Hidden figures, the more things change the more they stay the same

The movie Hidden figures tells the story of three unsung black females, who helped the United States to win the space race.  The thee main characters and the movie, Hidden Figures are all touted as a crusade for both feminism and civil rights in a segregated Virginia (amurdikkka). A crusade to help put the country into orbit. One article described it as…. “a work of history, and a collective biopic, and a beautifully rendered drama of the small-scale victories that lead to large-scale progress”

According to another article i read before doing this post, there has been 63 black woman, born in amurdikkka, to have earned a PhD in physics, from the Perimeter Institute at the University of Waterloo in Canada. There is nothing surprising about the fact that black women could handle the work of astrophysics and other technical science skills that NASA clearly was realistic enough to recognize. Since then. Still, those who either saw the movie or has reviewed it feels or felt that these “colored computers,” as they were called by NASA, at the time, deserved to be afforded the same rights and treated with the same respect as their white male colleagues. One reviewer gushingly described Hidden Figures as “empowerment cinema at its most populist, and one only wishes that the film had existed at the time it depicts”. 

Feel-good drama reveals the largely untold way in which race factored into the U.S.-Soviet space race.

If one reads both the professional and amatuer reviews of Hidden Figures, one would be excused if all they saw was a movie of “empowered black women” who helped amurdikkka become the current super power and number one terrorist state on the planet. Delve deeper though and you will see feminists equating the struggles and success of these three highly intelligent women’s as a success for ALL women over white male “patriarchy”. Somehow white people and specifically feminist, have decide that this movie was as much about them as it is about three of the many black women AND BLACK MEN, without whom, the race to space against the Russians would have left the United Snakes, literally throwing their feces at each other.

In other words where the Russians would have been today, in comparison to where amurdikkka would have been, would have made the U.S appear as a stone aged society. Yet even with all the 1500 Nazis scientists they clandestine took from Germany, ahead of Stalin, after destroying Hitler’s own march towards world domination, the United Snakes still needed people like these three women to get their space program literally off the ground. Hidden Figures, the movie, is more than the story of  of black women empowerment and empowerment of women in general. For two very obvious reasons. The first is how the narrative pushes the black woman story as fighting against Patriarchy for women in general, yet ignore the fact that white woman not only benefited from this same patriarchy, but they also benefited from anti-Afrikan hatred.

Stark evidence of this is how the character, Dorothy, played by Octavia Spencer, takes orders from a tight ass, condescending white lady (Kirsten Dunst) (“Y’all should be thankful you have jobs at all”), who addresses Dorothy by her first name, and offers little help with her request for a promotion to supervisor, despite the fact Dorothy is already doing the job. The condescending attitude. The anti-Afrikan hatred, dislike and feeling of comfort around us, have been and is still the prevailing attitude and theme with us in the halls of white corporations. Since then and  even after Martin Luther King and his gang, marched the kneegrow into the burning house of integration, the struggle to be accepted and seen as relevant in numerous areas of corporate amurdikkka, has been a struggle..at least. Down right a waste of our time…at best.

Even knowing how much ourstory and his-story grudgingly admitted how much we contributed to the wealth and infrastructure of western society in general and amurdikkka specifically.

This is what edumacation and the pursuit of edumacation in the institute of diminished returns, causes us to act and be. Till now our edumacation has trained us to be edumacated and employed slaves on corporate and capitalist plantations. Building another generation of wealth and power for our ancestral and traditional oppressors.  This is where I shake my head at all the hoopla over Hidden Figures. Don’t get me wrong, the movie portrays one of many instances where the Afrikan effort in building amurdikkka and western culture. The problem is we often celebrate our propping up this uncivilized culture in becoming the preeminent controllers of the planet, when we should have been promoting the return to Afrikan glory that was interrupted by imperialism and colonialism.

Into the killing fields

These two images, above and below are what modern blacks celebrates, as a path to success in amurdikkka. This was basically what was promoted by the talented 10th of Dubois and the Dr. Martin Luther Kings of black amurdikkka.

  

Yet despite stories after stories of the need for black business and the few successes, black people really have not gotten behind the notion of black business and black business as a socio-political and cultural vehicle to world wide relevancy.

If I was to count the amount of “black firsts” celebrated on social media that involves some one, unfortunately mostly black females, in industries that ensures amurdikkka’s continual super power status, the numbers would stretch for several meters. The first man to make a furnace, make a clock, make a light bulb work, gas mask, stop light, etc.  The first  black woman astronaut, the first to find “cure” for this, for that. We could go on and on. And as February is fast coming up and the typical feel good celebrations come around, kneegrows will wax nostalgic about the many firsts developed that has never served us directly or Afrika indirectly. None of these inventions or works even benefit a majority of the inventors, due to the past institution of meritorious manumission’s third rule… inventing something that a white slave master could make a profit from!

