We want people to relate to art. As a trans man, I sincerely wish there was more art that I could directly relate to, that spoke directly to my experiences.

What we don't want is for the people who get every movie made specifically for them (white people, men, younger people, upper-middle class people, straight people, etc.) to turn every movie into a story that applies specifically but very vaguely to them, even when it clearly doesn't. The average straight person watches something like Brokeback Mountain and takes away the sentiment that forbidden love can ruin lives. What they don't take away is what they have or haven't done throughout their entire lives to create a society in which the relationships of gay and lesbian people could be celebrated and not hidden away. They don't take away any acknowledgment or examination of the privilege that their own straightness has accorded them in their lives and their relationships. In other words, they don't set out to think or say or do anything to change the world in which characters like Jack and Ennis can believably have their lives ruined just by being in love, as gay men, in a straight world. A small minority of straight people will recognize the inherent gay context of Jack and Ennis's story. But most are too unreflective and self-interested to consider that such a movie might not have been made for straight people's gratification.

And now average white people are doing the same thing with a movie like Precious. They will take away uplifting and utterly cliched messages about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps or surviving tough family situations or trying to build human connections in isolation. And those can be universal things. But what they won't take away is how Precious's place in society as a young black woman has explicitly affected or distorted the rest of her problems. They won't take away any introspection about the privilege that they, as white people, carry with them everywhere they go, every day of their lives. They won't take away any desire to look into and see how or why internalized racist oppression still ruins the self-image of young people of color.

That's what we, as people who take responsibility for both our oppression and privilege, are so pissed off about. The average viewer sees in these movies, movies about discrete and unique events and situations, universalized concepts that feel good for them to identify with. But they don't go the extra mile to live with the discomfort that such movies should cause for people who have lived their entire lives as unknowing oppressors in some way, shape, or form.

I just wanted to note that just because some of us are arguing in favor of recognizing the distinct black context of Precious's story does not mean we are saying a non-black person should not feel free to try to identify with the protagonist. Indeed, one of the best outcomes of a movie like this would be if people who hold power and privilege in our society, which are largely white people, saw this movie and gained a new understanding of the unique predicaments that poor urban people of color face in their day-to-day lives. Precious's story, while fictional, is not exceptional, and that is something that we whites must come to grips with.

That kind of openness to learning about the lives and stories of the "other" is, however, antithetical to the idea of the appropriation of Precious's story as a vague and universalized story of suffering or oppression. The story is complex and specific in its details. You can no more universalize the internalized racist oppression that Precious must deal with than you can universalize about the negative consequences of illiteracy, teen pregnancy, or being an abused child.

At this point, I would like to reiterate that neither Zac nor my responses came out of nowhere, but rather in response to people who got mad at Erin Aubry Kaplan for making the movie into a "black" story of oppression. Precious's story is uniquely rooted in a black, urban, female perspective whether we want it to be or not. The least we can do is acknowledge the complex role that racism plays in the lives of real people who go through many of the same problems that this fictional protagonist does.

Not European-American in descent. Just European.

By white Latino, I mean someone who is Latin American in origin but European-American in descent, such as an ethnic Italian Argentinean-American or an ethnic Spanish Cuban-American.