This is a criticism of the film Precious: based on the novel Push by Sapphire.

Many black people will not abide such a thing. We are very protective of most black achievements. It does not matter that the film presents our community in an extremely negative light. We prefer poor representation to no representation at all.

Also, we seem to find this type of subject matter "authentic," whether we have had similar experiences or not. This may be because we have internalized beliefs that legitimize certain views of the black experience.

We consider healthier depictions, like The Cosby Show for example, pure fantasy. Even those of us whose lives are more like The Cosby Show than Precious believe this to be true.

Black gay people, in particular, refuse to hear any disparaging words about the film. Understandably, we feel a strong solidarity with director Lee Daniels, who is, himself, openly gay.

We also appreciate the positive portrayal of gays in the film. And because we endure a peculiar persecution from the black community at large, we freely support any vehicle that takes black people to task.

So blacks almost uniformly rejoiced when, on Sunday, March 7, 2010, The Academy awarded Precious with two Oscars-one for Best Adapted Screenplay and another for Best Supporting Actress. It was a sad day. Here is why.

There are a few blacks who-sometimes proudly-embody them. The problem is that Hollywood (in conjunction with the mainstream media) makes it seem that the stereotypes are the norm and non-stereotypes are the exception.

Coupled with the fact that Hollywood and the media largely ignore or do not assign the same weight to these same images in the white community and you have the makings of the white superiority/black inferiority paradigm.

With its story and imagery, Precious helps to cement these philosophies in ways that rival shameful American works like The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind.

We never get to see why Precious's mother ("Mary Jones" played by comedian Mo'Nique a.k.a. Monique Imes-Jackson) is the woman she is. We never understand why she lives the life she lives.

As far as the film is concerned, poor black people-and only poor black people-live this way because they are barbarians who use whatever cunning they possess to exploit the American public assistance system.

Most importantly, it is the white man's burden to endure and, perhaps, civilize these creatures.

Remember all of the great American novels and other media that contained Mammy figures?

Remember how Mammy was presented as someone who existed solely to serve the whites for whom she worked?

Remember how her toil was presented as a necessary and redeeming part of her character?

Remember how her personal life was never investigated? In Mary Jones, we have both the New Millennium Mammy and the justification for past Mammy portrayals. Mammy had to toil away for white folks so that she would not become a welfare queen.

Her home life was ignored because as kind as she was to her employer's children was as evil as she was to her own. According to Precious, Mary Jones is what Mammy becomes when she is left to her own devices.

Precious is not just a receptacle for the AIDS virus or the monstrous things her father, mother, and boys in the neighborhood do to her. She is also a vessel for the self-hating messages of the filmmakers. "I want a light-skinned boyfriend with curly hair," she narrates.

The film never investigates her reasoning. It never gives her the opportunity to understand how or why this line of thinking is self-destructive or that it should be overcome. Quite the contrary, the film confirms that this is what she should want-and what the audience should want, too.

The casting makes that abundantly clear. If the film is to be believed, dark-skinned black people are either evil or unlovable, take your pick. Only light-skinned black people or white people are worthy, and only they can be saviors.

Moreover, the film's narrative is incomplete: Precious's journey is truncated, unfulfilling, and offers no catharsis. She goes from bad at the beginning of the film to bad (maybe even worse) at the end of it.

The literacy theme that was the novel's saving grace is almost completely abandoned in the film. Given primacy is a voyeuristic sadism that seems to revel in what Precious endures.

The audience is encouraged to await Mary's attacks on her with the same curiosity and thrill they experience when Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street thrashes one of his victims.

Her portrayal lacks breadth and nuance. Gabourey Sidibe is a darker, female version of Coronji Calhoun's character in Monster's Ball. And given her enormous presence, it is rather astounding how little of her shows up on screen.

Critics laud her performance as "quiet," but "silent" is perhaps more apt. The other characters in the film (Precious's teacher-played by Paula Patton-and her fellow classmates) are cardboard cut-outs from any generic afterschool special.

Only one person in this film shows any range. Surprisingly, it is Mariah Carey as Precious's welfare case manager. She is able to capture both the bureaucratic distance and fleeting empathy of a social worker (and she is the only human being in this film.

