Paul Kersey #fundie vdare.com

Of course, all this begs the obvious question how “fictional” Hidden Figures really is.

Contrary to myth, America was already thoroughly race-whipped when NASA was in its heyday. For example, a Washington Post reportorial entitled “Racism, Sexism, and Space Ventures” back in November 24, 1973, was a stereotypical lament that NASA lagged behind other federal agencies when it came to employing non-whites

Black leaders were intensely critical. As man was about to land on the moon, the black magazine Jet was condemning the space program for using money which could be better spent on welfare programs for blacks. [Blacks Scarce as Men on Moon at Launch, by Simeon Booker, Jet, July 31, 1969]

Not to be outdone, Ebony magazine published an editorial comparing white men going to the moon to Columbus’s voyage to the New World, which led “to one of the most infamous and long lasting rapes of all history” [Giant Leap for Mankind?, Ebony, October 1969]

On July 16, 1969, Ralph Abernathy—the heir to Martin Luther King’s civil rights shakedown machine—rode a mule cart, with three mules, along with 150 other poor black people to protest NASA’s launch to the moon. [Protesters, VIPS Flood Cape Area, by William Greider, Washington Post, July 17, 1969]

Even Time and Newsweek were upset by the lily-white nature of the moon launch. Time, for example, asked “Is the moon white?”

In long run, these black leaders got what they wanted. America gave up exploring the heavens to spend untold trillions pretending race didn’t exist.

Now, we are expected to fall on our knees to praise the obviously inflated contributions of three black women canonized in a film which has already won a Screen Actors Guild award and will no doubt win an Academy Award.

Hidden Figures was made with the painfully-obvious agenda of delegitimizing the contributions of white scientists, physicists, engineers, mathematicians, project managers, aviation experts and rocket scientists. Instead, America’s greatest triumph evidently hinged on unknown black women manually calculating trajectories already confirmed by computers and a white man named Jack Crenshaw.

But even in 1969, NASA and the federal government would have been proud to show off any black contributions to the moon landing. By highlighting black contributions to the Apollo program, NASA could have kept blacks from singing songs like Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” (which bemoaned how a rat could bite the black singer’s sister while white people were on the moon).

But this didn’t happen.

Why didn’t someone from NASA bring up Katherine Johnson back then to counter this negative publicity?

Simple. Her contributions were so insignificant no one with NASA noticed them enough to highlight them.

Which is why Hidden Figures matters and must be lavished with awards and praise. It creates a new narrative, completely devoid of truth, about black participation in man’s greatest achievement even in the face of discrimination. And it’s a narrative that a certain audience—it should be noted women made up 64 percent of the opening weekend audience, with minorities representing 57 percent of those seeing the film—want to hear [Hidden Figures cast celebrates as film hits No. 1, by Joey Nolfi, Entertainment Weekly, January 9, 2017].

Yet surely audiences wanted to believe it in 1969 as well. Katherine Johnson, were her contributions so vital, could have been the much-needed minority public relations asset to parade around to the media back then.

But her value as a symbol was limited—because her contributions were trivial.

And she can only be brought up now because the real truth about black opposition to the space program has been hidden in plain sight.

7 comments

Confused?

So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!

To post a comment, you'll need to Sign in or Register. Making an account also allows you to claim credit for submitting quotes, and to vote on quotes and comments. You don't even need to give us your email address.