Hidden Figures Discrimination Quotes

Through its inability to solve its racial problems, the United States handed the Soviet Union one of the most effective propaganda weapons in their arsenal. Newly independent countries around the world, eager for alliances that would support their emerging identities and set them on their path to long-term prosperity, were confronted with a version of the same question black Americans had asked during World War II. Why would a black or brown nation stake its future on America's model of democracy when within its own borders the United States enforced discrimination and savagery against people who looked just like them?

The Negro’s ladder to the American dream was missing rungs, with even the most outwardly successful blacks worried that at any moment the forces of discrimination could lay waste to their economic security.

Why would a black or brown nation stake its future on America’s model of democracy when within its own borders the United States enforced discrimination and savagery against people who looked just like them? The

The Housing Rights Act of 1968, making it illegal to discriminate in the housing industry based on race, had lingered in Congress for years, vehemently opposed by legislators both in the North and the South. The bill only made it over the finish line in the wake of the 1968 assassination of Dr. King. Katherine Johnson certainly knew all about the housing issue.

On the cusp of the 1970s, as the space program approached its zenith, the civil rights movement—or rather many of the goals it had set out to achieve—were beginning to feel as if they were in a state of suspended animation. There were real and shining triumphs, certainly: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 pried Jim Crow’s legal grip off the country’s workplaces, modes of transportation, public spaces, and voting box. But the economic and social mobility that had been held hostage by that legal discrimination remained stuck.

There is a very important lesson for human evolution hidden in figures 9.3 and 12.1. At the cortical level, the three levels of processing are special to the human. Rolls has discussed the evidence that rodents do not have these successive levels; in fact, they have only a tiny area equivalent to the OFC for Level 2 processing. Experiments have reported that in the rodent, sensory identification and reward evaluation are combined and occur even before reaching the cortex. This means that the cortical processing of independent streams of sensory input at successive levels of behavioral analysis is a primate, and perhaps most highly developed human, invention. It is of adaptive value in enabling humans to carry out a more detailed analysis of food and drink flavors. Humans thereby are able to differentiate themselves to a greater degree in terms of flavor preferences. It supports the proposal in Neurogastronomy that humans are more adapted for flavor perception than are other species. It also supports our hypothesis that wine tasting takes advantage of this ability, developed for survival in selecting foods, and uses it to discriminate and enjoy the flavors of wine.