As the cumbersome title does its best to remind us, the film is based on the novel Push by poet and author Sapphire (a.k.a. Ramona Lofton). For years, Sapphire declined offers to turn Push into a film because she believed that given American racist perceptions, the results would be disastrous.

With the election of Barack Obama, America's first non-white president, she thought now was the time for a film adaptation. She believed Obama's presence would balance out anything revealed in the film. Sadly, she was wrong.

First, the counterbalancing burden is far too great for any one individual. Second, Obama is thought of as an "exception"; his light skin, white upbringing, and possible lack of ancestral slave ties allow whites a guilt-free way to relate to him.

Third, it is possible that Obama actually confirms the most consistent message in Precious: The lighter your skin, the better you are. In permitting this film to be made, Sapphire made a dreadful mistake for which we will pay an exacting price.

Precious is so not P.C. What I learned from doing the film is that even though I am black, I'm prejudiced. I'm prejudiced against people who are darker than me. When I was young, I went to a church where the lighter-skinned you were, the closer you sat to the altar.

This is clear to anyone who watches the film. He continued:

Anybody that's heavy like Precious - I thought they were dirty and not very smart.

Which explains why he was astounded by Sidibe, a nearly four-hundred-pound, dark-skinned black woman who is highly articulate. Generally, when people imagine overweight black women, they think of someone like Mo'Nique: a crass, loud, funny, overweight sister-girl who can cook and is always hungry. Though, Mo'Nique's appetite also manifests itself in other ways.

She would not show up to promote Precious, despite all of the accolades and acclaim she received, unless the producers agreed to pay her for her appearances. With Precious, she reveals that she is not even above exploiting her own experiences for material gain.

She will tell anyone who will listen that she can vouch for Precious because, as a child, she was molested by her older brother. Her assertions, meant to lend the film authenticity, come across, instead, as self-indulgent. As journalist and author Jill Nelson keenly observed:

Can you imagine Meryl Streep revealing she used to be a bushy tailed, carnivorous mammal or editor-in-chief of Vogue to market the authenticity of The Fantastic Mr. Fox or The Devil Wears Prada?

However, it is rather odd that Tyler Perry has co-signed on this. Yes, he, too, has spoken, in great detail, of the abuse he suffered as a child. Yet, on the other hand, in one of his most lucrative films (Madea's Family Reunion), Perry uses incestuous lust as comedy (the scene involves a group of uncles imploring their young, scantily clad niece to bend over to retrieve beverages so that they can, unbeknownst to her, get a better look at her private parts). Hypocrites, it seems, always want to play innocent.

So, they offer up the film as representative of the black experience. "We are all Precious," they claim. They mean themselves and "us black people." They are, of course, insane.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

The truth is this:Precious is, as Armond White said, pornography. For what was sold as a sympathetic depiction of someone's nightmarish experiences has, instead, all the makings of someone's dysfunctional x-rated fantasy; its value limited to getting some of its audience off and some of its audience off the hook.

One blogger he mentioned in his article was Darian Aaron, the creator of the incredibly informative, entertaining and crucial blog, Living Out Loud with Darian.

Anyone who reads Darian's blog is fully aware that while his blog does focus on the issues that are closest to those in the Black community, he, by no means, excludes the points of view of those outside of the community.

While there are a handful of gay bloggers, like Jasmyne Cannick, who are notoriously unfriendly to outsiders, by and large, this is not the case with most Black gay bloggers.

However, the Black gay point of view has long been excluded from countless gay blogs. Not a single person within the so-called mainstream gay community so much as lifted finger or a voice to challenge-or to examine-that deeply curious practice. It was viewed as the status quo and as a non-issue.

I am not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination, but when I hear this new criticism of Black gay bloggers, what immediately comes to mind is from the book of Luke, verse 6:41:

But why lookest thou on the mote which is in the eye of thy brother, but perceivest not the beam which is in thine own eye?

What the critics have conveniently ignored is the fact that the gay community-and now I mean the gay community as an organized, visible force wielding whatever social and political power they have to influence the course of things in the country-has presented itself as a largely White and largely (upper) middle-class machine that is interested in, almost exclusively, the issues most pressing to its largely White, largely (upper) middle-class constituency. It has, heretofore, disregarded or dismissed as "fringe" the concerns of those outside of this narrow group.