 

The more things change, the more they stay the same

I recently read an article which stated before and after the amurdikkklan tribal war, where newly discovered facts have purported to demolish the long held assumptions, that the North was the economical and social dynamic section of the country and the South was mired in backwardness, poverty of enslavement. Many felt that assumption played a part in poisoning the idea of “black equality” in the mind of the amurdikkklan  public.

Equality? Apparently all those tools of torture, those narratives of violence and people living environment of oppression, was also assumptions as well? The modern kneegrow still practices and believes the same old integrationist nonsense that if we try hard enough to prove our value to the white pathology system, they will eventually accept us as equal.

I am not in the habit of reading slave narratives or books about slavery. This is why I have never read the biographies like that of Josiah Henson. Yet in reading actual reviews of the man, it appears that his life was even more interesting than the bullshit that Harriet Beecher Stow came up with.  According to Henson, while still in his teens, his “master”, Isaac Riley, began calling him “a smart fellow.” His fellow slaves predicted he would do “great things” when he became a man. Soon he was vowing to “out-hoe, out-reap, out-husk, out-dance, out-everything every competitor.”

Does this not sound like many kneegrows you have met on your own factory or office plantations?

Henson did not hesitate to compete with white men as well as fellow slaves. He had a low opinion of the farm’s sloppy careless overseer. When he caught the man defrauding the master, Henson reported him. The “master” Isaac Riley fired the thief and Henson asked for a chance to oversee the farm. He was soon raising “more than double the crops, with more cheerful and willing labor, than was ever seen on the estate before.” Not only did he managed and over saw the day to day work, he brought the harvested wheat and tobacco to market and bargained skillfully to bring home astonishing profits.

I have personally had kneegrow overseers that acted like Henson. Someone who would work harder to make sure the ship runs smoothly for the white man and would be harsher on the slaves than even the white overseers.

It was when Riley reneged on his promise to let Henson buy his freedom for a reasonable price, that he quietly planned and executed an escape to Canada with his wife and four children. There he started a sawmill that was soon selling thousands of feet of black walnut lumber in Boston and New York. He persuaded the Canadian government to let him start a manual labor school to teach escaped slaves skills that would increase their earning power.

This last pert is very interesting. After all those years making a profit for the white slaver, it was later in his life that Henson, realize that collective economics for black people was what he should have been doing all along.

The researched information went further, though. In the 1850s, the fifteen slave states in amurdikkka, were by far the most prosperous section of the nation. Southern farms, many of them slave-managed, were between 35 and 50 percent more profitable than comparable farms in the free North and Midwest. In 1860, the South, considered as a separate country, would have ranked as the fourth richest nation in the world.Southern whites had a higher per capita income than citizens of France or Germany or Denmark.Instead of the “pleasure-wallowing wastrels portrayed by the abolitionists” in their assaults on the Slave Power. Further the information stated that most southern planters were hard working businessmen who studied the latest techniques in scientific farming and did their best to keep their slaves contented in spite of the restrictions and confinements of the system. On a per capita basis, the four wealthiest states in the Union were South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia. In the top twelve were only two northern states, Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Answer me this? If the Southern Farmers studied the latest techniques in scientific farming and did their best to keep their slaves contented in spite of the restrictions and confinements of the system. Why then try to make slavery in the South less hue-main as previously thought.instead of eliminating slavery then? And why do kneegrows keep praising the many creations of the enslaved, who were really skilled artisans stolen from Afrika? Where the captured prisoners of imperial wars, unskilled artisans? Where the Southern farmers really unskilled peasants from Europe’s dungeons? Or where they really skilled in scientific farming? Ether way what the need to continue the peculiar institutions, to the point they would start a civil war that killed quite a few white and black people?

And just like today, there were black men and women like Henson in every southern state. Because propping up the system was not only beneficial to each individually. It was hoped then, like it is today that the savage will see us as hue-man and including us into their family. By the 1850s, black overseers were far more common than most northerners of that era – and most Americans of the twenty-first century — have realized. Some historians estimate that blacks predominated in that position on roughly 70 percent of the South’s plantations with one hundred or more slaves. On smaller plantations, the overseer was almost always black.

In the past when I worked for the local government, I would ask individuals who had the education and skills to be administrators, accountants, logistic personnels etc, why they don’t venture off an work for themselves. To a man..or woman…they showed no interest or felt that they wouldn’t bee able to make it in the business world. In other words, they lacked confidence in themselves to create their own wealth, but show much confidence and willingness to create wealth for white people.

