Innocence Lost: Shaniya Davis, Jamar Pinkney Jr. and the Uncomfortable Reality of ‘Precious’

The death of Shaniya Davis was a national tragedy. As many self-righteous black elitists bemoaned the critical acclaim and widespread attention given to the film Precious, whose subject matter deals with the psychological and physical abuse of an obese, black teenage girl — the real world provided further evidence that the mistreatment of youngsters is an all-too-common reality that continues to not be talked about sufficiently. Little Shaniya’s body was found after her mother reported her missing. The authorities later discovered evidence that her mother, Antoinette Davis, sold the 5-year-old girl into prostitution. Shaniya was last seen at a hotel with a 27-year-old man — approximately one week later, they found her body abandoned near a roadside.

The small, but vocal, backlash against Precious is further evidence of an ongoing psycho-societal battle raging among black people. The overweight girl from Harlem is the subject of sexual and emotional abuse, scorn and derision from her family and peers. In a society where the media and entertainment industries are so instrumental in shaping perception, and with a people who have suffered decades of distortion and stereotyping at the hands of that industry; should we support a film that features black characters who engage in such horrifically inhumane behavior? 

Some decry the film as yet another negative portrayal of African Americans, the truth is, the best films and characters cannot simply be reduced to “negative” and “positive” — the best are complex and multidimensional, and at their core, able to project a fictional narrative onto the greater national consciousness.

Such should be the case with Precious. We can’t be so preoccupied with appearances that we devalue the catharsis of telling our own compelling, gripping, sometimes harrowing stories. And in times such as these, a story like this is even more relevant.

Just days after Shaniya’s body was found, another dual-tragedy happened in Detroit involving a family, a child lost, and the devastating repercussions. What Jamar Pinkney Jr. confessed to his mother was shocking and appalling. The 15-year-old revealed to his mother, Lazette Cherry, that he had molested his 3-year-old half-sister. Lazette called the boy’s father, Jamar Pinkney Sr., and told him what the younger Pinkney had done. The father came home, pistol-whipped his son in the living room, stripped him naked, walked the pleading teenager into an alley and executed him while his screaming mother looked on.

There are millions of children like “Precious” living in black America. But in our quest to sanitize every facet of the black experience, we’ve become ashamed to tell their stories. Precious is the fictionalized embodiment of the sad and forgotten young people like Shaniya, Jamar and his poor, traumatized little sister, who face abuse daily. We should see ourselves in each one of these children being cast away and dumped on the fringes of our society. There are countless little girls and boys being robbed of their childhoods because their parents have abandoned them and the proverbial village that is supposed to help raise them has deemed them inconvenient, inconsequential and embarrassing.
–todd williams