I recently watched this movie Hidden Figures after years of watching clips on YouTube and wanting to see the whole thing. I like it for a lot of reasons.
I can identify with the mathy girl main character. I've long been interested in space to some degree. It has some kind of Southern setting and large parts of it were filmed in my home state of Georgia.
But the thing that has most intrigued me for a lot of years is that "social outcasts" at the bottom of the totem pole -- Black women in a racist and misogynistic world -- played such a critical role in getting the US to the moon.
I have long hypothesized that this is not mere coincidence but there's actually a function to it.
These were people who weren't going to get by on looks, charm or who their daddy was. They were going to be tolerated solely because they were talented and their talent was needed and for no other reason.
There would be no wiggle room, socially, for the occasional mistake. They basically needed to be perfect, performance-wise, while getting a wall of hatred.
The social environment was as cold and harsh as space, which also has little to no wiggle room for mistakes. Relatively minor mistakes kill people when trying to get to space.
It's sort of glossed over, but this runs deeper than the star, Katherine Goble and her incredible mathematical talent. If the movie is accurate, Dorothy Vaughan is the reason the IBM computer was finally made to work while White men yelled at other White men "I'm not paying you!" because it was a debacle and not functioning at all and these threats failed to get results. She got it working because she was trying to save her job and the jobs of all the Black women working under her.
She wasn't even supposed to be there and was being fussed at for it and the fussing stopped when they realized she had the machine working. Modern audiences may not realize how much she was risking to do that. Unlike the White men in question, she was unlikely to be pointlessly yelled at without meaningful consequences.
I don't know how that point could be hammered home. I discussed a key Star Wars scene with someone for years before finally saying "The much copied dramatic NOOOOO! is not the strongest statement in that scene. The stronger statement is his silent decision to quietly fall to his expected death rather than join his father, Darth Vader."
It also took me years and years of being annoyed with Die Hard before finally going "They could have shown his bare feet as he ran off to the elevator."
We know his feet are bare before that because he takes his shoes off and makes "fists with his toes in the carpet" per the instructions of some fellow traveler and we get a lot of emphasis on the detail that his feet are bare throughout the movie after that. It fails to really make the point that it's why he was able to silently slip away at all. Without his feet being bare, the entire plot falls apart because he probably doesn't quietly escape to begin with.
It fascinated me for years because I chose to stay the course and get well while the world threw me off one forum after another and shunned me, leaving me homeless for years and without a single friend. It got me to the leaderboard of Hacker News but ultimately I no longer participate there either and probably never will again.
I didn't seek social isolation. I'm a people person and I've done everything in my power to be warm, friendly, respectful and kind.
And nothing is sufficient to overcome the entire world's objections to me getting well when that's not supposed to be possible.
I'm on track to die of poverty. The only thing I can consistently do as work is blogging. I haven't succeeded in getting traction doing freelance writing of various sorts, though I've tried and tried again.
Without "popularity," there's no money to speak of in blogging. I have overcome CF and will die because there's no overcoming the misogyny and hatred the world has for me for solving my problem.
And I can't solve my financial problems by sweeping that under the rug, seeking zero acclaim or fame for it, and trying to start a socially inoffensive financial pursuit, such as a web comic or clothing line, because those still require "an audience" or "popularity" and I'm not allowed to have anything but open hatred and social isolation no matter how hard I try.
Having committed this egregious offense of being that talented and unable to prove fuck all, planet earth will murder me with poverty.
Like they did Semmelweis.
Humanity really doesn't deserve nice things. Killing people for being right shouldn't be part of the social paradigm.