I borrow my title from a well-known movie, Hidden Figures, which tells the story of black women mathematicians who did a lot of the essential calculations for early space missions back before we had much in the way of integration. In spite of the critical role they played, the women were kept out of sight and had to walk quite a distance to use a “colored” bathroom. The theme of “hidden figures” is actually recurring in literature, even though it is rarely named explicitly. If you’ve read The Little Prince, you probably recall that the Fox told the Little Prince that “It is only in the heart that one can see rightly, what is essensial is invisible to the eye.”
The eye, after all, is designed to observe the external environment. We need to know what’s “out there” for a variety of reasons critical for survival. What we do with that information, however, usually depends on factors—the hidden figures—invisible to the eye. We are conditioned by culture to assign meanings to externals. Over the centuries, most of us have learned that not all cultures assign the same meaning to the same externals. In virtually all cultures, however, men and women have been conditioned to behave in “gender appropriate” ways. The issues in the movie, Hidden Figures, included conditioning based not only on race, but also on gender. Given the time period covered by the movie, very few people would have been able to recognize a black woman as a brilliant mathematician and physicist.
The Biblical command is for women to keep silent in church, and Christianity has a general sense of male superiority. In the Catholic Church, for example, only men can be priests. At this point in our history, it’s easy to watch the movie and feel superior because many of us can now recognize such talent. We haven’t yet reached the point at which everyone can, but for those of us who can, the real question is where we are missing the “hidden figures.” It is, of course, easier to see the “moat” in someone else’s eye than to see the “beam” in one’s own.
Black men were given voting rights in 1870. Women, white and black, were not given voting rights until 1920. The order of who could vote when says a lot about what’s kept hidden in our political system. It also says a lot about the way we all—men and women—relate to one another every day. Who has “rank,” power, and authority? Who is “one up,” and who is “one down.” Human history is replete with rank and privilege based on concepts that go all the way back to hunter-gather societies long before cultures started maintaining oral histories, let alone written records. Many early written documents are simple tax records focused on who paid how much. Information, primarily histories of a people and their heroes, were passed from town to town, generation to generation, orally.
If you have ever wondered about the reason the Old Testament includes a long list of begats, it’s basically the way people tracked history in pre-literate societies. The ancient Greeks and Romans had poets who memorized stories about their heroes and went from town to town entertaining people with the stories. Homer is usually given credit for the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the same is true for the Aeneid, usually credited to Virgil. We tend to forget that the Jews of Biblical times used the same techniques to pass history of their people on from generation to generation. They had an oral history long before anything was put in writing.
Once people learn how to read and write, oral histories are put into writing. We’ve had written records for so long now that we take them for granted. Writing facilitates communication, including information that would be easy to “overlook” in an oral culture. It wasn’t until the advent of writing that the stories told by Homer and others could be studied and analyzed. Having written records changes everything. And now, of course, we are accumulating history in video formats. The advent of television and film changes our perceptions of history every bit as much as writing changed the perspective of our ancestors. I haven’t experienced virtual reality, but I suspect that it will bring about as many changes in culture as writing and video have.
We naturally see things from our own perspective, based on our own experiences in life. Our own perspective, however, is limited. If we can’t see it, we can’t see it…. That doesn’t mean, however, that we shouldn’t be curious about what we aren’t seeing. Asking yourself the question, “What am I missing here,” is probably the best way to learn something new.