Loved It!

Rating: 10/10 (29 January 2017)

First of all, I must say that it was a delight to see Kevin Costner after a long hiatus. He was amazing as always. However, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson are women after my own heart. As a Black woman who attended two predominantly White institutions in the South. Alabama, to be exact, where people are still just as prejudice as they always were, and there has been very little progress in race relations. I still managed to graduate with a Bachelors of Science in Biology, a minor in Chemistry, and currently working on my Masters in Rural Community Health, and going for my PhD in Epidemiology. It was always my dream as a little girl to work for The CDC, The Pentagon, or NASA.
This movie was phenomenal! It shows that despite having the cards stacked against you, it can be done. As an African-American woman with a love for science who is trying to make it in an industry predominantly run by White males, I was deeply moved by such an inspirational film. Black women are rarely shown in a positive light in film or in any other form of the "entertainment" industry for that matter, so it was really refreshing to see this.
It does bother me that people always take whatever opportunity they can to compare feminism to racism when there is no comparison. I appreciate this movie for taking an honest approach to the situation, especially since being a woman only comes second to being a Black woman. Black is all people see first and foremost, so being a Black woman only makes it that much harder to get ahead. Above all else, at least White women have always had the color of their skin working in their favor, which is why I will never understand why this comparison is even a comparison at all. On top of that, people can call it racist propaganda all they like if it makes them feel better to bury their heads in the sand and pretend like these things never existed when in fact they did. We'll just pretend that the Black people made up the Jim Crow laws of the South to avoid offending people. I THINK NOT! Coming from someone who was born and raised in the heart of where the Civil Rights Movement took place, who's grandmother, Eva Lou Billingsley Russell, was a foot soldier in the movement. I can safely say there is no "propaganda" here!
In many ways, that's the way it still is today, so these are not things of the past. I actually did a research project on the stereotypical representations of African-American women in contemporary television, although it was also from a reality television perspective, so I am fully aware of the hegemonic labels the media seems determined to keep circulating about Black women. They want us all depicted as mistresses to White men or portraying one of the many stereotypical labels placed on Black women. For example, the roles they want us to play always consist of being "The Angry Black Woman," "The Whore/Groupie," "The Hood Girl," "The Video Vixen," "The Gold Digger," "The Baby Mama," and "The Bourgeois Woman." We are hardly ever shown as someone who is intelligent, ambitious, and classy. I can say this because these are only a fraction of the stereotypes, assumptions, and preconceived notions I face as an educated Black woman involved in an interracial relationship in the South.
I appreciate a movie being made about how smart, talented, and educated Black women are. We are much more than the images that people put out about us. We are Mathematicians! We are Chemists! We are Engineers! We are Physicists! We are Doctors! We are Scientists!
Now, I'll prepare to be down voted...