Poverty Novelty: Author Behind Oscar-Nominated ‘Precious’ Has It All Wrong

by Charles C. Johnson

Sapphire, the author of Push, spoke at my college, Claremont McKenna on February 8. Her book was made into the movie, Precious – which is now a serious contender for the Oscars.

The question and answer period quickly descended into the kind of self-flagellation that white liberals and modern academia have come to demand whenever we discuss the issue of race in America. It’s important to fact check these types of speakers because they allow so much misinformation and disharmony into our culture.

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Ask yourself: Why is an author of a book designed to empower black people so wrong about their accomplishments and history? Could it be that she is profiting off of showing a slanted view? I took a detailed recording of Sapphire’s talk, so that it could appropriately discusses and ultimately rebutted, if necessary. Among several of the ridiculous things that Sapphire blamed on the white man was the disintegration of the black family from slavery, but in reality, slaves actually had stronger marriages than Sapphire would have us believe:

Sapphire: In any article in the New York Times, Ishmael Reed who is criticizing Precious mentions that incest is not confined to one group of people.

I agree, but I argue that it does have a different place in the African-American culture than it does in white American culture where it is equally as prevalent. During slavery, many black women were impregnated by their masters who were often their fathers. The white male was literally the master of the plantation. He had sex with who he wanted to – black women, children, and men. This was the family structure most slaves were exposed to. Black men were not allowed to act out the role of the father. They themselves were raped like women in addition to being turned into stud-like breeders. Black people I would argue as a race have yet to accept the fact that our men were treated like “bitches” during slavery. Nor have we dealt with the impact that has had on the generations of us that have come out of slavery.

Fact check: The black family was disintegration long afterward, thanks to the Great Society programs.

From Pages 188 to 189 of Thomas Sowell’s Ethnic America: A History (Paperback) [Internal citations omitted] [Emphasis mine]:

The black world was ultimately the only world in which slaves could find emotional fulfillment and close attachments, and to become a pariah there meant personal devastation . . . Incest taboos, for example, were more widely observed among slaves than among contemporary whites. Marriages between first cousins were common among white slave owners, but very rare among black slaves, in keeping with differences in incest taboos between Europe and Africa. . . . Even slave owners found it expedient to accommodate the wider incest taboos of black by allowing marriages between their slaves and slaves who lived on other farms and plantations, even when there were eligible mates (by white standards) in the slave plantation community. In one rare case of nuclear family incest, the slave owner was forced to sell a father who made his daughter pregnant, for other slaves had threatened to kill him.”. . .

Slave marriages and slave family relations had no legal standing, but usually lasted for decades, if not a lifetime. . . . Sometimes slave marriages were forcibly terminated, usually by the sale of one of the partners. Most of these forcibly terminated marriages had also lasted many years. . . .

Later on to a question of how to fix public education in the inner city, Sapphire said that the problems of the inner city could be solved with reduced class-size.

Fact check: There’s little evidence that class size has anything to do with educational attainment.

University of Rochester economist Eric Hanushek examined 277 separate published studies on the effect of teacher-pupil ratios and class-size averages on student achievement. Only 15 percent suggested that there is a “statistically significant” improvement in achievement, 72 percent found no effect at all, and 13 percent found that reducing class size had a negative effect on achievement.

. . . Although American students lag behind other students in international testing, American classrooms have an average class size of 23 students, incredibly few compared with the averages of 49 in South Korea, 44 in Taiwan, and 36 in Japan. Washington has an average class size below the national average, yet ranks near the bottom in academic achievement. We shouldn’t forget that average class size in American schools dropped from 30 in 1961 to 23 in 1998, without any improvement in standardized-test scores. (Source: Casey Lartigue, Education Week, September 29, 1999).

Sapphire said that she was taking some notes and planning to write a new novel featuring the real lives of black women. Maybe she should take some notes from Zora Neale Hurston, who she lionized after responding to a question about the similarities between Push and Their Eyes Were Watching God: “I’m so into Zora Neale Hurston that for a little while I was telling people to call me Zora,” she said.

The real Zora Neal Hurston would be disgusted at the kind of poverty novelty that Sapphire exploits.

She wrote, in her famous essay, How It Feels to Be Colored Me:

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. . . . I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature has somehow given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it.

It’s the old idea, trite but true, of helping people to help themselves that will be the only salvation of the Negro in this country. No one from the outside can do it for him.

Now wouldn’t it be cool if they made a movie about that?


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Posted Mar 5th 2010 at 7:03 am in Books and Literature, Daily Gut, Film, Politics | 95 Comments