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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1471 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Hidden Figures Movie | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1471 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined:
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Just saw the movie "Hidden Figures" at Amazon, which is a true story, dramatized but not excessively, about three black women who worked at NASA in the sixties, helping to put John Glenn into orbit. I kept wondering how on earth I had never heard of these women before, any of them but especially Katherine Johnson who is the main character, a genius mathematician. She's still living at 98 and I saw some interviews with her on You Tube.
It also made me wonder about my own racism that I would never have imagined a black woman mathematical genius. Let alone a whole department full of them all working at NASA. It's a very "consciousness-raising" movie, and for me thoroughly enjoyable as well as educational and inspiring. I wouldn't have imagined a whole department of white women genius mathematicians either though, and they were there too. In their own department. Segregation was a reality in those days and it's a main part of the story. I saw it twice. I also watched some interviews at You Tube with the cast as well as with Katherine Johnson, who is probably smarter than Dr. Adequate. I just wanted to put something up about this movie I think it's so good.; Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1471 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
The movie is good mainly because the story is new and generally unknown, certainly to me, and because it's such a success story for black women. But it's well enough done too.
Like I said it's a "consciousness-raising" story, you learn from it, for instance it doesn't matter how much you know about segregation you need to get some idea of how it was experienced by the people who lived it. It's taken for granted by Katherine and friends in the movie, it's "just the way things are" and a lot of the time she hardly even notices it she just adapts to whatever the situation calls for. If you watch interviews with the real Katherine you might note that some questions meant to bring out her experience of segregation go over her head and she answers in some other context. She knew her abilities and the social handicap was just there to be gotten around. But the movie shows the hardship of it in her having to go all the way to the Colored Women's Restroom which is half a mile away so that she's always late back to work. Also her coworkers give her a coffeepot of her own so that she won't have to share theirs, and they don't even bother to make the coffee for her. And there are lots of subtle exchanges between her and her superiors and coworkers in which even her obvious superiority at the work she does gets suppressed. And then there's the scene that made me cringe where a group of white women are standing together to greet the astronauts while the group of black women stand about ten feet away from them. It makes you happy when John Glenn takes the time to go over to them and shake their hands and you hope it's true. From the interviews with the cast I saw and the writer, it WAS true, all the incidents in the movie are true to what really happened, though they were often dramatized to stand out.
I take this as high praise of Dr. Adequate. Not necessarily. I know he's a mathematician and when he was describing himself, years ago now, he called himself a genius. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1471 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
According to one of the interviews I saw at YouTube the book was only a proposal when it was picked up to be a movie, and got written after the movie was already underway.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1471 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
No I hadn't heard of her, good to know.
There are certainly white women geniuses who also deserve recognition. I think of the women of "Bletchley Circle" as geniuses, the English women who worked as codebreakers on Nazi communications during WWII. There's a TV series based on them. Also the story of Alan Turing who broke the Nazi "Enigma Code" includes the woman mathematical genius Joan Clarke who worked with him. (That story involves a primitive computer that Turing designed. "Hidden Figures" is also about the first days of computers as one of the women makes herself a programming expert.) But it's the racial story of "Hidden Figures" that's the eyeopener. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1471 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
I'm not sure how you got it from that link but somewhere else he said he's British, but lives in the US.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1471 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
I saw the film about Turing and Clarke, couldn't remember the title; yes I remember now that he was gay and went through some horrific treatment for it. It's a sad story for sure but not unfamiliar; to me the story of the black women at NASA was absolutely brand new, and that's what a lot of people say about it, particularly black women.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1471 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
What is surprising is that there were a lot of black women mathematicians and scientists working at NASA and nobody knew about it until this movie. As I say in the OP I was amazed that I'd never heard anything about these women before.
