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Racism And Stereotypes In The Movie, Hidden Figures

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“Every time we have a chance to get ahead they move the finish line.” A direct quote from Mary Jackson, one of the protagonists of the movie Hidden Figures (2016). Hidden Figures takes place in 1961 and follows the story of Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughn and their jobs working at Langley Aeronautical Laboratory. All three women work in the West Computing Group due to the color of their skin, but prove that skin color does not determine greatness. The women work as human computers, and by the end of the movie receive promotions, higher education, and most importantly, respect. The movie Hidden Figures demonstrates ideas of contemporary racism such as the effects of Jim Crow laws, microaggressions, and stereotypes.
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Daily meetings occur where new information that Johnson needs in order to do her job is learned and one day Johnson argues that she needs to attend the meeting like her male colleagues. Her male colleague and competitor, Paul Stafford, simply laughs and says “girls don’t go to the meetings” (Hidden Figures). This is a microaggression because it is a brief statement that is meant to degrade Johnson on the basis of gender. Another example of a microaggression from the movie is when Jackson is trying to receive higher education classes to pursue a career in engineering and is told “West Virginia Collegiate Institute is the best school for [Black people] in the state” (Hidden Figures). This is another microaggression that is degrading on the basis of race. Microaggressions happen in everyday life but were very common during the 1960s where they degraded people of color and women in a very backhanded way. Sue states that microaggressions have been found to “create a hostile and invalidating work or campus climate” (Sue) which is the work environment Johnson frequently experiences. People who are giving microaggressions typically do not know they are being discriminatory, but back in the 1960’s people frequently tried to be discriminatory which is a large difference between the

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A young girl named Katherine G. Johnson received a scholarship from a well-known school which led her to be a human calculator of NASA. Before all black American are discriminated, everything they do can lead to a crime that no white people are arrested for. All ‘colored’ staff or employee are separated from the white Americans, they are secluded in the West building. Racism and sexism was so great at that time that everything was labelled for white and negro people. Like the bathrooms, where they get their coffee, or women can’t be engineers and so on and so forth.

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To elaborate, Bryant Gumbel became the first Black anchor on network television, Vanessa Williams became the first Black winner of the Miss American pageant, and later in the decade Oprah Winfrey became the first black woman’s talk show that addressed difficult social issues. Undoubtedly, the release of “Miss Evers’ Boys” was part of a broader movement to increase representation of Black people on television. As a result, the film's portrayal of the unethical Tuskegee syphilis study was an important contribution to the conversation about racial disparities and discrimination in the 1990s. In 2001, Freimuth et al. conducted a study examining African Americans' views on research and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and their findings shed light on the perceptions and reactions to the film “Miss Evers’ Boys.” There were mixed reactions from African American participants in the study to the film “Miss Evers’ Boys.”

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Hidden Figures is a film that tells the story of three African American women who played essential roles at NASA during the 1960s. Katherine, the main character, is a scientist at NASA working to do the math required to launch a rocket into space. She struggles because as an African American woman trying to get people to give her the respect she deserves. Many scenes show the hardships that she had to go through in order through a normal day. This essay will be exploring three main communication concepts found in the film:

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