Precious a Perfect Look at Black America

At first horrified, political alarms blaring, as she watched the Precious trailer, Erin Aubry Kaplan realized after seeing the film that it’s actually a story that has long needed to be told: “that of a big, black, sullen-faced, illiterate girl who lives in the depths of the ghetto and in all likelihood will stay there,” Kaplan writes for Salon. “She is the bogeywoman not just of white society but of black society, too.”

Precious stands in for all the blacks who have “looked in the mirror and wanted ‘better’ hair, less body mass, lighter skin, more confidence, more assurance that we're worthy,” Kaplan continues, and “just in time for the Obama era, which urges us to believe in the president as a symbol of success for blacks everywhere. Role model? Not hardly. To Precious, Obama is only another light-skinned black fantasy boyfriend with a dazzling smile and good hair.”
(More Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire stories.)