A woman who lived in the same town with them and saw them in the stores and at church all her life took it for granted until she returned to the town with her husband years after moving away and he was astonished at the information when somebody brought it up. That's what prompted her to write a book about it. And if you listen to all the interviews and panels about the movie on YouTube you'll hear everybody say how they'd never heard of this before and how important it is to know about it -- the people who made the movie including the cast, as well as audience members. A lot of the black women said that they didn't even know women could do math (at that level) and now they have a whole new idea of what's possible to them. The actress who played Katherine Johnson admitted to having to learn not to be afraid of numbers just to play the part -- she writes a lot of numbers in formulas on blackboards in the movie. . Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1471 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Well, I can't speak for Faith, but I'm also surprised that, seeing how important computers (the humans ones) were, that either women or African-Americans were allowed such a role at that time. I don't think that their stories were all that well known to most people. Certainly not to me. It's a history that hasn't been told on a wide scale. Yes, that's part of the surprise too, that they were ALLOWED such a role. There was some idea though that women are more meticulous about details and being exact -- make of it what you will. And all the women had degrees and impressive academic histories. And my impression is that NOBODY knew about this until the author of the book realized it's an important piece of history that had to be told. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1471 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
But isn't that a true indictment of the US in general? How is it possible so many of our population were ignorant of such things? Yes, that has to be explained. How could we not have heard of this? How? You might wonder why NASA kept it a secret for instance. But people kept saying how progressive NASA was at the time so it could be just that they took it for granted the way the author of the book did, just didn't realize what a big story they were sitting on. It really doesn't seem to be a racist thing at all when you hear people talk about it.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1471 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
It was the South after all (not fair to pin it on all "Americans."). And yes NASA had figured out that it was more important to have Katherine Johnson's mind at their disposal than to further racist attitudes. Those attitudes do change by the way, during the course of the movie. The boss desegregates the women's rooms for instance.
It wasn't part of the movie but it turns out that one of the three women hacked into NASA's computers at some point and found out that black women and I think women in general were being seriously underpaid, and got their pay raised. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1471 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
I've lived in the western US all my life and there has never been anything even remotely like the racism you see in the South in a film like this. Not that individuals weren't racist, but no, America at large was NOT racist, certainly not in the sixties.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1471 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Oh for pete's sake. There has never been any sense of socially sanctioned discrimination like what is shown in the movie. No separate bathrooms and no feeling there should be, no separate coffee pots, no separate sitting areas, no back of the bus, no separate fountains. The races all mingle together without the slightest sense of difference. THAT's the level of racism I'm talking about and it has never existed in the western US that I ever experienced. Inequity in wages OK but that's not on the social level I'm talking about. All you hypersensitive racism sniffers have to go out of your way to sniff it out.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1471 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Maybe it's different in the eastern US. But I don't mean to say there's NO racism, I was reacting to the pervasiveness of it in the film, it's just THERE in a way I've NEVER experienced it. Perhaps I'm not tuned in to various ways it does happen, but all I know is I've never experienced anything like what is in the film. The film makes it real in a way it was just a dead fact before. In my life anti-Semitism has often become more real than racism against blacks, and unpleasantly real for me personally.
And it's interesting to me how in the film the segregation IS just There. Even though there are some striking moments when it becomes the central focus, for the most part it's background and the characters don't even react to it most of the time. As I've learned more about the historical context of the movie it's become clear that's also the way it was for the real participants. Katherine is described as involved in her work, always focused on that and not having much to say about the segregation she had to endure.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1471 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
BTW, the toilets at NASA were not segregated. That part is a fiction, but it was a very effective bit of film-making nonetheless. Plus it did reflect the situation at the time. The people involved in making the film said all the facts in it are true, though often dramatized to get the point across. Yes even if not true it's a good piece of filmmaking, but since the producers of the movie said they're all true I would assume you are mistaken about that fact in that era. NASA was known to be liberal but that was the South during segregation; it isn't hard to believe they had separate bathrooms when it's clear they had separate work facilities. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1471 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
I also "absolutely hate math" -- started bogging down in Advanced Algebra, never took another math class. I wonder if a different approach to teaching it would have made a difference.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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