McPherson: When Math Wasn't Racist (or Sexist)

Events conspired until very recently to detain me from seeing the film Hidden Figures, a 2016 biographical drama about black female mathematicians who worked for NASA in the 1960s. My wife and I finally watched it a month or so ago, and we both thought it was a good film. Out of five stars, I gave it a solid three-and-a-half. I Liked It. At 2 hours and 7 minutes the film runs a tiny bit long for me, but when covering events of historical and cultural importance a certain amount of elbow room is sometimes required.

*Spoiler(s) ahead! Proceed at your own risk!*

The film focuses on the lives of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, who served respectively as a supervisor, an engineer, and a mathematician calculating flight trajectories at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia in 1961. Really impressive stuff. Writing this I had to stop and think for a second before I remembered how to spell "mathematician," and these amazing women – actually referred to as "human computers" – we're helping to safely launch people into space. Pretty cool.

Many other black women participated in the early space program, but for the sake of brevity the film understandably used some composite characters, and timelines were changed and "conflated." In Hidden Figures we get a little peak into the lives of women who were defying not just gender stereotypes but racial stereotypes as well. It's always fun to see the good guys win, and the three main characters, played by Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe, are all easy to cheer for. The challenges they faced, and overcame, were equal parts infuriating and inspiring. Whether it was segregated coffee pots and bathrooms (even at NASA), or Sheldon for a boss, or the jerk cop – these women couldn't sit at at the same lunch counter as a white person but they were operating, albeit on the fringe, in a world dominated by white men. That's also pretty cool.

Most interesting is that these black women were operating according to the same standard as those white men. They lived and breathed in a world based on logic.

Math is pure logic. Something either is or isn't. And it's provable. Aristotle's Law of Identity applies: "A is A." If it isn't, then it's not A. This is true regardless of one's gender, race, religion, sexual preference, or taste in music. It just is. For thousands of years humans have understood that fact. When Europe was mired in the Dark Ages Muslims (the Saracens) were advancing human understanding of math without any thought of their skin color vis-à-vis white Europeans. It was just math, the same for everyone.

One of the main characters in Hidden Figures demonstrated this in a momentous scene. Mary Jackson (played cool as a cucumber by the gorgeous Janelle Monáe) needs to take graduate courses in math and physics to advance her career as an engineer. She was granted permission to attend evening classes provided by the University of Virginia at the whites-only local high school. Entering the room, the class's white male students all look up as she is confronted by a white male teacher who tells her, "The curriculum is not designed for teaching a...woman." Jackson doesn't miss a beat. "I imagine it's the same as teaching a man," she replies self-assuredly, and takes her seat.

Fortunately for Ms. Jackson she did not benefit from Left wing indoctrination – er, a modern American university education. Because according to the Marxists that run our universities today – and their violent, sexist, racist student foot soldiers – math is not the same for men and women. Or blacks and whites. Math is taught by whites, for whites. Math is, according to Rochelle Gutierrez at the University of Illinois (paying parents please take notice), itself an expression of "whiteness" that perpetuates privilege because Pythagoras hailed from Europe. I'm not kidding. Gutierrez also wants teachers to be aware of the "politics that mathematics brings." Math is "political" now? It must be, when logic itself is "racist."

Would that it were, this kind of kookiness is not confined to a handful of fringe (and preferably unemployed) academics. And it's not just applied to math. Other subjects suffer from "Euro-centric bias" to the detriment of women and "people of color," according to these same Marxist half-wits. For example, a University of Michigan professor (again, paying parents please take notice) is now arguing that the study of economics is driving away women because its textbooks are – wait for it – "male-dominated." Economics textbooks are mostly written by men; the economists cited in these books are mostly men; and the examples used to explain economic concepts mostly use men. And apparently that is scaring off women, who would otherwise just be killing it in the field of economics.

Thank goodness Mary Jackson wasn't a Marxist.

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for just about everyone in the country when he dreamed of a society where people would be judged by the "content of their character" rather than the "color of their skin." That's all Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson ever wanted. They recognized that math and physics and geometry (and surely economics) were objective concepts, grounded in reality – they recognize no gender or skin color. Two plus two equals four, even if you're a woman. Even if you're a black woman.

What is most terrifying about the politicization of education today is that it seeks to overturn all the progress made in race relations over the last half-century. It also re-embraces the evil "science" of eugenics. In the 1950s white racists chanted "separate but equal" because whites and blacks are supposedly different in a fundamental way, requiring different methods and places of instruction. Civil rights activists demanded inclusion, on the basis of equality. They wanted to operate on the same plane as whites. "Progressives" are now demanding that "people of color" (Quick Question: Isn't white a color?) and women need separate textbooks, separate teaching methods, separate subjects, and even full days when they don't have to look at a white person – all if they are to succeed. How insulting. To everyone.

Hollywood is a cesspool of Marxist crackpots pushing political correctness at every turn. But in telling a story of black women succeeding in the world of white men, despite racial inequalities and the laws that helped so much to perpetuate them, it has in 2 hours and 7 minutes successfully exploded the sexism and racist racial theories that drive the American Left. Hidden Figures teaches us that not-so deep down we're all really the same, and can prove it if we're only allowed to try. That stands in stark contrast to the divisive and destructive rhetoric spewing like vomit from college campuses today.