PRECIOUS
The film precious is based on the novel push by Sapphire. Claireece Precious Jones who is an overweight and illiterate teenage girl is the main character in the movie. Precious lives with her mother in a tenement in a New York slum known as Brony. Precious undergoes physical and sexual abuse from both her parents. Through the sexual abuse from her father, at the age of sixteen, Precious has her fathers two children. She faces a lot of hardships as her mother beat her everyday and treats her without any respect. She also encounters problems in school as she remains stuck at 9th grade when in reality she is supposed to be in 12th grade.
Poverty is depicted in the film through precious and her family as they live in slums and depend on welfare. Illiteracy can be seen through Precious herself and her own mother who used to beat up her daughter on daily basis without any pity. Her father is also illiterate since an educated person cannot treat his own child the way he used to treat Precious even to an extent of sexually abusing her. In addition, she was a very illiterate and bad mother who could not even protect her daughter from her own father who sexually abused her until she bore him two children. They lived in a low social class in slums but precious often dreamt of getting out of that life and move on top. Precious’s family were very poor until they survived on welfare. Abuse is the main theme in the story since the main character is abused by all the people around her until she lives a dream. Precious was always victimized and abused by the people around her.
Motherhood in the film was very poor as we see precious being mistreated with her mother. In the film, the life of Precious depicts how women are oppressed in the society. Many women are on many occasions abused by their own fathers or relatives and nothing is done about it and this forces them to live with the trauma for the rest of their lives. Ableism is seen in the film where Precious’s first born child is known as mongo the short form of mongoloid because she suffers from Down syndrome.
The film Precious shows how black women experience hardships and racism highly contributes to their hardships. The film shows the female struggles that many women underwent in the past and they are still going through them up to date since the perpetrators who harm they are left free. There is racism in the film since the black woman was the one suffering and the whole story is based on the pain and suffering of a black woman. The film is also racist because the heroes in the film are light skinned while the villains and those who suffer are dark skinned. The film gives teachers an opportunity to discriminate the blacks people and this discrimination increases poverty since most of them end up dropping out of school and resolve to violence. White people are stereotyped in the film.
The film does not support gender equality as women are despised and abused as we see through the life of Precious. Those with a social standard undermine the poor because of their low class. Class has always been an issue between the blacks and the whites. Black women are always discriminated by the whites and they undergo a lot of harassment and abuse (Mapping the Margins)
The film talks about discrimination of women as one of the issues we learnt from our readings (Lifting as we climb). There is the issue of persistent poverty and residential segregation whereby we see the people of color living in slums and the white people living in good areas and have a social class and these are some of the things that are in our class readings.
References
Melvin, L., O. and Shapiro, T., M. (1995). Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality, New York: Routledge
Lifting as we climb pdf
Kimblere Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins pdf
