Hidden Figures

For this week, there is no article, last class we watched the movie called “Hidden Figures” which talks about a bunch of black women that were facing different situations that relates with racism and sexism. They were part of the NASA team, which at that moment (the 60s) were trying to make a man go around the earth in space, but they were trying to beat the russians on who could accomplish that first. The russians make some important achievements before the americans like getting a man on space, because of that, the americans needed to get a man to go around the earth and safely bring him back to american soil.

At the NASA offices, there were a bunch of black women who were extraordinarily good with math and numbers, they did all computations before the computers as we know them today were a thing. At the time, black people didn’t have the same rights as white people, they even needed to use a different restroom.

The team that was working on the project, needed a good “computer” (computers on this context were those brilliant black women), so they asked Katherine to be their computer, this was unheard of, and when she got to the workplace, there were a small amount of women, and no black people, so she and everyone there were very confused (they even got a coffee mug for black people!). She tried her best to deliver the expected results, but because her gender and skin color, everyone there underestimated her work. Meanwhile, her colleges watched a new generation of computers arrive, this time weren’t humans, so they thought that the machine would replace them, which was the objective, but the team in charge of that computer weren’t able to get the expected results from it, so Dorothy stole a Fortran book from a library, so she could learn the language and operate the machine. This is something I think needs to happen more frequently, especially on this moment that software is taking some peoples jobs, I admire her for her courage.

At the end Katherine was able to show her colleges that she, as a black women, was as capable as every person on the room, and because of her, the project was successful. This was a lesson for the society that a person shouldn’t think that people, because are different, shouldn’t have the same rights as me.