Hidden Figures: Visibility / Invisibility of Brown Brilliance, Part I

Has everybody seen Hidden Figures yet?

It’s delightful: a tight, well-acted, gripping drama, based on a true story about an exciting chapter in national history. You can just go to have a good time. You don’t need to feel like you are going to some kind of Important Movie About Race or whatever. It is totally kid friendly, and as long as they know the most basic facts about the history of racial discrimination, it doesn’t force you to have any kind of conversation you aren’t up for / have every day and don’t need another… / etc. Just go and enjoy yourself.

THAT SAID.

Everybody, parents especially, and white parents especially, please go see this film and take your kids.

I was actually fighting back tears inside of 5 minutes.

Long-time readers of this blog know that I am strongly critical of the widespread notion of innate mathematical talent. I’ve written about this before, and plan on doing a great deal more of this writing in the future. The TL;DR version is that I think our cultural consensus, only recently beginning to be challenged, that the capacity for mathematical accomplishment is predestined, is both factually false and toxic. My views on the subject can make me a bit of a wet blanket when it comes to the representation of mathematical achievement in film – the Hollywood formula for communicating to the audience that “this one is a special one” usually feels to me like it’s feeding the monster, and that can get between me and an otherwise totally lovely film experience.

In spite of all of this, when Hidden Figures opened by giving the full Hollywood math genius treatment to little Katherine Johnson (nee Coleman), kicking a stone through the woods while she counted “fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, prime, eighteen, prime, twenty, twenty-one, …,” I choked up. I had never seen this before. The full Good Will Hunting / Little Man Tate / Beautiful Mind / Searching for Bobby Fischer / Imitation Game / etc. child-genius set of signifiers, except for a black girl!

What hit me so hard was that it hit me so hard. For all the brilliant minds we as a society have imagined over the years, how could we never have imagined this one before now? And she’s not even imaginary, she’s real! And not only real, but has been real for ninety-eight years! And yet this is something that, as measured by mainstream film, we haven’t even been able to imagine.

You’ll do with this what you will, but for me it’s an object-lesson in the depth and power of our racial cultural programming, as well as a step toward the light. I am a white person who has had intellectually powerful black women around me, whom I greatly admired, my whole life, starting with my preschool and kindergarten teachers, and including close friends and members of my own family, as well of course as many of my students. And yet the type of representation that opened Hidden Figures is something that only fairly recently did it begin to dawn on me how starkly it was missing.

So, go see this movie! Take your kids to see it! Let them grow up easily imagining something that the American collective consciousness has hidden from itself for so long.

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This blog and the nation

I have been relatively inactive on this blog for a while now. This has been due 100% to the necessity to focus on my schoolwork and other offline pursuits, and will continue to be true for a few more months at least. (Btw, I’m on twitter now! But won’t be using it much for the same few months.)

Also, the scope of this blog, while broad (I think) within the general umbrella of math and education, has never ventured out from beneath this umbrella.

But the sea change in our national political context is on all of our minds, certainly on mine, and there are a number of themes and ideas that I want to explore with you here, relating to the state of our union and our democracy. Some of them are related to math and education directly; others more obliquely.

Much of the writing I intend to do will have to wait at least the above-referenced few months. But I am going to commence a pair of hopefully pretty short blog posts now, entitled Visibility / Invisibility of Brown Brilliance, concerning the way that some recent exciting pop-cultural events have thrown into really stark relief for me the doggedness and obstinacy of our refusal, as a culture as a whole, to acknowledge the power of our black and brown citizens’ intellectual contributions to our nation.

I hope the relevance to the political moment is felt, but I don’t want to draw explicit connections here because I don’t want what I’m going for to get drowned out by partisanship, mine or anyone else’s. I hope to steer clear of self-righteousness (and please let me know if I’m unsuccessful). These posts are intended to invite introspection — I’m aspiring to the dental hygiene paradigm of race discourse. When I talk about our refusal as a culture as a whole to acknowledge brown brilliance, I mean all of us – me and you and all of us. Not “the bad guys” / “the others”.

Anyway. Look for a pair of posts on this theme in the next few days. I hope you’ll find them useful.