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Culture December 14, 2016
Taraji P. Henson“Empire” star Taraji P. Henson is “pissed” that girls are not encouraged to pursue careers in math and science in the same way that boys are.
“If little girls knew they could do math and science, maybe they wouldn’t be on Instagram twerking,” she told the women of “The View.”
The subject came up while Henson was on the show discussing her upcoming film “Hidden Figures,” in which she plays one of a team of African American women who provided NASA with the mathematical data needed to launch their first successful missions to space.
She admitted that when she first read the script and realized it was a true story, that was a frustrating experience as she had always been told such studies were reserved for the opposite sex.
“Oh, don’t worry about math and science. That’s for boys,” she recalled hearing in her childhood. Henson lamented, “That’s a dream I did not know belonged to me.”
She was also upset to not have known the amazing story of the African American women mathematicians that worked for NASA. “We had a very important part in history and we didn’t know about it,” added Henson, who plays numbers genius Katherine Johnson in the Jan. 6, 2017 release.
READ MORE: ‘Hidden Figures’ Recognizes Black Women’s Contributions to NASA’s Space Race
Johnson’s crucial calculations were even more accurate than those of a computer. Henson explained her character acquired such an important position because “men saw being human computers as being secretarial, so they didn’t want these jobs.”
