Hidden Qualities
Having just watched the movie Hidden Figures, I believe it is a particularly fitting allegory for how America can right itself at this perilously critical juncture. What gave the head of NASA the courage to protect and support those exceptional women was not some unfounded belief that they were deserving just because of their color or gender. Nor was it the belief of those women that they deserved a chance for those same misguided reasons.
No. What elevated those hidden figures, Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, to a level where they were unbound by societal constraints and thus able to serve a larger purpose was the quality of their work and the precision of their intent.
They had to create. They yearned to build. They needed to put the first American safely into orbit and bring him back home.
It was the desire to achieve this larger vision that compelled NASA to break from another bastion of long-held false equivalencies around race and value. It was these hidden qualities that proved themselves even more fundamental and universal than any based on class, race, wealth or gender.
And as such, when we jog our ancient institutional memories and recall that these measures of quality work and creative intent have always been and should continue to be the only truly fundamental measures of determining an individual’s worth, then we will find ourselves breaking free of the current bilateral struggles. We will have expanded our views from a philosophically constrained single axis into a world of much broader and universally aligned interests.
But first we must break some bad habits.
