This movie came up in my debates with liberal boomers, so I decided to look into it.
For those who don't know, Hidden Figures is a Hollywood movie about three black female mathematicians who used their genius to chart the navigation for John Glenn's mission into space. It proves definitively that black women can be smart and powerful, and that black people put us on the Moon
These three women are: Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson. But as we look into the story, things are revealed to be very different than the Hollywood narrative.
Mary Jackson never worked on this project. The first female engineer hired by NASA, she worked as a low level functionary in a Wind Tunnel laboratory. She then transferred to work in the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs as the Affirmative Action Program Manager.
en.wikipedia.org
Dorothy Vaughan also never worked on this project. She worked as a mathematics teacher at a High School in Virginia, before being recruited by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which had recently begun scouting out minorities in response to Roosevelt's desegregation order. She worked as an administrator at West Area Computers, a FORTRAN programming outfit.
en.wikipedia.org
Katherine Johnson is the shining star of this group, and the only one to actually work on this project. However, there is something very interesting about her. Maybe you can see what it is from her picture
She did not work alone, but as a low level functionary among many others. Her job was not in designing, or planning, it was in computing. Meaning she was literally just plugging data into the computer and hitting enter. These were the first electronic computers of their time, so data entry had to be spot on. Her crowning achievement of this time is apparently when NASA engineers asked her to double check the calculations for the trajectory they had worked out. She did not make these calculations herself, there was no thinking involved on her part whatsoever.
en.wikipedia.org
The fact that this story was turned into a major Hollywood movie consumed by the masses is beyond belief. It is a deliberate attempt to pump a socially progressive message based on lies into the heads of people all over the world. People who will never question the narrative
