Hidden Triggers

The theater seats reclined to nearly flat and my mother giggled as my brother and I, seated on either side of her, helped her to adjust the controls on her seat. Her feet lifted as her head lay back and we all settled in for the movie.

Hidden Figures was the first movie I watched in a theatre in nearly a year. After seeing people on my twitter timelines enthusiastically recommend it after screenings at the end of 2016, I decided it was worth a trip through the mall.

The movie opens with young Katherine Johnson stunting on teachers in her grade school class, and her counselors coming around her and her family to send her off to the best schools. The message here was clear: this woman is a genius.

Not five minutes into the movie, I began to cry. To be a young, Black girl and to have a community invest in you in the way the movie portrayed was something to behold not because it was unusual. Just the opposite, in fact, because it was how I ended up where I am today.

That is: the reason I am a software developer today is because of the role Black women played in getting me the resources I needed at every level of my education. Many of these Black women were brilliant in their own right and were only hindered by the structural violence similar to what was portrayed in Hidden Figures.

As thrilling as it was to see a squadron of Black women programmers marching down the halls of an institution built by and for the advancement of white men, it was even more painful to watch and relate to the ways in which the Black women were talked down to, ignored, and downright disrespected by the people in that same institution.

Nearly 50 years after the events on which this movie is based, the same scenes play out in college campuses and workplaces of institutions across the United States, not just in engineering and science departments, but in all fields of work. Today, I am the only Black woman developer in the room on any given project I find myself on in the tech industry.

It should not be so in the 2017th year of the common era.

Unicorns and Power

In Hidden Figures, NASA scientists Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson were portrayed as exceptional, as they were. But I maintain that Black women's brilliance is normal and only becomes exceptional in our current context of power: a nation built on the enslavement and death of Black human bodies, minds, and spirits.

That context of power makes a movie like this necessary, because it's the same context that renders Black brilliance invisible until it's time to profit. Over the course of the opening weekend and in several weeks following, Black communities bought out entire screenings to bring their children of all genders to see this movie. And what a powerful story to show a young scientist to be before she sets out on her journey through a minefield of triggers on her way to greatness.

Some marginalized groups today have taken to use the term 'unicorn' to describe our predicament as rarities in the tech industry. But this label does not mark the ways in which power – at the intersections of racism, sexism, and other hierarchical categories – has systematically shut out Black women specifically and marginalized groups in general from achievement at every level.

In spite of the racism and sexism, Black women were and are still able to excel. One of my favorite questions to ask as I design software and systems of code is how a Black woman from a completely different culture would conceive of code. Hidden Figures helped me to realize that by asking what it would look like for Black women to write code from their POV, I was erasing Black women who already did.

Black Community

While the erasure of Black women's contributions to history is ongoing by design, I was encouraged by the way the Black American community showed up in the film. From the beginning, when Katherine Douglas’s teacher recognized her talent, Black people’s support of each other was a tangible driving force of the story. Though they were short, the glimpses into the interior lives of the main characters were enough to reframe what it means to be a computer, or, in modern terms, a computer programmer.

When we think of a programmer today, we certainly don't think of a single, working mother of three who makes the potato salad for the church potluck on Sunday. And we don't think of the wife and mother whose husband gifts her with mechanical pencils as she braves the courts to fulfill her dream of being an engineer. Neither do we picture a determined mother sitting at the back of the bus reading to her sons from a FORTRAN book stolen from the library.

But these moments of reality against the tapestry of the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War were powerful echoes of where we are today in America: fresh off the heels of the movement for Black lives and a messy new administration. In the middle of all of this, Black life is still vibrant as it was then. Black people got married, went to school, lost loved ones, and just lived.

Seeing the Black men closest to these women support them was also unexpectedly important. I realized one of my unspoken fears about being in a relationship was having to sacrifice my art and work for patriarchy's demands. But, reclining in that theater with my mother who had given up her art and work for patriarchy's demands, I felt the possibility of having a meaningful relationship settle into my spirit. Even though I was aware the movie was just based on real events, and much of the plot constructed to pull at our heartstrings, just the visibility of Black love in that way was enough. And Aldis Hodge, aka #OriginalBae, definitely made that seem possible in his portrayal of Mary Jackson's (portrayed by Janelle Monae) husband. His anger at her ambition was only a thin veil over his fear of losing her and their children to state violence. In a simple act of giving, he reveals his love in a small, but loud scene.

Eartha Kitt said it best:

I've always said to my men friends, if you really care for me, darling, you will give me territory. Give me land, give me land.

Or, in this case, mechanical pencils.

Power Not Permission

I'm reminded that the way Black women work is not to wait for men friends to give us land or territory. We are master organizers because of the many structures of power we have to juggle and navigate through to get the things we need to get to do the things we have to do to get where we trying to go. We didn’t have time to wait for someone to tear down a sign for us to give us permission to access the bathroom, read the book, or program the mainframe then, and we certainly don’t have time to wait for permission today.

While I felt more triggered than seen or validated by Hidden Figures, I was reminded in very clear terms that Black women's achievements in science and technology are very much aspirational, and that Black women who look like me and come from communities like mine have a place in technology, even if we have to chin up and march our brilliance in and out of hostile rooms every day.

We are brilliant and we came for power, not permission. Try to hide us if you can.