Black gays have been excluded from gay places of business. The gay community has even gone as far as to mock Blacks in blatantly racist terms and defend the racism as something other than what it is.

So in the midst of this hostility and invisibility, Black gays have felt it necessary to form their own communities, to create centers of friendship, love and healing meant to undo the damage done in the larger gay culture, as well as address the issues that larger culture refuses to even place on the table for discussion.

The critics of this movement charge that Black gay bloggers are, in effect, guilty of the same exclusionary crimes of which the larger gay community is guilty; that the actions of Black gay bloggers only exacerbates the overall problems of racism, classism and segregation in the gay community. I find the critics to be operating on very childlike terms, with very simplistic tools.

They ignore what even the blind can see: When one is turned away from shelter, one must find shelter where one can. Certainly, one could be persistent. One could continue knocking at the door and beg for one's place at the table, but where is the dignity in that-especially when one has the skills to create one's own table?

Furthermore, critics claim that these Black gay blogs render White gay blogs invisible; remove them from the discourse. What I would like to know is how that is possible-not just as a matter of common sense or philosophy, but as a matter of physics: How can hundreds of Black gay blogs render thousands upon thousands of White gay blogs invisible (particularly when many of the White gay bloggers have a stranglehold on media and resources)?

I do not believe that Whites are not being permitted a voice in the discourse; they are not being rendered invisible or being excluded. Here is what I believe to be the source of the hysteria: All people with power panic when their formerly powerless denizens prove themselves resourceful and embark on a quest of self-determination. It does not matter to the people with power that they have created both the cause and the effect of the revolution.

Their goal is simply to quell it by any means necessary because they fear that they might lose something if they do not. Privilege-and in this instance I am speaking of White privilege-is an affliction that robs its hosts of both objectivity and a sense of fairness, attributes which are crucial to this discussion.

First is the idea that there is something inherently wrong, in the sea of blogs that cater specifically and exclusively to the White gay point of view, with having blogs that cater specifically to the Black gay point of view.

At the expense of being accused of exaggeration, I must say that the NAACP was created precisely because there was Jim Crow and the KKK. Eliminate Jim Crow and the KKK (and the mindset that imagines such monstrous institutions) and you eliminate the need for an NAACP. The logic does not work the other way around.

Second is the way in which the White gay community chooses, when it deigns, to "include" Blacks.

It is not as intellectuals, not as equals, not as brothers and sisters in the struggle. It is as objects meant to satiate curiosity and desire; often, the Black man himself is rendered invisible while his private parts are magnified.

And the truth of the matter is that we did not erect this partition. It was the White gay movement that constructed it and refused our calls for entry and unity; that relegated Black gays and Black gay concerns to the most remote edges of the territory. That Blacks have built castles on those edges is only sensible.

And if the desire is, now, for Black gays to tear down those castles and join in rebuilding something that everyone, Black and White, can live in, I believe Blacks are generally a forgiving people and would be agreeable to that end. But justice demands that the walls and castles Whites have built should already be torn down and laid to waste (and I do not believe that they are).

Nothing can be built jointly a moment sooner than that.

He is currently working on his first novel, The Book of Samuel.

He resides with his partner in Brooklyn, NY.

In a video posted on the media-sharing site, You Tube, rapper/actor Bow Wow (aka Shad Morris) attempts to answer the question: "Are you homophobic?" You see, in a previous interview, Bow Wow recounted a story in which he needed a haircut and asked his staff to find a barber.

When the barber eventually showed up, Bow Wow refused to allow the man to cut his hair because Bow Wow perceived that the barber might be gay.

In the latest video, Bow Wow tries to defend himself by saying that he's not even sure what the word "homophobic" means, nor does he grasp the proper response to the question.

He goes on to indicate that he knows gay people and are aware that there are many of "them" in the entertainment industry. BUT-and this but is almost as big as his homeboy Omarion's-Bow Wow also indicates that he's a "man," and so it's only natural that he has an aversion to being touched by someone who might be gay.

The reason why I call this a teachable moment is because there are some interesting things at work in Bow Wow's response. For some reason whatever ailment afflicts America at large, its grip is almost always firmer in the black community.

'm certain there are some detailed studies out there that look at this phenomenon and present very cogent explanations for why this might be so.

