Toe to Toe An improvement over Precious!

Ejecting "bad people" from the ghettos makes everyone happy,

A film by Emily Abt

This is the story of two girls, Tosha and Jesse, who attend a competitive Washington, D.C., prep school. Tosha is a fiercely determined African American scholarship student from Anacostia, one of Washington's poorest areas, while Jesse is a privileged, but troubled, white girl from Bethesda, who deals with promiscuous tendencies that pull her toward self-destruction. Toe to Toe is the story of their friendship that incorporates many common prejudices and tries to get beyond them. Sadly, one prejudice remains: to be poor is to be brutish, quasi human, almost mindless with little impulse control over immature angry impulses.


I don't expect men, nor young teenage boys to embrace this film I don't think it has the prejudicial ingredients to make it into the main stream American culture that wants to see white people "helping" the poor, fat, black, supposedly mean, stupid, lazy denizens who haven't made it into the White House. (as the recent and much too much applauded film Precious does) But my hesitation in recommending this film is the elevation of Princeton as a college over Howard where I think a healthier overall environment ensues and the clothes worn by the actors were too nice, too expensive.


This is a film where the poor seem angry at each other making life hell for everyone in their environment which is the unfounded prevalent idea of what ghetto life in America is like today. Putting family without community back into the picture of ghetto life doesn't give a true picture of what it is like to live in the "inner city".


What I enjoyed about Toe to Toe is its insistence on being about teenage kids being teenage kids, not miniature adults. I liked the detail of how isolated very wealthy people can be. The film captured how too much money seems to interfere with intimacy and healthy people interactions while the black girl is overwhelmed by family and unwanted people intrusions in the intimacy of her personal space.


What holds these girls together is how both are trying to survive in their own worlds where they are outcasts; one because she is smarter or rather a better student then her cohorts, the other because she is wealthier than her school mates and lives essentially without a stay-at-home mother.(unfortunately women don't rise above the ugly fray of prejudice in this film)


Both girls suffer silently but eventually form a friendship that fosters their mutual growth. Just seeing/hearing the black girl telling the white-soon-to-be friend, "you haven't done anything for me", was a wake up moment well worth the price of admission.


Even though Toe to Toe was obviously contrived, there was something so raw and seemingly real about the production that I felt drawn to the experience.


Rather than waiting for it to end, I wished it could go on and on.


Linda Zises
WBAI Women's Collective