Through this book and movie, we started our journey to understand how racism still works in America. The story of these three remarkable women highlights this.
Based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s book “Hidden Figures,” the movie revolves around three mathematicians, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson. They were instrumental in the development of US’ intelligence capabilities. While working in the all-black West Computing group at NASA’s Langley Research Laboratory, women of color were often denied equal opportunities and subjected to segregation. The story took place in the late 1950s and ’60s, when whites applied Jim Crow’s segregation laws.
It’s not so surprising that a movie about breaking the race and gender barriers would address bathroom politics. As we’ve seen recently, the controversy about anti-trans bathroom bills, public restrooms are a unique place where abstract ideas about justice and access play out in intimate ways. Public bathrooms have long been a critical point in the civil-rights fight, an area onto which people project their anxieties about social change, a point where the personal and political intersect.
There are many examples of Jim Crow laws and etiquette in Hidden Figures:
When Katherine is assigned to work in a different building with an elite task force of primarily white male physicists, she finds no place for her to go to the bathroom. So she was forced to run a few miles with her stack of binders and papers, every time she needed a bathroom break, in rain and sun.
Katherine, (played by Jennifer Garner) is confronted by her superior, Al Harrison, about her unexplained absences. She expressed her discomfort and dissatisfaction through her words and actions. Katherine was shouting and screaming at her boss Harrison.she tore up and listed the various humiliations she experienced at NASA. she says that she works like a dog that’s living off a pot of coffee: “There are no colored bathrooms here, or anywhere except the west campus,” she says, through tears. “And I work like a dog living off a pot of coffee the rest of you don’t want to touch.” In efforts of compressing her rage and anger she left with her bag. As a result of this scene, Harrison marches over to west campus, bashes the bathroom sign down with a sledgehammer, and declares, “Here at NASA, we all pee the same color!” which made this scene a little bit more lighthearted.
This movie is a heart-warming story that will make you want to achieve more. We invite you all to watch it!!!
Written by Talking Heads (1ère)
Section Française SVP
Octobre 2021
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