But if I had to hazard a guess based on my own observations, I would say that it might have something to do with the place black people, for the most part, inhabit in American society: Blacks, for a great deal of the history of this country, have found themselves designated as the object by which (through direct opposition) Whiteness is defined.

Whatever it was determined that whiteness was (intelligent, wealthy, privileged, clean, educated, manly, womanly, humanly, Godly, etc), blackness was not.

Whites could only experience their imaginary superiority by enforcing blacks' imaginary inferiority. Thus, a society was created and institutions were established to actively excluded blacks and actively denigrated them.

They were not always successful (the most insidious power of oppression is in its surreptitious effects on the oppressed). As a result, many blacks internalized this fictitious deficiency and behaved as though the lie was the truth; more than behaved, they believed it.

So whatever it was that the whites possessed, blacks coveted (the sole exception being intellectual endeavors since the power cultivated there is neither vicious nor immediate)-whether for ill or for good-believing that only by imitating and eventually becoming more like whites could they ever be deemed civilized (no matter how dehumanizing the civilization process).

One of the most dangerous things blacks coveted from whites was their notion of manhood. For whites, masculinity rested in the loins of pirates and cowboys; soldiers and hunters, raiders and frontiersmen; and eventually, outlaws of any kind: Really, anyone who wielded a weapon of destruction; who conquered at the slightest whim; who took what did not belong to him; who raped and murdered and pillaged and plundered as he pleased; who was invincible and immortal; in other words: Jehovah.

These things had nothing to do with manhood whatsoever and everything to do with defining what it meant to be a monster. But blacks (blinded by their avarice) and whites (blinded by their hubris) could not see that.

If the worst thing a white person could be was black, then the worst thing a man could be was a woman. So imagine their shock at witnessing something they could not have been imagined (or did, but repressed): The wretched homosexual man (the only true wretched thing was the degenerate mind that regarded him as such).

Not only did this homosexual man willingly (or so it seemed) dispense with his masculine birthright, but he sometimes assumed (or so it seemed) the position of the female: Some of them walked like her, talked like her, dressed like her, and most appallingly, had sex like her. And if that were not enough, he presented yet another challenge: He represented the potential of any man (or so it seemed) to be likewise afflicted.

It did not matter that one's homosexuality was as intrinsic to one's being as one's eye color or skin color. It did not matter that one could not be forced to be a homosexual (unless one was raped; and this fear reveals the heterosexual mind: He would gladly rape a woman if he could get away with it; so why wouldn't the homosexual gladly rape him?).

It did not matter because now the men were blinded by their panic and their horror gave birth to homophobia. Like the black man, the homosexual did not escape the imperative. Placed within him, too, was a monumental hatred of self. And so it was written.

And this is the toxin-one of, literally, biblical proportions-that has been passed down from generation to generation for centuries. This is America's chief pastime, product and export; its claim to fame, its gold ring and ivory tower; its joy, its pain, and its repetition.

It is what has infected the blood of men who believe themselves both reasonable and pious, but are, in fact, neither. It is, as I said earlier, expressed with even greater degree in the black community because blacks hunger doubly for whatever single thing whites possess.

It is from this double-wide cesspool that Bow Wow speaks; a victim as much as he is, himself, victimizer.

In his limited imagination, like in the woefully limited imaginations of his forefathers, his manhood (a disguise for monstrosity) is so fragile-indeed so paper-thin-as to be vexed by the mere touch of a homosexual.

Part of the reason this pestilence endures is because so few are willing to challenge it; so few have the courage, the fortitude, the requisite steel to stand before an audience that desires nothing more and nothing less than their bodies swinging from trees, or atop pyres, or tied to cinder blocks at the bottom of the ocean.

So few are willing to share their larger, grander, more inclusive vision, and I understand the reticence; there is an enormous price to pay for such honesty.

Yet, I feel compelled to write this, to announce my truth, to stand up, to confront, to dispel, to correct, to challenge, to instruct, to teach every misguided poltroon who has ever waged war against me from the safety of their multitudes, behind their shields of foolishness, with their ever-shrinking gods. Even as they raise their swords, which, with time, have grown dull, I shall come out and, with my hand on their shoulders, proclaim: I love you.

And I'm a man.