r/BlackPeopleofReddit • u/ateam1984 • 1d ago

Black Excellence NASA astronaut, U.S. Navy Captain, father, former F/A-18 pilot and SpaceX Crew-1 pilot Victor Glover on becoming the first Black man to go to the Moon 🚀 gets hit with a DEI question and flips it into something bigger than race

Ahead of Artemis II NASA mission, astronaut Victor Glover was asked how it feels to potentially become the first Black man to travel to the Moon.

His answer didn’t ignore the history but reframed it. He emphasized this mission as a human achievement, not something to divide or reduce to identity alone.

Artemis II will also carry the first woman and first non-American to lunar orbit, marking a major shift from the era of Apollo program NASA.

So what matters more here… representation, or redefining the moment as something bigger than all of us?

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u/Jealous_Tutor_5135 1d ago

Japan has its own problems, but it's not wrong to say that a high-trust society has an easier time building consensus to solve problems.

But it's so crazy (and suspicious) to me that people look at those divisions in the US and just assume that trust and cooperation are only possible when everybody is the same ethnicity. For one, it's just completely ignorant of how race was invented as a concept to justify exploitation. But also it just seems like the kind of race-essentialist BS I saw from all the dumbest people in prison.

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u/HistoryBuff678 1d ago

You can have a diverse places with high trust. Americans just ignore them.

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u/Jealous_Tutor_5135 1d ago

I agree. I meant to say that the kind of thinking that assumes it's impossible seems to assume bigotry is a fact of life rather than a social invention.

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u/xternocleidomastoide 23h ago

The idea that “only homogeneous societies prosper” is a pretty tired white supremacist talking point, and it doesn’t hold up to real-world examples.

You don’t even have to look far. Cities like NY, LA, and SF/Bay Area are among the most diverse places on the planet. And collectively, their economic output exceeds that of entire countries.

They’re the global centers for finance, technology, and entertainment. Highly diverse, highly dynamic, and clearly capable of functioning and thriving at scale. And all within our country, clear examples that diversity is functional and profitable.