Is There Presentation?

     Cooper makes her thoughts on the dichotomy between presentation and representation very clear in her article. At least she talks about them in the context of writers who try to present and represent when she she divides writers into two categories.
      There are those writers "who write because they please" and who "cannot warp a character or distort a fact in order to prove a point. They have nothing to prove" (380). These writers only present and paint pictures of what they observe. Then there are those writers "who catch you by the buttonhole and pommel you over the shoulder till you are forced to give assent" (381). These types of writers represent by using their words to create and/or argue for some idea that is not present in and of itself.
     It is with these two parties in mind that Cooper goes on to argue that while white men present white men and black men in various forms of literature, there has yet to be a black man to "present the black man as a free American citizen" (382) and white men in literature. She notes that there is still plenty of presentation of the black slave but that black men cannot present the free black man until there is "freedom in mind as well as in body" (382). While her main point here is clearly for equal rights between white and black men I wonder what kind of presentation can really exist.
     Like I mentioned earlier, Cooper says that writers who present "cannot warp a character or distort a fact in order to prove a point. They have nothing to prove" (380). I don't really see how that is possible. How can some have no bias, or if they do, how can they keep their bias from distorting characters or facts? I don't think there is such a thing as an author "presenting" something without distortion. It seems like all authors only represent while only individual perceptions (and here I mean physical senses) can present something. But if that's true then every representation is presented to us when we read it... And now I'm going in circles.