Hidden Figures, White Saviors

Changing Black women's history so the white boss is the hero.

The most Hollywood scene in the based-on-a-true-story biopic Hidden Figures, and I think the emotional and thematic climax of the film, occurs around halfway through, when Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) takes a stand against segregated bathrooms.

Katherine is a mathematical genius who does calculations for the first NASA manned space flight. She’s also, though, a Black woman, and she faces subtle and not so subtle discrimination from the almost entirely male, and entirely white, team she works with. Specifically, there is no bathroom for Black women in the building, nor on the entire side of campus where she works. To use the facilities, she has to run half a mile and back.

One day her boss, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner) notices her absences, and demands to know why she’s gone so often. Katherine, who has refused to complain about the situation to this point, reaches the end of her tether, and loudly explains to Al, and the rest of the assembled staff, how she is being discriminated against, and how it affects her job. The assembled white people are chastised and embarrassed; Al immediately desegregates the coffee pots, and then personally, with a hammer, knocks down the signs designating the segregated bathrooms. NASA, he declares, will no longer see color.

This confrontation, its dynamics, and its outcome—they’re all Hollywood staples. Big films about social justice issues are always built around dramatic individual confrontations, in which the main character makes a powerful speech, usually to a gathered audience which stands in for the audience watching in the theater (or at home on streaming.) The (white) audience onscreen and the (white) audience offscreen are both swayed by the virtuous declaration and called to their better selves.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Katherine, in real life, never made that speech. In fact, in Margot Lee Shetterley’s historical book Hidden Figures, Katherine simply refuses to use the segregated bathrooms; no one confronts her about it.  The woman who has to deal with a distant segregated bathroom is Mary Jackson (played in the film by Janelle Monae). And she doesn’t endure it for weeks or months. Instead she vents about it almost immediately to a white section head, who asks her to come work for him instead. The movie shows us Katherine enduring a humiliation she didn’t endure in order for her to perform a dramatic monologue she never uttered.

Why make up this scene? Well, it seems pretty clear. The scene is staged so that we can appreciate the white people’s moment of moral awakening—and so that Al can have his white savior moment knocking down the “Colored Ladies” sign. Quiet resistance—or even vocal resistance like Mary’s to a smaller audience—doesn’t feel big enough for Hollywood and doesn’t give the scope for white transformation. If Black women can navigate and resist segregation themselves is there even anything to make a movie about? Why tell a story if it isn’t designed for white people to feel good about themselves?

I’m not saying Hidden Figures is terrible. On the contrary, by Hollywood standards, its handling of racism is unusually deft and respectful. The main characters are Black; they make their own opportunities; they have relationships with other Black people; they are at the center of their own stories. Al is a bit of a white savior at times—because of course he is since he’s played by fucking Kevin Costner—but he’s also not who the film is about.

Still, it’s telling I think that even this fairly honorable effort to recover a lost piece of Black history caters to a white audience by inventing a degradation for its main character that didn’t happen just so some white guy can show moral growth. Hollywood can’t seem to celebrate antiracism without adding in a bit of racism. Johnson, of course, would soldier on. But that doesn’t mean white people (like, say, Kevin Costner, or the director) should get to take credit for her courage or genius.