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What on earth is this screed about. Besides the fact Kathrine Johnson's achievements start NASA stand up outside of her race and gender (literally being truste
by BoorishBears 7y ago
What on earth is this screed about.
Besides the fact Kathrine Johnson's achievements start NASA stand up outside of her race and gender (literally being trusted over computers and programs that sent people into space)
Your analogy with Steven Hawkins is so incredibly stupid and insulting.
Her race isn’t relevant just because blacks are underrepresented.
It’s because SHE LIVED IN THE RACIALLY SEGREGATED SOUTH.
How foolish is it to act like her race is some aside like a fucking wheelchair when she lived in an era where her drinking at a certain water fountain was illegal because of her skin color.
And I mean, you don’t know about a lady who won a Presidential medal of freedom, has a building named after her by NASA, brought people back home from space safely, who was a subject of one of the most successful films of 2016 (a movie that Google shows as having almost 100x more reach than useless fiction like a Dyson Sphere btw) so what?
Kudos to the grandparent comment for doing what I wanted to do but wasn’t bold enough to.
Sure it doesn’t satisfy your delicate sensibilities that this is a post about someone dying, but damnit if I have thought the same thing, and damnit if this isn’t just as good a place as any.
There is no place where someone wouldn’t have tried to brush off their comment with some foolishness about “this is not the place”.
Because it’s never the right place or time when someone talks about something uncomfortable to you people.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoI'm medically handicapped. I was comparing myself to Stephen Hawking, not Katherine Johnson. I was talking about why I reflect a lot on such things.
- BoorishBears 7y agoYou were comparing her by proxy with yourself >”that I tend to get attention for all the wrong reasons routed in my gender.” You’re clearly trying to imply the merit for her would be the fact she’s a black female, why even bother trying to imply otherwise
- DoreenMichele 7y agoI engaged the comment with a comment of my own out of respect, not hostility. If I really desired to shut the discussion down, I would not have added to it. I would have flagged it and downvoted it. I appear to be the highest ranked openly female member on Hacker News. I appear to be the only openly female member to have ever spent time on the leader board. I was homeless for nearly six years. I hit the leader board about a month after getting back into housing. So I got most of that karma while homeless -- while I was extremely dirt poor and something of a social outcast. I'm sympathetic to the OPs frustrations. I left the comment out of a desire to be supportive. I realized I was taking a chance and the odds were fairly high that it would be wildly misunderstood to be the exact opposite of my intentions. I did it anyway because I felt it mattered. I don't really intend to engage you further.
- BoorishBears 7y agoYou haven’t engaged with anything I said, just listed fairly meaningless things that, I don’t know, were supposed to garner sympathy? Or maybe somehow hardship qualifies you to downplay the incredible acts she committed with “I hate when people do the same thing to me because my being female is totally comparable to being a black female at NASA in pre-desegregation south”? So don’t worry, you won’t be engaging with me at all.