I saw a great movie yesterday, “Hidden Figures”. It is the true story of three brilliant black women who worked for NASA in the early days of the space program. While it is on the surface a story about the push to get the space program going, the underlying story is rich, and sometimes subtle.

I grew up in the segregated South – there were certain fictions that we were taught, fictions that upheld the system of segregation. One was that black people (a different word was used in those days, by the way) were not as intelligent as white people. All three of these women clearly blow that fiction out of the water! Interesting that no one knew about them at the time – No one would have, because people in the South did not believe any news that might be thought to encourage the Civil Rights Movement. (Not believing the national news has a long history in the south.) It was much easier to deny truth than to confront an untruth! A second point the movie made was in the segregation of rest-rooms, water fountains, work space, even the coffee pot where these women worked. That was based on another fiction – you saw it in the movie, “The Help” as well. White people feared catching some disease from black people. I am sorry – I feel ugly just repeating these fictions! Personally, I recognized them as fiction with a shock when I went to nursing school in Birmingham in 1961. The hospital there prided itself on having a separate floor for the people they called “colored”. The thing that shocked me to the core, however, was that the sheets used on the beds of that floor were yellow, so that no white person would risk sleeping on them after laundering. It made no sense, and even I, raised to believe that segregation was “right”, saw how demeaning it was. The whole system of segregation was demeaning, and based on fictions. And those in power often supported the fictions by pointing to “proof-texts” in the Bible.

Unless we at some point seriously examine the things we have grown up believing, we never know that they are fictions. And, we never see the racism within ourselves.

One particularly poignant moment in the film is when a white supervisor, after years of calling Dorothy Vaughn “Dorothy”, and refusing to promote her, does at last tell her of her promotion to a position as the first black supervisor at NASA (over the IBM team). And when she delivers that message, she addresses her as “Mrs. Vaughn”. Finally, she treats her with respect. The first step to loving our neighbor is treating one another with respect.