Feministing: Precious, my Precious: Black Female Citizenship, Complexity, and the Politics of Unrelenting Survival
There is a real untold story here, and the voice of that child and the voice of her mother need to be heard. They need to be heard because it is our silence on issues of sexual abuse and systemic violence that allows the space for the empire’s story about us to be the only one told. We do not control our media and cultural systems or the institutions of civil society, and therefore the narrative of black female citizenship has been used in so many ways as the lynchpin to justify the most brutal democracy in the world. The lies that our citizenship is somehow a gift and not a right, that our mothers are responsible for the socialization of black children and therefore the cause of their incarceration, and that our daughters have drained and massacred the economy, have justified mass incarceration, war, the privatization of social services and health care, and the defunding of public education. The same has been done to black men, using different stereotypes. But this, right here, is about black women.
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All this being said, the Hollywood version of the book absolutely invisibilized patriarchy, cast the system as a hero and not an actor responsible for the conditions of oppression in which Precious lived and survived, and over-simplified Precious’ mother as an animal who fed her child to the wolves. The movie’s flaws are real, and knowing that the film was being viewed by white middle class audiences whose ability to discern the notes in this song was minimal, was painful to experience.
Whether you’ve read the book (Push
