The Not So Unknown Katherine Johnson
Yesterday a very caucasian gentleman named John Cardillo decided to share a little black history with his nearly 250,000 Twitter followers.
He wanted the world to know about an extraordinary mathematician named Katherine Johnson whose calculations were so good that NASA astronauts like John Glenn trusted them more than primitive early computers.
In the final two sentences of the tweet Cardillo very confidently asserts “You've never heard of her” followed by “George Floyd has statues.”
Now you might be wondering why Cardillo felt the need to compare a NASA mathematician who worked with John Glenn and was essential to the early space program with a man who was murdered by the police in a crime that shocked and horrified the world. What could such disparate figures possibly have in common?
oh look, a statue!
They’re both African-American. So in Cardillo’s mind at least that apparently means that they are in a feverish posthumous competition to see who deserves more attention and coverage. In Cardillo’s telling, it’s a competition that says TERRIBLE things about society and Black Lives Matter and Floyd because to CARDILLO, NO ONE has heard of this brilliant Katherine Johnson woman while the brutal murder of George Floyd was international news.
There are at least two things wrong with the tweet. First and foremost, Cardillo is operating in very bad faith. He has no real interest in honoring a woman whose existence he apparently just learned about.
He’s like Trump in that respect. Remember when Trump said he made Juneteenth famous by scheduling a rally on it back in 2020, telling The Wall Street Journal, “I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous. It's actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it?”
In actuality Juneteenth was already very famous. LOTS of people had heard of it. It was apparently news to Trump, however, so just like Cardillo, he acted as if it was unknown to the public at large, and consequently something he should be praised for very tardily learning about as an adult.
Cardillo was interested in using Johnson only as a way of shaming people who care about social justice for having the wrong priorities and elevating the wrong kinds of people. I cannot imagine that Johnson would feel flattered that her memory and example were being used to denigrate Floyd and everyone who was horrified and disgusted by what happened to him, that she was being held up by Cardillo as someone worthy of praise and admiration rather than a man famous for being murdered by the police.
The other huge problem with Cardillo’s tweet is that it is demonstrably wrong. If Cardillo had Googled Johnson’s name or looked her up on Wikipedia he would have discovered that Johnson has been the very worthy recipient of an enormous outpouring of praise and attention over the past ten years.
What kind of praise and attention? Well, they made a movie about her life called Hidden Figures that did REAL good. It made a lot of money at the box-office, over two hundred million dollars internationally.
It snagged great reviews and was nominated for three major Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay.
But it went beyond that. President Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Lego included Johnson in a prototype for its “Women of NASA” set. There are MULTIPLE buildings named after Johnson.
She was even included in Barbie’s “Inspiring Woman” series. As many people on Twitter were happy to inform Cardillo, statues have been erected of this national treasure and pioneer.
You’d think this would make Cardillo happy, right? He labored under the misconception that the subject of an Oscar-nominated hit movie from a few years back was unknown by literally everybody reading his tweet. Then he learned that she was actually hugely famous and had received an incredible amount of attention and validation and praise in the decade before her death at 101 in 2020.
It did not. Instead, Cardillo is very proud of his tweet for “triggering” the left. Being a right-wing troll means never having to say you’re sorry or admit that you’re wrong or that you’ve gotten your facts laughably mixed up. When your only goal in life is to irritate people with your bull-headed ignorance, it’s damnably easy to succeed.
You can’t shame someone who is proud of their stupidity , who delights in being wrong if it means getting any kind of a reaction.
So it’s unsurprising, perhaps, that instead of deleting his original tweet or acknowledging that he was wrong , Cardillo has instead doubled down because for people like him it’s never about being right, or facts, or humility, but about getting a strong response, even if that response is a damn near universal cry of, “Doesn’t this idiot realize how screamingly wrong he is?”
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