Managing plantations was by no means the only goal to which a black man might aspire, even though he was a slave.

27% of the adult male slaves in the city of Charleston were blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers and other skilled artisans. They operated as virtually free men. And while the “slave carpenter or shoemaker would and could advertise his services, negotiate his own contracts, receive and pay money and even live in his own house. His slave status required him to pay a percentage of his income to his owner. Otherwise he was a relatively free man.” 

Free but not really free. Just like in modern society, where we as indentured slaves, feel compelled to work for a dictatorial boss, or face expulsion and white balled from similar employment.

Slave artisans frequently made enough money to buy their freedom, even in the 1850s, when the soaring price of cotton made a slave’s market price as high as $1700 — $25,000 in twenty-first-century money. In fact the South’s 260,000 free blacks had an even more impressive net worth. They owned property worth $25,000,000. About one in every hundred owned slaves – as many as fifty in some cases. Even more surprising to modern readers is the number of slaves who worked in factories, displaying a gamut of industrial skills. The papers of David Ross, who operated the Oxford Ironworks in Campbell County, Virginia, one of the largest factories in the nation, reveal that the business was staffed and run entirely by trained slaves. A man named Abram was responsible for the highly technical and demanding day-to-day management of the blast furnace. The furnace keepers, Abram’s chief assistants, had to know precisely how much charcoal and limestone to put into the furnace when it was in blast. All the other skilled workers — blacksmiths, potters, hammer men, miners – were slaves.

Again the article implied that Southern plantation owners practiced Scientific farming. Other interesting information about the South informs us that:

• The profitability of cotton made money an ingredient in raising productivity on many plantations.
• Owners frequently paid between $40 and $110 a year to experienced slaves for doing a good job.
• Slaves were also permitted to grow fruit and vegetables in their gardens, and sell the produce.
• One industrious field hand made $309 in a single year selling peaches and apples on the side. In modern money that sum would be about $5,000.
• In tobacco farming, where a high degree of skill was necessary, planters frequently paid slaves as much as $300 a year to guarantee a good performance.
• Rice cultivation required equal amounts of savvy. The plantations were divided into dozens of small watery plots surrounded by dikes.
• One traveler visited a rice farmer in Georgia and found a slave engineer who received “considerably higher wages” (in the form of presents) than the white overseer for his skill in building and maintaining the dikes.
• Some planters, to increase productivity, entered into profit-sharing arrangements with their slaves.
• One Alabama owner permitted his bondmen to keep two thirds of the profits of the plantation, setting aside a third for his private use. From the slaves’ share came the cost of clothing and food for them and their families, the taxes for the farm, and medical bills.

 

With the informations coming to light from these new research, claims have been made that black men and women have been given very little credit for the South’s remarkable wealth. While this is true that the enslaved participated in the system, not as mere automatons, but as achievers, frequently mastering the technology of the South’s agriculture as well as the psychology of leadership. It seems the pendulum has now been swung the other way in that the new information seems to be glorifying our participation in that system, even though only a few benefit as elites. Something we assail the boulé class and other kneegrows today of doing to the impoverished among us.

These researches seemed to think that slavery was evolving. Conveniently ignoring the reality that exploitation of Afrikans was still the foundation of slavery in the United Snakes. They even went as far as postulating that many planters did not like slavery but were baffled by how to eliminate it.

Really why disband it when your wealth exceeded many countries in Europe who also benefited from slavery. The researcher were said plantation owners were haunted by the fear of insurrections, and they did not think the black and white race could live in peace if both were free and equal. This was a view that was shared by almost everyone in the North as well as the South. In most northern states, blacks could not vote, serve on juries, or obtain decent jobs. They lived a segregated way of life in housing, schools, even churches.

In other words, they will allow us to be the main cog in growing our wealth, but we can not participate significantly in how the system looks and operates. Was this why every time a black community struck out on their own, white marauders and klans men shoot, lynch, loot and burned them out? The feeling that staying a slave would be beneficial for public harmony? This is the logic of the savage for you. And the logic of the kneegrows who strive for acceptance from the main controllers of this illegal society.

 

This is how i see Hidden Figures, the Help, the Butler and any fictitious, semi-factual or factual stories told about black people being the first to make white people feel comfortable or contribute to their generational success and wealth. These same benefactors then turn around and ask what’s wrong with black people? Why can’t black people clean up themselves?

I have said it numerous time and will continue to beat that drum. We need to take our skills and do for self. We need to make our education relevant to us and for us. Everybody else does both. And the parents of  every other non white group either indoctrinate their children to use their education to build up that specific group or use the training and education to become manufacturers and producers for their specific group.