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Hidden Figures

 This week, we watched a movie called Hidden Figures, telling the story of black women working at NASA at the time of segregation. I originally watched this movie when it came out, and saying I liked it would be an understatement. It's not a perfect movie by any means; I think the message was a little bit too on the nose and most characters besides the three leads were one-dimensional. 

However, I think the movie does a great job at highlighting how oppression works. If you really think about it, there is no "bad guy". Everyone is just living their lives, trying their best, and following the rules that were set by society; no one is actively trying to make the main characters fail. Still, at almost every interaction, we can see they have to try harder than everyone else, and there's always the feeling that something could go wrong for them. And it's not obvious if you don't think about it, but that's the feeling they are faced with every day of their lives, and they have to live with it. 

I think the most obvious example was displayed by Katherine. She's the only one the astronaut can trust with the calculations. She can feel the pressure, she gets the job done, she runs almost a mile in order to get the calculations to mission control in time, she sighs, she's happy, and then... they just shut the door. Katherine didn't get sad, she didn't get angry, she just took a deep breath and forgot about it, because that's what they've been taught to do when there is an injustice. And it's terrible knowing that this is still happening to a very large group of people, both inside the industry and in the world in general. 

To close, although the movie wasn't perfect production-wise, it was perfect where it mattered. It brought attention to very important women whose work had been ignored for a long time, and it allowed someone like me, and many others who don't have to face oppression every single day of their lives, to understand how it feels to have everything you do disregarded, and why it's important to change not only ourselves, but the institutions we are a part of.  

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