I am not going to read through all 328 papers to fact check this, but I'm very confident they did do a "thorough review", that's how you start research like this. There's a bit more detail in the course that this presentation is from:

> As of 2021, we only found two technical papers that showed Afro-textured hair [Bertails et al. 2005; Patrick et al . 2004]. While some technical papers containing Black hair have started to appear since we published our findings [Hsu et al . 2023; Wang et al. 2023], these usually represent relatively unstyled hair. Some styles have started to appear in short talks [Ogunseitan 2022], but a wide range of intricate, sophisticated, and very common hair styles still lie outside the visual language of computer graphics research.

- https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3664475.3664535 (not open access, I can share it if you're interested though)

The four papers they mention here are not from SIGGRAPH. The "short talk" was from SIGGRAPH 2022, but as that phrase implies it was a talk and not a paper.

One could read the claim being made as there aren’t any papers that are primarily about Afro-textured hair, nor about Black hair geometry considerations, which is likely true. There might not be that many papers that you could say are primarily about Caucasian hair either, but there most definitely is a lot of straight and wavy hair. I think some Siggraph hair papers do show examples of Afro-textured hair, IMO Darke’s slides here have one (p.23, example (c)) tkim.graphics/MORETHAN/Darke_Slides.pdf

Might be worth pointing out there aren’t that many siggraph papers on procedural hair geometry generation, quite a few are on rendering hair and do cover dark/black hair with elliptical cross sections. IIRC there are some papers on blonde hair specifically because it exhibits more visible scattering.

Anyway… is there a historical/cultural bias toward Eurocentric hair and not a lot of representation of Black hair? Yes that would probably be totally fair to say. Splitting hairs on whether or not their words are unambiguously and perfectly accurate might be slightly beside the point. Let’s take it as a hint that we can improve, and enjoy a paper that brings new hair generation methods to bear.

I'm inclined to believe that the authors, if they quoted that, read it. The implied claim is that this treatment is inadequate. (My reading is supported by the text on the previous slide: page 23 in the PDF.)

Black person here; this social disconnect is of course something I pay quite a bit of attention to.

The answer, typically, is OF COURSE. Big time. It would be well appreciated by most.

That being said, I get where this perception comes from -- there can be, as you call them, outsider social-justice folk who might try to say something weird here:

But I just need to highlight the "outsider" part of that -- if only for non-black folks to understand and to try to pay attention to exactly who you're listening to and getting authority from? I hate to use a phrase like "real Black people" but I'll go with that for now; real Black people tend to be the MOST reasonable, but often under-heard.

I'm reminded of, e.g. police reform; I understand that it's incredibly important and necessary. Which is why phrases/ideas like "Abolish the police" and "ACAB" are deeply unhelpful.

(and as always, I am only one Black person, nothing I say here should be taken as gospel for everyone, I could be wrong)

Yes they could. The paper we're discussing was written by non black people. Another recent paper they reference was as well: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/adaptive-shells/.