Reading Log #1

Hidden Figures

Title: Hidden Figures

Director: Theodore Melfi

Text Type: Film

Date Finished: 12 March 2017

This film is about three intelligent women who work for NASA ‘Human Computers’. Somewhere around the 19th century the Harvard College Observatory hired a group of to help with studying ways to safely send a human to the moon and get them back or to launch a rocket.

This film gave me an insight to racism and. The film ‘Hidden Figures’ displays black and whites working in their own kind of area with whites working in a well built and flash building while blacks were working in the basement in some rusted old building. For example In the film they classed the black women as ‘human computers’ meaning they were really smart with whatever their specialty was and also during the film the men who worked at NASA were the type to work on all the tough things they thought women couldn’t handle. Even up till now people still think that whites are better than blacks with separating the blacks and whites from working with each other and even when the black women are asked to work within the white area with the other white men in the building and in the film when the workers wanted a coffee break they had a coffee maker for the whites and then when blacks wanted a coffee they only had a budget jug that no else touched and was labeled coloured only. This goes to show that after all the years slavery was around and the divide with whites and blacks people around the world still think it’s ok to have it around and that some people think it’s important to feel important with having to own and boss around people for fun because they want to be noticed.

One other idea that caught my attention was how the men treated the women as if they weren’t fit for the job and being real sexist. In the film this was displayed with women working as what they called ‘human computers’ seeing as the men thought that women weren’t capable of helping out with the technical stuff but later on in the film Katherine Johnson, played by Taraji P. Henson, when she helps calculate how to safely launch the rocket ship into space and was more accurate with her calculations than her fellow work mates missed out on calculating. In my opinion I think that women are capable of doing what men do because in my life I have done plenty things that men couldn’t do and so for Katherine Johnson to take the lead and show her fellow work mates that she is capable to do what she did was a way to let men know that women are capable of doing whatever men can.