THE TOOLS BELONGING TO what Audre Lorde called “the white fathers” are master frameworks that continue to shape the world we live in. But those same tools are always being picked up by others, by people who have stories to tell that their masters never suspected and audiences the masters don’t know how to reach. Lorde may be right that those tools will never be sufficient to accomplish a total revolution or completely dismantle the order of things. But the hand of the slave who wields the master’s tools inevitably transforms them. New keys can unlock new doors that open onto unsuspected basements. Something always changes even if it’s not always obvious at first sight. Juan de Pareja’s painting of Saint Matthew of Ethiopia may not be a masterpiece in the way that Las Meninas is. But these two artists thought about mastery in different ways, learned different lessons, sought out different conceptions of the truth in painting. Pareja, I am convinced, was attuned to some very subtle questions about the relationship between freedom, art, and the divine. He was driving at questions that Velázquez never even contemplated. Brilliant though he was, Velázquez was nonetheless limited by his position as master. There were some things very near to him, things in fact essential to his own success, and indeed to that of his royal patron, that he could not see. Velázquez had the tools of a master. He didn’t have the vision of the slave.