Emilia Rembisz ’27
Hidden Figures Examines the American Dream as Conditional, Dependent on One’s Race and Gender
In the 1960’s, amid the struggles of segregation and the Civil Rights movement, the United States engaged in the Space Race with Russia, fueled by an American Dream that burned stronger than ever. But without three women— Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson, and Mary Jackson — it’s possible that man would have never set John Glenn into orbit, or stepped foot on the moon in 1969. The film Hidden Figures, directed by Theodore Melfi, stars Octavia Spencer, Taraji P Henson, and Janelle Monae who play Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson, and Mary Jackson respectively, three women who are mathematicians, engineers, and intellectuals. However, at that time women’s roles within NASA were not developed, particularly for black women, with most women working as secretaries at most. In order to work towards their own personal American Dreams, and to help America as a whole reach the dream of space exploration, Dorothy, Katherine, and Mary must work exceptionally hard and through many struggles that white men would not have to, all while balancing their home life, families, and other obstacles. Hidden Figures simultaneously celebrates individual achievement and critiques the myth of the American Dream by illustrating how the systematic barriers of racism and sexism make personal success dependent on factors other than individual hard work and effort, thus questioning the narrative of meritocracy and highlighting the ways in which the success of African-American women is contingent upon their ability to navigate and challenge oppressive systems.
The American dream has existed for centuries, morphing and changing with the times, but it has never strayed far from a core and idealized belief in meritocracy. Hidden Figures criticizes and interrogates the idea that “the United States is a land of opportunity that allows the possibility of upward mobility, freedom, and equality for people of all classes who work hard and have the will to succeed,” (Murtoff), making the American Dream achievable for anyone. The American dream is contingent on the dream of being ‘self made’ and achieving all things desirable — money, fame, power, freedom, property, independence—and becoming successful through nothing but hard work. It’s a convincing goal for nearly all Americans, the women of Hidden Figures included, and it could be argued that Katherine, Mary, and Dorothy have achieved the American ideal to a certain degree. These women work hard, live in well-kept houses in the suburbs with their spouses and children, and are upwardly mobile in their occupations. On a deeper level however, there are barriers that prevent them from achieving the American Dream and its corollary goals and outcomes—primarily occupational mobility— than if they’d been white and male. Hidden Figures exposes the impossibility of truly achieving the American Dream, presenting race and gender as two obstacles preventing the characters from achieving the universal goal.
Just like in Hidden Figures, the narrative of the American Dream becomes complicated once critiqued in the context of the many systems of oppression that are at play in the United States. Hidden Figures presents NASA as a microcosm of the outside world that exists with the same power hierarchies based on race and gender, which makes black women second-class citizens (1:10:00) in both systems. As Dr Martin Luther King stated in his 1960 Address at the Annual Freedom Mass Meeting of the NAACP in North Carolina, “[America] has been torn between…a self in which she has proudly professed democracy and a self in which she has sadly practiced the antithesis of democracy. Slavery and segregation have been strange paradoxes in a nation founded on the principle that all men are created equal…if America is to remain a first class nation it cannot have second-class citizens” (King, 1960). King argues in his speech that America has had lofty dreams as a country of achieving greatness, but it cannot achieve that greatness until all people, such as women, and racial and religious minorities have equal access to the American Dream, and to the freedoms that have been promised to all but given truly to few. Despite having a common American Dream, not all Americans are able to achieve it the same due to various intersecting systems of oppression that slow them down or block them completely, and racism and sexism are just two of them. As Mary Jackson states in the movie, for black women at NASA, the finish line is always shifting further and further away (47:17), creating extra barriers that do not exist for white men.
For women like Katherine, Dorothy, and Mary, success is largely dependent on not just hard work, but also systems of gender and racial discrimination, and how they navigate them. Katherine Johnson, the protagonist of the film, is a Black woman and a prime example of these intersecting dynamics of oppression and disadvantage. Although she is an intelligent mathematician, arguably even more skilled than her white male counterparts, her role is reduced in importance as she works in a white and male-dominated office. Like many of the other women in NASA at the time, she was expected to take on a more supporting role rather than a leading one, and like many other women in STEM fields, she also faced issues with being credited for her work (Gancel, 2022), having to fight to have her name put on the reports that she calculated the numbers for (1:13:50-1:15:00). Her contributions were often also downplayed and mistrusted by her coworkers, despite her having proven herself multiple times. Although women may be highly educated and intelligent, their achievements depend heavily on their ability to navigate and/or challenge the oppressive structures around them—structures that might otherwise limit or entirely block their success. Even with external interventions, black women have to work harder than white women to gain the recognition that they deserve while still receiving lesser results such as lower pay (Wingfield), proving that “hard work” is not equal for everybody. In the beginning of the film, when Katherine is given calculations to do, she has to work around censored information because she is not granted “clearance”. A similar situation occurs when she is denied clearance to the Pentagon briefings and even once she gets in, the men in the room doubt her abilities. In both of these situations she earns the trust of the white men involved only after she proves herself by performing impressive calculations and through the help of Al Harrison’s interventions. Thus, black women’s progress is often not just a reflection and result of individual hard work and effort as the American Dream proposes, but also of the external validation and interventions that are necessary in order for their success and contributions to be acknowledged.
