Debra Dickerson on the Film "Precious," And Why We Should Say Stupid Things

Debra Dickerson always has a lot of interesting stuff to say, and today was no exception, as she and Imus discussed the movie Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. Much to her surprise, Dickerson had not felt the way she thought she would about the controversial film.

Precious is about an obese, African-American teenager living in Harlem during the Reagan era. She is functionally illiterate, sexually abused by her mother and by her father, with whom she has two children, one with Downs Syndrome. By way of his abuse, her father, long gone, has also made her HIV positive.

"I call it 'race pornography,'" Dickeron, who wrote The End of Blackness, observed. "It's what white people want to hear about black people."

Critics have zeroed in on this theory, complaining that the only "black movies" that get made are ones with such awful dysfunction. Maybe, said Dickerson, but that doesn't mean dire situations like the one featured in Precious don't exist.

"Why are we so knee-jerk against showing that, and talking about it?" she asked.

Setting the story in the 1980s was significant in that HIV/AIDS was, at that time, a death sentence. Additionally, the kind of social services the title character Precious needed were in short supply at that time.

Movies like Precious, Dangerous Minds, and Stand and Deliver tend to feature "heroic" character in the form of a teacher, social worker, or principal, without whom the troubled protagonist would never emerge from darkness.

"Those kinds of movies have to do that," Dickerson said. She is troubled less by Precious than by the kind of literature on which it is based, a genre known as "urban lit."

"The only books that young black people are reading are urban lit," she said. "There's all this bling, and gangsta rap, and horrible exploitation of women. It's like gangsta rap writ large...it's deplorable, horrible stuff."

As with most divisive works of art, the upshot of a movie like Precious is the conversation it begins.

"They force us to say out loud the stupid things that we actually believe," said Dickerson. "And if you say them out loud, oftentimes you can hear how stupid they are."

Not to point out the obvious, but it's an approach that has worked pretty well for Imus over the last four decades.

-Julie Kanfer