Race, witness, voice

Race is not a topic tonight -- it's a condition of seeing and being seen. Brooks compresses an entire worldview into eight lines and a single pronoun. Baldwin arrives in a Swiss village where no one has ever seen a Black man and tries to write his way through what that means. Morrison tells a story about two women -- one Black, one white -- and never tells you which is which. Each writer is interested in what witness requires: who's looking, who's looked at, and what gets distorted in the exchange.