Learning to....

As Precious learns about the world around her, how do her views on race and sexuality change? Do her friendships help her lose her biases and see beyond stereotypes? What factors contribute to the way Precious sees the world in the beginning of the book, and what factors make her reconsider?

There is a certain inevitability to the role that each person’s earliest experiences play in shaping their worldview.  In the case of Precious Jones, this occurs to an extreme.  As a young child, the main character of Sapphire’s novel Push, experiences sexual, emotional, physical, and psychological abuse at the hands of her parents.  Through their added negligence, and Precious’ volatile time at school, she is sixteen years old before she even begins to learn her alphabet.

The isolation that Precious experiences as a result of her situation leaves her feeling as though she is the only person to have been raped by a parent, born a child at a young age, or beaten for no reason; she associates this with her race and her physical appearance, believing that if she were not black and overweight by fair skinned and thin that she would not have suffered the abuses of her parents and the system.

This begins to change, however, when Precious connects with Ms. Rain and her peers at the Each One Teach One school, an alternative place of learning.  But it is much more than learning to read and write that initiates the broadening in Precious’ perspective.  For the first time in her life, she actually experiences love, friendship, and predictability.   Ms. Rain always writes back in her journal.  Her new friends are always there for her.  While she remains skeptical early on, Precious starts to believe that she is actually capable of being loved.

It is this love—and the friends that share it—that lead Precious towards her largest revelation: she is not alone.  When Rita takes Precious to the ‘Survivors of Incest Anonymous’ meeting, Precious sees for the first time that other girls—even those of other races, other skin tones and hair colors, other body types—have been subject to the horrors that she herself has lived.  Precious narrates, “She look like a movie star! Slim, long hair, eyes like stars, red lips. ‘My name is Irene. I am an incest survivor.’ My mouth fall open. Someone like that” (129). She cannot believe that someone so beautiful, so seemingly ‘perfect’ from her point of view, has been victimized as she has.

This particular event captures the drastic change that Precious undergoes through her teenage years, and it demonstrates the true power of human connection.  As a child, Precious was shut off from the world, by her mother, her teachers, her father, and even her own confusion about the things that happened to her.  But as she gets out into the world, becomes a true friend, student, mother, community member, she begins to see that her situation is not entirely unique; because of that, she is able to start revising her stereotypes and perceptions of the world around her.