Oprah Is Wrong About ‘Precious'— Mo’Nique, in particular, is a revelation: She’s all snears and sullen putdowns, greedy, grasping, nasty. But in the comedian’s hands, we recognize the humanity in the monster, without wanting to forgive her of her trespasses. A word about all that hype: Oprah, who serves as executive producer along with Tyler Perry, has pushed the film hard, and she is to be commended for throwing her weight behind a little film. It deserves every bit of attention that it gets. But there’s something discomfiting about her declarations that “We are all Precious.” In short, she Oprah-fies Precious, rendering Precious’ fierce individuality the stuff of platitudes and Stuart Smalley moments on SNL. No, we are not all Precious. We all get our power from the individuality of our stories. Precious stands alone.—The Root

She Ain’t Me, Babe—Where exactly is the “arc of hope” at the end of the movie? A 350 pound, HIV positive, homeless,  reading at a 7^th grade level, 16-year-old high school drop-out totes her infant and mongoloid toddler, both products of rape/incest by her father, along a crowded Harlem street? Freedom may be just another word for nothing left to lose, but that’s not the meaning of hope. Maybe they meant “arc of hype.” And you have to be frightened when the movie receives the Barbara Bush seal of approval, she who described American citizens sheltered in the Houston Astrodome after their homes and lives were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina and government indifference  as people who “Were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them.” Still, the hype has been relentless, and the Oprah seal of approval’s had a chilling effect on criticism. —NiaOnline

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Can Oprah Lead Precious All the Way to Oscar?—Precious marks the first film to be affiliated with Perry's 34th Street Films, and in the case of Oprah it marks her biggest move yet to use her media empire in service of a film that doesn't feature her in the cast. Two years ago she stood behind The Great Debaters — a film that went on to gross only $30 million. She produced and co-starred in 1998's Beloved, 12 years after she was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in The Color Purple. If Precious were to be crowned Best Picture next February, Winfrey could well be singled out as one of the producers to take the stage to accept the award: Oprah would have her own Oscar.

For now, Winfrey is keeping the focus on the story that first inspired her to sign on to the project. "None of us who sees the movie can now walk through the world and allow the Preciouses of the world to be invisible," Winfrey told reporters in Toronto. But few things on earth are as precious as an Oprah Winfrey endorsement, and that's the X factor that is bound to have Hollywood insiders talking throughout the winter, wondering just how far this one woman can take an independent film — and how they can convince her to do the same for them. Until she starts up that film club.—Time

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A Precious Moment—Recently George and I hosted a special sneak preview of Precious in our hometown, Houston. The audience of 200 included young people and old, teachers and corporate executives, parents and grandparents, and folks of just about every ethnic and economic background. I planned to say a few words when the movie was over—but I was speechless. (My husband would tell you that is highly unusual.)

Precious is the story of an illiterate African-American teenager growing up in poverty in the 1980s. The abuse—sexual, physical, mental—this young woman suffers at the hands of her parents is difficult to watch; there are times when her hopelessness is overwhelming. But what saves her from a life of despair is a teacher who helps her learn to read and write.

After 30 years promoting literacy, I've never felt more energized. Watching this movie, I was reminded why it's important that we keep working so hard. There are kids like Precious everywhere. Each day we walk by them: young boys and girls whose home lives are dark secrets. They are often abused or neglected, and seldom read to or given homework help. Without the skills they need to lead a productive life, the chances are good they will continue the cycle of poverty and illiteracy.—Newsweek

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Fade to White—Black films looking to attract white audiences flatter them with another kind of stereotype: the merciful slave master.. In guilt-free bits of merchandise like “Precious,” white characters are always portrayed as caring. There to help. Never shown as contributing to the oppression of African-Americans. Problems that members of the black underclass encounter are a result of their culture, their lack of personal responsibility.

It’s no surprise either that white critics — eight out of the nine comments used on the publicity Web site for “Precious” were from white men and women — maintain that the movie is worthwhile because, through the efforts of a teacher, this girl begins her first awkward efforts at writing.

