lack of fresh produce in the food deserts of the inner city.
           But I liked how VT decided to step up. The phone developers recruited actual working artists to help their coders catch all the nuances of Black skin. I asked, and Jean-Michel confirmed it to me: extremely dark skin contains more blue and purple than black to accurately represent what our eye is seeing. He happened to have a picture of me on his phone and an app that analyzes color. He showed me what happens when you cycle through all the different colors that appear in a face, viewing them one at a time. Red then green then orange then…
           Wow.
           I remember the day I first purchased the phone, all the pictures I took of my face. This camera saw me. Outside in the sun, at lunch, at a party, at the gym, even at a concert in the darkness of the crowd, I was impressed. To tell the truth I was a little embarrassed at one point. I really needed to have an intervention with myself about my lip color choices. Why didn’t Talia say something?



Monday, October 10, 2023
           It was hard y’all. I sat there in that small windowless room knowing we were being videotaped, body tense as hell, trying to smile and look cool, but I was struggling.
           I was sitting alone in an unused room with a drug dealer. Correction: former drug dealer. One of the best. White walls, a camera, a desk, two chairs. This was the only place available in her office building.
           “And how long did you work for Wansir Pharmaceuticals?” I asked.
           Asking these type of simple starter questions helped. Talking eased my body into it and it kept me from thinking about the image that always comes into my head. The image of a toddler crying in the back seat of a car. In the front seat, the child’s parents leaning against the windows with their mouths slack open. Eyes closed. At first you think they’re asleep and then you realize…
           It’s an image taken by a firefighter, not by an EMT. Why? Because the EMTs were overwhelmed and they had to train firefighters how to do it. How to administer Narcan. How to bring back heroin victims from the dead.
           “And when did you see this chart?” I asked.
           She sat there with her legs crossed in jeans and a t-shirt. But she wore expensive high heels, hanging one of them from her right toe. Her name was Carla Everette-Tune and she looked like someone who’d never lost a fight in her life. Hard and pretty. Hair pulled back in a tight bun. I wouldn’t allow myself to think she felt at all guilty about what she had done. I doubt she had ever thought of giving any of the money back.
           “And when did you know the chart was inaccurate?” I asked.
           The chart in question was created for sales people to convince doctors that the drug’s sustained release capability prevented it from becoming addictive. It was a smooth line, a gentle wave. Nothing to be concerned about. It looked like a hill you could roll up on in a wheelchair with minimal effort.
           But the problem was the X-axis. The number on the right side didn’t go up by tens. Oh no. They didn’t even go up by fifties. No, girl. They went up exponentially. So the number one began at the bottom and then the next tick was ten, then one hundred, and so on and so forth until you want to throw up. But they were all evenly spaced as if the jump from one to ten was as safe and easy as the jump from ten to one hundred. You would barely feel the wave hit your body if you stood in this water.
           You can’t make this stuff up.
           “Your undergraduate degree was in Statistics. Is that correct?” I asked.
           You knew what you were doing.
           I’m not a fan of trying to trap someone in a set of leading questions, but we both knew why we were here. I needed to know how far she was willing to go. How honest she was going to be before I got to the real questions.
           I had to go to place outside of myself to stay focused and calm. I fell back into the familiar place I had cultivated with the time and patience: I began paying attention to my breathing. A wide mirror just over Carla’s shoulder allowed me to see both of us in the room. I separated myself from my emotions, cotton pulling away from cotton, and noticed something eerie. For there I was, sitting in front of Carla, my hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. My jeans were light blue while hers were indigo. I was also wearing a t-shirt, the only difference being mine was a dark v-neck. I knew she was around my age from the pre-questionnaire.
           Could this woman be the demon I imagined her to be? Demons don’t do what you might have seen on television or read about in a story. They don’t whisper things into your ear until you go crazy. They don’t sit on your sleeping head and fill your head with nightmares. No, there are other demons in the world that look just like you.
           Carla said, “It was a crazy time. There was a lot of money. A lot. People were making more than they had ever made in their lives.” Shaking her head, she continued, “We thought we were helping people. We thought we were giving people their lives back from chronic pain. We thought we were on a mission to make the world a better place.”
           For the rest of the interview, I remember talking to her and asking questions and even laughing at one point. I was moving on automatic. Inside, I was wondering what I would have done differently if I were her? If everyone around me was doing the same thing. If I was finally making enough money to help raise my family up, and out. We’d like to think we would do better, be better, but when you’re in the middle of something, the center of a hurricane, you really can’t say what you would do.  
           When we finished, I shook her hand and headed to my car. I didn’t notice the rain until I shut the car door. All these years of numbers in my life, and the bottom line seemed to be the same refrain. We thought we were making the world a better place.
           I had been so sure of myself since high school. I had been so driven to write this book about the misuse of data.
           So many emotions. It made me feel good to think that most people are good, wanting to do good things. But now every step I would take would be more careful, and I wouldn’t fool myself into thinking I was the hero. I would step, I would question, and I would step forward again.  Always watching myself as I tried to make my world a better place.
           Damn those shoes were cute though.
           “What would you do differently if you could go back in time?” I had asked.
           “Probably nothing, to tell the truth,” she said. “What can one person do against Goliath?”