Precious is the protagonist of Push, which she narrates in her own distinctive voice. At the beginning of the novel, Precious is a 16-year-old Black teen who is pregnant for the second time by her father. She is illiterate, having had major disruptions in her formative educational years due to the trauma of abuse and her first pregnancy at age 12. Precious’s father started sexually assaulting her at the age of three, and both parents have subjected her to rape and violent physical abuse. She has been bullied in school for her weight, her Blackness, and her pregnancies, and she has no friends.

Precious’s entire sense of self thus flows from a life in which she has never been treated with love or made to feel as if she matters. On her journey to become educated and change her life path, Precious learns that the abuse she experienced wasn’t her fault. Being thinner, whiter, or prettier wouldn’t necessarily have saved her from her parents, and if it had, it would only be because of the societal racism that they have arguably internalized to such an extent that they can’t see a Black child as, in Precious’s words, a “real person.