Redemption through learning the ways of white culture is an old Hollywood theme. D. W. Griffith produced a series of movies in which Chinese, Indians and blacks were lifted from savagery through assimilation. A more recent example of climbing out of the ghetto through assimilation is “Dangerous Minds,” where black and Latino students are rescued by a curriculum that doesn’t include a single black or Latino writer.

By the movie’s end, Precious may be pushing toward literacy. But she is jobless, saddled with two children, one of whom has Down syndrome, and she’s learned that she has AIDS.  Some redemption.—NYTimes

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The NAACP House of Shame: Precious and the Big Payback—Suppose the producers of a nominated picture like “Hurt Locker” donated one million dollars to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and on the night of the Oscar presentations “Hurt Locker” received Oscars for best picture, best actress, best supporting actress and a special honor was awarded to the “producer.”

This is exactly what happened at the NAACP Image awards last Friday night. The film Precious received six awards as a kind of payback to Tyler Perry who donated one million plus dollars to the organization last November.

As a result, the NAACP gave segregated Hollywood the green light to admire this abhorrent, repellant movie. They must be gloating over at EW.com (Entertainment Weekly) sites with connections to the Oscars establishment and where my Op-Ed about “Precious,” printed in The New York Times, was the subject of criticism by Owen Gleiberman and Lisa Schwarzbaum. Their criticism was picked up by Sasha Stone at awardsdaily.com. They and the bloggers who weighed in about my state of mind and my low I.Q. and how I was connected to the part of the body that plays a key role in the elimination of wastes will probably use these NAACP awards as justification for their defense of the film and as evidence of the black community’s support for “Precious.”

Owen Gleiberman, a man whom I have never met, said that my criticism of the movie said more about me than about the movie. He never said what my criticism of the movie said about me. I also challenged Ms. Scwarzbaum to comment about an article printed in a Jewish magazine, Tablet (“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Why Jewish producers kept Jewish women off stage and screen,” 10/20/’09), which pointed to the discrimination against Jewish women by Jewish producers, from the early days of Hollywood to the period of Woody Allen and Larry David (a guy who thinks it funny to appear in a scene eating a cookie shaped like a black penis.)

The producers’ justification, historically, was that they didn’t want their women to play the kind of roles they assigned to black and white gentile women.—BlackAgendaReport

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What Reed Ignores, and Erases—First, [Ishmael] Reed never once asks if the film reflects reality. He never asks what it is actually like for young women and girls—of all nationalities—who are raped and molested in our society. And the particular ways this impacts Black women who are doubly oppressed. He never suggests that these stories should be told. By making this solely about a "marketing strategy" to sell "images of Black male depravity," Reed erases the brutal and undeniable reality of what it means to walk the earth as a woman. In the U.S. alone, 1 in 4 women are raped, a woman is beaten by her partner every 15 seconds, 3 women are killed every day by lovers and husbands, and almost 220 children are sexually abused every day―most of them by a relative or family friend.

Reed even criticizes the Pulitzer prize winning play, Ruined, about rape in the Congo, for contributing to this demonization. (Rape was systematically used as a weapon of war in the Congo and this play depicts the harrowing reality. There are no comprehensive statistics, but hundreds of thousands of women were raped in the Congo in the last 10 years and this is continuing at a frightening rate. The play also alludes to the role of the West in fueling the conflict in order to gain control of coltan resources, which are used in electronic devices such as cell phones. (Raymond Lotta discusses this in his powerful, short video: The Rape of the Congo and Your Cell Phone, youtube.com/raymondlotta.)1

Now do something Ishmael Reed refuses to do—stop and think about the lived impact of those numbers. The dreams of young girls crushed and broken and the lifetimes of nightmares that fill young girls' sleep. And think what it means that on top of this, like Precious, women are told in a thousand ways that they brought this torment on themselves. Annie Day wrote, "The story of Precious is not an anomaly but a distillation." And this reality reflects how this is so.

Reed also ignores the way the film has touched many, many people, especially (though not only) thousands of Black women who responded to seeing the film by telling anyone who would listen their own stories of abuse. Across the country, on Internet forums, schools and theatre lobbies Revolution distributors have talked to people. Even if not experienced with the same extremity, many women said they felt Precious gave a window into what they experience.

