Filmmaker Tyler Perry hit back at what he called “highbrow negroes” criticizing his films for being too in line with the common, everyday black American experience.
Perry discussed his frustration during an interview on the Baby, This Is Keke Palmer podcast, where he talked about holding onto his “authentic voice.”
“No, no, no, no, no, you gotta drown all of that out, because if you let somebody talk you out of a place that God has put you in, you are going to find yourself in hell,” he said. “I know for a fact that what I’m doing is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing, because for everyone who is a critic, I have thousands of — what used to be — emails from people saying, ‘This changed my life. Oh my God, you know me. Oh my God, you saw me. How did you know this about my life and my family?’ That is what is important to me.”
Tyler Perry said he represented a “disenfranchised” fanbase.
“A large portion of my fans are disenfranchised, who cannot get in the Volvo and go to therapy on the weekend. So, you’ve got this highbrow negro who is all up in the air with his nose up looking at everything, then you got people like where I come from, and me, who are grinders, who really know what it’s like. Whose mothers were caregivers for white kids, and were maids, housekeepers… beauticians,” he said.
“Don’t discount these people and say their stories don’t matter. Who are you to be able to say which black story is important, or should be told? Get out of here with that bullshit,” he added.
Perry’s comments expound upon statements he last year in the documentary Maxine’s Baby: The Tyler Perry Story in which he said that his black peers were more hostile to his career than Hollywood.
“I think the most difficult part in all of the success wasn’t battling Hollywood; it was black people,” Perry said in the doc. “There’s a certain class of black people who look down on all things Tyler Perry.”
For instance, filmmaker Spike Lee referred to Tyler Perry’s work as “coonery buffoonery,” along with scholars like Donald Bogle and Jamilah Lemieux, who wrote in an open letter to National Public Radio that Perry’s work features “old stereotypes of buffoonish, emasculated black men and crass, sassy Black women.”
Lemieux went on to argue that Perry’s famous character, Madea, disrespects the classic black grandmother matriarch, which was seriously portrayed in movies like Soul Food and lampooned in movies like Big Momma’s House.
“Through her, the country has laughed at one of the most important members of the Black community: Mother Dear, the beloved matriarch. … Our mothers and grandmothers deserve much more than that,” she wrote of Madea.
“I don’t think that Tyler Perry entered the creative marketplace to save the Black community,” poet and author Carl Hancock Rux said in the documentary. “And if he did, I think he would have actually come fully armed, which he did not.”
Perry reflected on the pain this criticism caused him.
“When I started to look at the history of what we’ve done to each other as black people, others who are successful, it’s pretty interesting to see,” he said in the film. “Amos and Andy was the first African Americans on television, and it was the NAACP who boycotted; the first television boycott ever. So the show was yanked off the air in 1953, and there was not another black cast on television until the late 1960s.”
Perry also recalled how the NAACP boycotted the Oscar-nominated movie The Color Purple.
“They were picketing outside the Oscars,” Perry said in the doc. “Langston Hughes called Zora Neale Hurston a ‘new version of the darkie’ because she spoke from a Southern dialect and she wrote in that dialect. So I learned very early on that it’s okay This is how it goes. No matter how well or good your intention is, no matter how many people it freely lifts out of despair and sadness, it only matters to certain critics if it is what they deem to be art.”
At least one prominent black artist defended Perry’s work: rapper Killer Mike.
“The audience is there. He paid attention to an audience that people ignored and were saying, ‘Come up to us.’ And he said, ‘No, I’m down here with you,'” Killer Mike said in the documentary. “We’re gonna laugh at the things that we laugh about amongst family gatherings. We’re going to make public the things that we think of as joking.”
Paul Roland Bois directed the award-winning Christian tech thriller, EXEMPLUM, which has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes critic rating and can be viewed for FREE on YouTube or Tubi. “Better than Killers of the Flower Moon,” wrote Mark Judge. “You haven’t seen a story like this before,” wrote Christian Toto. A high-quality, ad-free rental can also be streamed on Google Play, Vimeo on Demand, or YouTube Movies. Follow him on X @prolandfilms or Instagram @prolandfilms.
