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The black women of Hidden Figures are constantly pushing — whether it’s Johnson pushing Harrison to allow her to attend Pentagon briefings, or Vaughn stealing a library book to learn Fortran, the programming language for the IBM computer threatening to put her out of a job. After a librarian informed her that the book came from a part of the library restricted only to whites, Vaughn tucked it away and took it anyway, because how else was she going to learn?
But even common interests can’t serve those who can’t see them, and in that regard, Vivian Mitchell, the obstructionist head of the white computers played by an icy Kirsten Dunst, becomes a cinematic metonym for the 53 percent of white women who voted for Donald Trump, an admitted sexual assaulter who said women who have abortions must be punished for doing so. Mitchell is so determined to block Vaughn and her fellow computers from achieving any sort of progress — and so interested in maintaining a racist status quo she’s convinced benefits her — that she ends up undercutting herself in the process. When NASA needs programmers for its new IBM computer, it’s Vaughn’s team who is armed with knowledge of Fortran, while Mitchell’s group is left in the cold.
Besides communicating about the power of common interests, Hidden Figures demonstrates why sneering dismissively at “identity politics” or using the term as a pejorative amounts to little more than hogwash. When you stand in the way of progress for women and people of color, you are only hobbling yourself. Hidden Figures offers a beautiful illustration of how hollow the call to “Make America Great Again” really rings, because an America without black women isn’t just an America without the women who birthed, nursed, and raised so many white children at the expense of their own. There will be no white ethnostate like the one white nationalist Richard Spencer dreams of creating because an America without black women is an America without its most educated demographic in the workforce. It is an America devoid of a group, who instead of pouting and throwing hissy fits as automation threatens to make its jobs obsolete, instead picks itself up, dusts itself off, and answers with steely resolve and a thirst for more education, as Dorothy Vaughn did.
An America without black women is an America lacking the energy, the bravery, the optimism, and the determination to power its wildest dreams, like sending a man hurtling into space to orbit the earth and then bringing him safely back home — you know, its moon shots.
Soraya Nadia McDonald is the culture critic for The Undefeated. She writes about pop culture, fashion, the arts, and literature. She is the 2020 winner of the George Jean Nathan prize for dramatic criticism, a 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, and the runner-up for the 2019 Vernon Jarrett Medal for outstanding reporting on black life.
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