The XX Factor: What women really think.

"Precious" Gets A Few Things Wrong

A post from DoubleX writer Beth Fertig:

In the new movie Precious, Clareece Precious Jones is beaten by her mother and raped so often by her father that she’s pregnant with his second child. She’s also illiterate.

I’ve spent the past three years profiling illiterate young adults, and I decided to take two of them to a preview screening. Yamilka and her brother, Alejandro, now 26 and 24, are Dominican immigrants. They’d gotten all the way to high school without learning to read. After a hearing officer ruled in 2005 that New York City had violated a federal law that’s supposed to protect them because they are students with disabilities, the siblings received a combined total of more than $250,000 in private tutoring.

Yamilka and Alejandro expected the movie to get the Hollywood treatment. And they were fine with some of that, so long as they found it generally believable. Yamilka—who was overweight and self-conscious in school—related to the way Precious sat in the back of her class in junior high. “I didn’t want people to notice me, to notice something was wrong.” When she saw Precious guessing her way through a multiple choice test, Yamilka said she had done the same thing ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).