Hidden Figures Part 1: A film connecting to a Bigger Story

   The successful book and film Hidden Figures tells the true story of women who were instrumental in the American space program in 1962 and onward.  This film came out in 2016, but it continues to generate income and capture hearts because its message connects to a bigger story in our culture, including Black Lives Matter and #MeToo.  The discrimination faced by Dorothy Vaghan, Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson based on gender and race is tackled head-on.  Alan Shepherd and John Glenn are household names, but without a vast team of support staff at NASA there would be no rocket, no launch and no successful re-entry.  The three women documented in the film give us another angle to explore the operations at NASA's site in Virginia in light of a budding civil rights movement, the infancy of the IBM computer and the hopefulness of the Kennedy presidency.
   The clever pun in the title--figures--denotes both persons and the mathematical operations they performed, and that is how this film points to an even bigger story than early efforts to further opportunities for women and Blacks in America.  The rooms filled with engineers and human computers remind us that most people remain anonymously in the background when great achievements happen.
   Think, for example, of the first man to make it to the North Pole.  This achievement is given to one person, named Robert Peary.  The first Western person to climb Mount Everest, with cameras to prove it, was Sir Edmund Hillary.  However in both cases we easily forget that without their Inuit and Sherpa guides, respectively, neither of these triumphs would have been recorded.  Hundreds of porters were involved even further behind the scenes to carry the 13 tons of baggage to the base camp at Everest [1]. In the case of Robert Peary, there were other hidden figures besides the team of Inuit men who guided him.  There was African American Matthew Henson who has only recently been recognized as instrumental to the success of the trek and also Captain Robert Bartlett, who may have been deliberately left at a base camp so that the glory would not have been shared with him.
   Upon reflection, no invention or accomplishment can be claimed by any one individual.  Not only the network of people around him or her need to be acknowledged but also the technologies and advancements that have paved the way.  Staying with the examples already cited, technologies like the Inuit inventions of sleds and warm clothing, navigation systems, mountain climbing equipment, such as crampons and snow goggles were essential.
   Such acknowledgements are seen, to a certain extent, at awards ceremonies where recipients name or refer to the people who have helped them along the road to their achievements.  Nevertheless, even in the smaller achievements that we take pride in, it is good to remember that we could not have done these difficult things alone or without infrastructures we take for granted.  Admitting this is not just humility, it is honesty.

[1] See the photo caption on https://www.theguardian.com/travel/gallery/2013/may/23/mount-everest-first-successful-ascent-in-pictures