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Comment by FanaHOVA | Hacker News Reader

Also see "Hidden Figures" for a real story about undervalued women (or at least at first) in the science field.

The truth behind Hidden Figures was in some ways more heartening, but less amenable to a film centered around social-justice issues, than thr movie showed. For instance, Katherine Johnson never had to run all the way across the complex to use the colored bathroom. She used the white ladies' bathroom and no one batted an eyelash.

It was not all peaches 'n' gravy for these women and their contributions are unfortunately overlooked today. But Hidden Figures was made to make a point, and its narrative serves that end.

All true. Downvotes wholly unjustified. Penultimate sentence says it all. Great movie though.

Possibly because it presents these things without any backup sources, and because donning the guise of agreeability but undermining a point (especially a 'social justice' one) is a fairly common tack among 'alt right' and 'dark enlightenment' types. I didn't downvote it, but I can see how someone might reflexively.

It's true but it's also misleading. For instance, it's true that Johnson didn't have to run across the campus to the bathroom, but Jackson did. (And someone did complain about Johnson's use of the unmarked bathroom, but only after she had been working there for long enough she had the social capital to ignore the complaint until segregation nominally ended.)

The film does suffer from trying to compress a whole office of computers into just three people, and a whole remaining government bureaucracy into another handful (Costner, Parsons, etc). It also has to do this while covering a part of the space program most people today are not familiar with (technically NACA not NASA, Atlas and earlier). At the same time, it's reasonable to cut out the 90% that's normal office work, because it's boring and doesn't help us understand the time or situation.

Most of the events have strong factual footing, with the notable exception of Costner's white savior moment. If you want more information, the book is dry and a little disorganized, but of course much more thorough about the timeline and who did what.

Well said. I would also add: why did this bathroom thing even need to be pointed out?

Is it not obvious that it and other moments in this movie were hollywood slices of a horrific, decades-long, deliberate campaign of dehumanization and oppression?

Was the point that because the bathroom scenes as depicted were not 100% historically accurate that the oppression of African Americans was somehow misrepresented or exaggerated?

Maybe the commenter is aware that all of the memorable vignettes in Apollo 13 did not occur exactly as presented there because they were exciting distillations of what actually happened. Do they normally call those out when talking about the meaningfulness of the movie Apollo 13? I doubt it.

Maybe there is a fear that a large portion of people will take it as literally true?

I've done my small part to reduce the negative score of these comments, but I think it's worth noting that at least some of them may have come from lack of sourcing in the original comment, and your followup defending it. That might have reduced or eliminated downvoting (I would like to think it would eliminate it, but...)

If someone has enough information to call out a representation as wrong in certain aspects, generally they have the ability to include the source of that knowledge, or at least why they can't include it (I seem to recall a book but can't remember the title... etc).

I disagree. The downvotes are completely justified because of the penultimate sentence. It has been a trend by "alt-right", "white nationalists", etc. to put sufferings of African Americans under the umbrella of everything but racism - e.g. discrimination was on economic/gender/political basis but not on race. This rewriting of history cannot be supported.

Also look at the comment from "throwawayhf" to find if the African American women were indeed forced to use colored bathrooms. Racism is not an invention by Hollywood.

Yes, to be clear, the "social-justice" "narrative" in the film is a relatively hamfisted and shallow one saying segregation is bad. A large portion of the film is a (good) story about the daily lives of black women in the 1950s, which is also by far the most fictionalized, and therefore editorialized, part. I mean, at the end of the day these women were working for an organization that was a mix of propaganda and military-industrial complex. The work they were doing is, within the film, contrasted to political radicalism of the period (much of which in turn we would consider run-of-the-mill today).

"The point" it was trying to make is a straightforward one: NACA/NASA employed a shitload of black women, several of whom offered extraordinary contributions to the USA's space program. As if an ordinary contribution to such a major national myth weren't already noteworthy enough!

To bring it back to Jean Sammet, because this is her thread: To the extent the film is political it's because we've forgotten or hidden the foundational contributions of women to so many aspects of science and technology, and likewise raise a disturbing aura of exceptionalism among those we do remember. Sammet did good work and shared her expertise in the field for many years, or as Booch put in the obit "Jean Sammet was a strong, consistent voice of integrity in [engineering discipline]." Would that any of us be so fortunately remembered!

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