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I wasn’t asking about your math background.

You previously posted this to me:

I don’t know what your high-school math courses were like...

But let's get back to the point at hand.

I am not the only person on the planet who is saying that "Hidden Figures" was revisionist history and propaganda.

Hyped Figures: John Glenn And The PC Myth Of Katherine Johnson–Unsung Black Women Were NOT What Got Us To The Moon

You stated that Glenn's reliance on Johnson was factual, as portrayed in the film.

The fact is, we don't know that.

And with Glenn’s death goes the possibility of refuting one of the stranger tales born in the Current Year and poised to become the definitive story of the Mercury and Apollo missions: the Christmas Day-scheduled movie Hidden Figures’ “untold true story” that black women were the real force behind America’s space exploration. In the book on which the movie is based, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, by Margot Lee Shetterly, Glenn is quoted as having said this of Katherine Johnson, the black female brain allegedly behind NASA’s greatest glories. “Get the girl to check the numbers,” said the astronaut. If she says the numbers are good, he told them, I’m ready to go.”

You also accused me of being "interested in skin tone." As I explained, I am not the one hyping race in this story. But race is the cornerstone of this movie, because that is what the writers, producers, and actors put out there. Further, the real Kathy Johnson was:

"...NASA’s website now reports that Katherine Johnson, a blue-eyed, light-skinned black female...

And, as the article I linked points out, there are many reasons to question not only the veracity, but accuracy of this movie's entire premise:

- Why isn’t Johnson mentioned in John Glenn’s John Glenn: A Memoir or Alan Shepard’s Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America’s Race to the Moon?

- Why does Charles Murray not mention her in his seminal book on the Apollo program (co-authored with Katherine Murray), Apollo: Race to the Moon?

- Why is Johnson not mentioned in Tom Wolfe’s epic The Right Stuff,documenting the sensational story of NASA’s first astronaut group, the all-white Mercury 7.

- Why, especially oddly, is Johnson not mentioned in We Could Not Fail: The First African Americans in the Space Program.

- Why was Johnson not mentioned in either Jet or Ebony magazine, two black magazines that spent the 1960s and 1970s simultaneously lamenting the lack of blacks at NASA and celebrating any minor achievements of blacks in the space program.

- Why, given her alleged role in the Apollo 13 drama, does Johnson not appear in Jim Lovell’s autobiographical Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13(subsequently made into the Tom Hanks movie, Apollo 13).

- Why does Gene Kranz, the Flight Director of NASA famously played by Ed Harris in Apollo 13, fail to mention Katherine Johnson in his autobiography Failure is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond?

- Why, perhaps most significantly, does Johnson not appear in Harlem Princess: The Story of Harry Delaney’s Daughter, the autobiography of Ruth Bates Harris? Harris, who took the job of Deputy Assistant Administrator for Equal opportunity for NASA in 1972, famously said, “I saw no minorities or women as astronauts. Could I help make a difference?” Harris waged a war to get more blacks involved with NASA, which was a paltry 5.6 percent non-white in 1973 versus a government agency average of 20 percent minority. [Societal Impact of Spaceflight, 2007, PDF]

- Why does Johnson not appear in Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories, by the black actress Nichelle Nichols, who played the part of Lt. Uhura in the iconic TV series Star Trek? Nichols waged a personal crusade against the overwhelming white nature of NASA, giving a speech in 1977, “New Opportunities for the Humanization of Space,”lamenting how white the space agency was and how this was dehumanizing to nonwhites.

Has Johnson's contribution been exaggerated and used for political purposes? Most specifically to fill a racial agenda?

Yes, I believe it has.

If you want to lionize this movie, hey, good for you.

I would caution you, however, that you are proving the point that propaganda is powerful and has the ability to influence people to conclusions that are not always factual.

You said you read the book and watched the movie. Your spirited defense of both clearly means (to me) that the music, the compelling story, the images, the acting - all influenced your conclusions.

And I believe that "Hidden Figures" is, at is heart - a piece of political and racial politics fiction.

Glenn was supposedly asking for one more check before his flight into space—a review of the orbital trajectory generated by the IBM 7090 computer. With Glenn’s death, we will never know if this conversation ever took place. But it is part of an insistent revisionist history of NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration], which was in fact almost entirely staffed by whites until the Apollo program was shuttered in the early 1970s. Historians of the space program recognize the awful truth: NASA, along with the companies that performed contract work during Apollo, was a reflection of society’s workforce in the late 1960s—mostly white, mostly male. [Apollo Moon Missions: The Unsung Heroes, by Billy Watkins,2006, p. 79] The primarily white Main Stream Media began frenetic virtue-signaling with the #OscarsSoWhite movement. This helped spawned a bidding war over the “true” story of how a lone black female helped fulfill John F. Kennedy’s promise of putting a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s: And Fox 2000 and Chernin are developing Hidden Figures, a movie about the African-American women who helped NASA launch its first space missions (Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer recently were cast). [Hollywood’s Casting Blitz: It’s All About Diversity in the Wake of #OscarsSoWhite, by Rebecca Ford, Hollywood Reporter, March 2, 2016]

1. You said the math in “Hidden Figures” was high-school level. I pointed out that the scene in the movie where the location of Glenn’s splashdown was calculated used a numerical approximation method for solving differential equations. This is not high-school math unless, perhaps, the high-school is the Bronx High School of Science. The use of Euler’s Method in the blackboard scene is a plot device, but Johnson’s contribution to solving the problem is not.

2. The movie does not state or imply that “unsung black women” “got us to the moon” or that “black women were the real force behind America’s space exploration” or that Johnson was the “the black brain allegedly behind NASA’s greatest glories.” Any such claim is an absurd distortion of the plot of the movie. But you wouldn’t know that since you refuse to see the movie. So, who is the victim of propaganda here?

3. You continue to be obsessed with Johnson’s physical characteristics, pointing out NASA’s description of her as blue-eyed and light-skinned. I’m not sure what your point is, but her appearance was sufficiently “colored” that she went to a segregated college and was then relegated to a segregated work team and segregated bathrooms at NACA. That Johnson never played the “victim card” is something to be admired.

4. The main point of the book, and the movie on which it is based, is that the contribution of the female “computers” (some of whom were black in an era of racial segregation) to the space program was unheralded and worth telling. If the story was widely known, through previous biographies and autobiographies, the book might not have been written by Shetterly.

4. I did not “lionize” Hidden Figures. I said it was a good, but not great, movie. It takes some liberties with the truth, as all movies (even documentaries) do, but it is largely based on fact and does not wildly exaggerate the contributions of the central characters.