Hidden Figures’ narrative is focused heavily on individual success, which is congruous with the American belief in meritocracy, but it causes the film to lose focus of the nuances behind the external forces and support systems that were necessary to lead the women to their successes. Al Harrison (played by Kevin Costner) and Paul Stafford (played by Aldis Hodge), who are both white male coworkers of Katherine Johnson, are prime examples of some of these support systems. The portrayal of ally characters in NASA such as Al Harrison and Paul Stafford complicate the narrative of individual merit, and their involvement in black women’s success at NASA hints that without their interventions, black women like Katherine would not have been able to achieve the success that they did. Additionally, although these characters were supportive, they were still beneficiaries of the white patriarchal society and the microcosm that NASA is of that society. Thus, their actions could possibly be interpreted through the lens of “white saviorism,” a term coined in a series of tweets in 2012 by the Nigerian-American writer and photographer Teju Cole. The idea of white saviorism is the belief that the white man must be a hero to those deemed less fortunate (Andersen et al.), but more often it becomes a way to validate one’s privilege and garner recognition rather than to actually give support (Tweet 5). The very existence of white saviorism confirms that there is an imbalance in power and opportunities between races in American society. These imbalances in turn create an unequal path towards the American Dream in which some privileged groups have it easier to achieve their goals. The supportive actions of Al Harrison and Paul Stafford could be put under critique for possibly being motivated by white saviorism since they never fully addressed the underlying structures of racism and sexism that affected the women at NASA, and their contributions were only made possible through their statuses of privilege and power, such as Al Harrison’s status as the department director. One example intervention from Al Harrison was the tearing down of the “Colored Ladies Bathroom” sign (1:03:30-1:04:05), signifying the end of segregated bathrooms at NASA. Although it was one of the big steps towards achieving racial equality at NASA, arguably the motivations for Al Harrison’s actions were not purely because he wanted to help the women achieve equality. More so, it was because the obstacles that Katherine faced as a result of the oppressive segregation became inconveniences for him. Making these changes would have also been impossible if not for his privileged and respected status as department director. Although it managed to work in the smaller-scale system that existed in Hidden Figures’s NASA, true change in achieving equality requires change from the entire system, not just through the actions of one authority figure who used his privilege to make an impactful decision. The willingness of Al Harrison to support Katherine breaks down some of the racial and gender barriers present at the time, but this still furthers the idea that a black woman’s success and progress—or a lack thereof— will always be dependent on factors outside of her control, proving that the American Dream of meritocracy does not hold in the case of black women.
Ultimately, by showcasing the struggles of Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan, the film Hidden Figures goes on to critique the ways in which the American Dream is in fullness an impossible task to achieve for black women. The idea of the American Dream was created to be a goal for all Americans to strive towards, and was believed to be a possibility for all Americans to achieve. That ideal, however, overlooked the existence of racism, sexism, and all of the other identities that American society had made into second-class citizens, marginalizing them and creating barriers against their success. While the film does great work in acknowledging the individual efforts of the women, it also brings to attention the ways in which their success had to have been a product of external supporting forces, and how that success simultaneously had been hindered by external forces and systems of oppression. In the beginning of the film, Mary Jackson was asked, “If you were a white man would you wish to be an engineer?” to which she had replied, “I wouldn’t have to. I’d already be one” (15:39). Had these three figures been white men, this story and their experience with the American Dream would have been vastly different.
Works Cited
Melfi, T. (2016). Hidden Figures. Twentieth Century Fox.
Helmick, Linda. “White Saviorism: An Insider Perspective.” Art Education (Reston), vol. 75, no. 3, 2022, pp. 9–13, doi:10.1080/00043125.2022.2027722.
Kristina R. Anderson, Eric Knee & Rasul Mowatt (2021) Leisure and the “White-Savior Industrial Complex”, Journal of Leisure Research, 52:5, 531-550, DOI: 10.1080/00222216.2020.1853490
King, Martin Luther. The Negro and the American Dream. Address at the Annual Freedom Mass Meeting of the North Carolina State Conference of Branches of the NAACP.
Cole, Teju. “The White-Savior Industrial Complex.” The Atlantic, 21 Mar. 2012, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/
Sendroiu, I. (2023). “Utopia shut up shop”: Hopeless futures, populism, and the american dream: European journal of sociology. Archives Européennes De Sociologie, 64(2), 223-257. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003975623000322
Murtoff, Jennifer. “American Dream.” Www.britannica.com, Britannica, 15 May 2023, www.britannica.com/topic/American-Dream.
Anais Gancel. “Space conquest : female figures in the shadow of a male narrative.” Igg-Geo.org, 2024, igg-geo.org/en/2022/06/02/space-conquest-female-figures-in-the-shadow-of-a-male-narrative/.
Wingfield, Adia. “Women Are Advancing in the Workplace, but Women of Color Still Lag Behind.” Brookings, Oct. 2020, www.brookings.edu/articles/women-are-advancing-in-the-workplace-but-women-of-color-still-lag-behind/.