Are You Also Divergent, Friend?
Widener Gallery
Trinity College
Hartford
October 24, 2025
As I sat down to write this story, a news alert came across my social media about a boy in a Baltimore high school who was held at gunpoint and searched by police after an artificial intelligence system misidentified a bag of Doritos he was holding for a gun.
The teen was African American, and the incident is a stark reminder about the future people of color face. As the overpolicing of African Americans combines with cutting-edge technology, we’re told that the new systems are supposed to eliminate bias and mistakes. Instead those traits are being hardcoded into machines that, despite claims about “intelligence,” will never be able to exercise judgement or move beyond the parameters of their programming.
The exhibit I just saw at Trinity College’s Widener Gallery, entitled Are You Also Divergent, Friend?, takes this exact issue head on. Artist Dennis Delgado explores being a person of color in a new age of automated and algorithmic surveillance. The exhibit encompasses four distinct projects, all of which are worth seeing.
The most fascinating to me was the project titled The Dark Database, which according to the artist “offers a visual record of the gaps and errors that facial recognition software produces.” Delgado used facial recognition algorithms on films that featured leading men of color, and the images are the results.
The image above is from the movie Get Out, the Jordan Peele classic and one of my favorite movies. Despite my love of the movie and my knowledge of many of the performers, I have no idea who this is supposed to be a picture of. The computer simply cannot make out a face for a person of color. This might be just a curiosity until it all gets sorted out in future updates, except that law enforcement are using these tools now, just like the AI system in Baltimore. And as with like the AI system in Baltimore, the built-in biases of facial recognition have led to false arrests.
The same test was performed on the film Moonlight, with similar results. We live in the panopticon now, but what Jeremy Bentham could have never imagined is that we would willingly build his perfect surveillance system to track our entire lives. From dashboard cams to Ring cameras to traffic cameras to cell phones, we’ve built a fundamentally flawed mass surveillance system that can’t even properly identify huge swaths of the population. People of color will suffer the consequences disproportionately, but all people need to be concerned about how these images might doom them.
One of the most frustrating untruths I’ve heard constantly is that racism is an old person’s problem. People have said that when the “older generation” (never specifically which older generation) dies off, then those antiquated, hateful ideas will die off with them. Of course that’s not true, but it’s a comforting thought for people who don’t want to do any work to dismantle racism. Inertia will take care of it.
Delgado’s exhibit not only puts the lie to that sentiment, but it demonstrates the enduring power of racism to evolve and change. Racism is endemic in how highways were built; where humans can live; what foods we eat. Naturally it will be built into our computer systems and tools, whether by oversight or intent. The brave new world of supercomputers and artificial intelligence unfortunately looks a lot like the old one.
NEXT
Are You Also Divergent, Friend? continues at the Widener Gallery through December 5. There will be an artist’s talk and reception on November 6.
Jamil is taking the weekend off. See you next week!
