Blinded by the Whites: Why Race Still Matters in 21st-Century America

6. "Stop Making the Rest of Us Look Bad": How Class Matters in the Attacks against the Movie Precious

131 When the movie Precious debuted in 2009 many black folks in high places viewed it as an abomination, a twenty-first-century brand of black poverty tourism. Indeed, one of the movie’s most vocal and esteemed antagonists then was Ishmael Reed, who launched a virtual campaign against the movie, going so far as to cast the movie’s black producers, screenwriter, director, and actors as modern-day Uncle Toms, willing to sell their black souls for a slice of fame and at the direct expense of perpetuating black stereotypes. Not surprisingly, in the public arena (which means, of course, that white folks are listening in) the discussion over the movie collapsed into a pro/con debate on whether blacksshouldcelebrateordisavowit.Giventhattwoofthemostpopular black folks on the planet, Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, signed on as executive producers of the movie, the pro-Precious camp definitely won the public relations war. It also helped that black fan favorite actress/ comedian, Mo’Nique walked away with an Oscar for best supporting actress (only the fifth black woman in history to be so honored) and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher became the first African American to win in the category of Best Adapted Screenplay. Sidestepping this pro/con debate on the movie, in this chapter I will examine the various race and class implications of this movie, and also discuss how white surveillance continues to alter the ways that blacks react to whites and each other. While it is still the case that many blacks prefer to keep the taboo portraits of blackness that Precious broaches out of the public eye, including that of impoverished blacks gaming the welfare/workfare system, abusing their children (emotionally and sexu- “Stop Making the Rest of Us Look Bad”: How Class Matters in the Attacks against the Movie Precious six 132 Blinded by the Whites ally),andself-destructinginabouteverywayimaginable,mycontention is that the mental, emotional, and spiritual health of our communities is bound up in being able to air our dirty laundry. Lest my prescriptions bemisunderstood,thisairingofdirtylaundryisnotsimplyabouttaking personal responsibility and owning up to the black communities’ social failings; it is also about speaking openly and frankly about the ways that whites benefit directly and indirectly from age-old white privilege, fueling the socioeconomic fires that are at least partly to blame for the tragic black realities on display in the film. However uncomfortable discussing many of these subjects might make some blacks feel, the real danger resides socially in shutting down these avenues of artistic-political expression in the name of black respectability, strategic solidarity, and combating black stereotypes rather than in opening them up. Though Precious is usefully controversial in all the ways I have out­ linedabove,itisneitherfairnorproductivetodismissthemovie’sdetractors out of hand. And, here, let’s start with a brief discussion of the racial receptivityofthenovelPUSH bySapphire(RamonaLofton)uponwhich the movie is based. While the novel has enjoyed a diverse reader­ship–at leastalongraciallines–ithasbeenelevatedtothepinnacleofblack“real­ ness” by a noticeably white and paternalistic body of readers that cut across political lines. To be more precise, these readers treat the unique and intersecting race, gender, and class experiences of the protagonist Precious as a reflection of authentic black experience. Purportedly, what makes Precious’s experiences of blackness more “authentic” than, say, my own rural-black-working-class-cum-black-middle-class-existence is that hers more closely reflects paternalistic whites’ view of blacks as poor, downtrodden, pathological, and tragic. (The white receptivity of recent blockbuster movies The Blind Side and The Help, which far outperformed Precious at the box office, operate upon a similar paternalistic impulse.) I’m reminded here of white critic Irving Howe’s warped assertion that Richard Wright’s Native Son (which featured the ruthless ghetto dweller and madman Bigger Thomas ) was more “black” and “authentic ” than Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (which featured a near-polar opposite protagonist in the highly philosophical and intellectual invisible man). Failing to extend to blacks the same level of complexity with which he engaged white consciousness and humanity, the paternalistic “Stop Making the Rest of Us Look Bad” 133 HowedismissedEllison’scharacterizationofhisblackprotagonistastoo brainy and introspective to be believable. Ellison writes, “Howe makes of ‘Negroness’ a metaphysical condition, one that is a state of irremediable agony which all but engulfs the mind. Happily the view from inside the skin is not so dark as it appears to be from Howe’s remote [white] position . . .”1 From Howe’s (not so critical...