Third, Reed erases and ignores the development and personhood of Precious. She confronts horrific sexual and physical abuse, illiteracy, being infected with AIDS by her father and more, but isn't broken by them. He ignores the relationships Precious forges with her classmates, and with her teacher, who nurture and challenge her. They develop bonds of friendship, respect, struggle, and caring. While the film does not go easy on the brutality Precious suffers—it also shows her with humor, humanity, curiosity, a vibrant imagination, intelligence, and heart. This is not some faceless victim. But not once does Reed talk about her this way.

Writing in Salon.com, Erin Aubry Kaplan made an insightful point about why a young woman like Precious would be ignored and the importance of the film in telling her story, "Far from being some exploitative spectacle for whites, the hard-hitting tale of Precious is a film for blacks and a challenge to drop our own emotional armor and embrace a real-life story we have been minimizing for a long time—that of a big, black, sullen-faced, illiterate girl who lives in the depths of the ghetto and in all likelihood will stay there. She is the bogeywoman not just of white society but of black society, too, especially for a middle class that's been trying for years to rescue its ‘negative' racial image from the likes of Precious. But while we in the real world preach community ad nauseam, it's girls—and boys—like her who remain at the bottom of the well. In making the bottom dweller eminently human, the movie forces blacks to assess their own humanity. And I found myself squirming in the seat more than once."

The other thing that stands out in Reed's article is the way he talks about women generally. He refers to young Black women professors who have commented positively on Precious at the web zine The Root as "...[T]he types who are using university curriculum to get even with their fathers." He suggests that the poet and author Sapphire and the filmmaker Lee Daniels have falsely remembered histories of abuse. He hardly ever mentions a woman without saying something about her looks. Mariah Carey, who plays a welfare case worker, is "firm," "the camera favors" Paula Patton, who plays Precious' teacher, Blue Rain; he says three times that the actress who plays Precious is 350 pounds (a fact which he is clearly bothered by), and he describes one of the film's financial backers as "manicured" and "buffed," and one who "doesn't go lightly on the eye shadow." And in linking Oprah Winfrey's backing of this film with what he sees as her other efforts to demean Black men, including backing and starring in The Color Purple (which he calls a "black incest product"), he quotes someone as saying, "like her addiction to food," Oprah can't help demonizing Black men.

His defense of patriarchy also bubbles over in relation to gay people. Here he gets the basic facts of the film wrong. He says a male nurse, John John, played by Lenny Kravitz, is gay. In actuality, the film makes clear that John John is straight, but Reed's vision is so distorted he can't seem to fathom a soft-spoken male character who isn't gay. He goes on to say Precious is "a film in which gays are superior to Black male heterosexuals," creating some sort of patriarchal totem pole and then seeking to determine where "his group" sits in relation to the top.

Not everyone who has raised concerns about the film contributing to stereotypical portrayals of Black people or the demonization of Black men would uphold this kind of straight-up misogyny. But you have to ask why Reed's argument goes there and why his argument has resonated.—Carl Dix RevCom 

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Black Motherhood Lost at the Oscars—Thursday, 11 March 2010—The historical legacy of the devaluation and demonization of black motherhood was both applauded and rewarded at this year’s Oscars. And the point was clearly illustrated with Mo’Nique, capturing the gold statue for best supporting actress in the movie “ Precious,” based on the novel Push by Sapphire, as a ghetto welfare mom who demeans and demoralizes her child every chance she can.

Mo’Nique’s role juxtaposed to Sandra Bullock’s, who captures her Oscar as best actress in the movie “ The Blind Side,” offers the hand of human kindness to a poor black child in need of parenting.

But the images African-American parenting have historically been viewed through a prism of gendered and racial stereotypes. And the image of Mo’Nique as the “bad black mother” and Sandra Bullock as” good white mother” is nothing new.

The images of the “bad black mother” have not only been used for entertainment purposes but also used for legislating welfare policy reforms.— Rev. Irene Monroe LAProgressive

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Other Relevant Material:  The Negro Family: The Case For National Action  / Monster’s Ball

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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan  /  The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll  /  Only a Pawn in Their Game

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