Tyler Perry Responds To Criticism About His Stereotypical Films

Tyler Perry Responds To Criticism About His Stereotypical Films

Tyler Perry has long been criticized for portrayal on African-American in his films and TV shows. Many feel like a Tyler Perry production is akin to a millennium minstrel show that has brought embarrassment and shame to the black community.

Writer Rembert Browne penned a piece in Vulture where Perry addressed those who have decried his work as pure f***ery. Including the writer himself…

I was suddenly hit with the reality that I would need to be honest with Perry. I knew I had been wrong about him, to some degree, and I wanted him to know that. But I’d also have to tell him that I spent years disliking him and his work, thinking his characters were negatively affecting me as a black person in a white world. That I knew black people were often judged by what people saw or heard, more than what they knew. That I felt black people were often collectively judged by their perceived failures instead of their perceived successes — the latter of which have long been treated as exceptions. That I knew research existed that analyzed the complicated relationships black people have with the images we see of ourselves on the screen, telling us that those images can inspire, but they can also cause great anxiety. That some black people took black characters merely as “entertainment,” but others saw them as images that they needed to instill racial pride, strengthen racial identity, counter racism, and be role models.

A decade of thoughts about Tyler Perry ran through my mind in that moment, and even if he’d made me laugh in Brooklyn, I thought I owed it to him — and myself — to say that, for years, when he was the foremost black person presenting black characters and telling black stories, I thought Tyler Perry’s films and shows made my life harder.

“So did a lot of people,” Perry said, calmly, after I told him how I’d felt. “Which is surprising to me. Let me tell you what took me aback about that, when people were like, ‘How dare you put fat black people on television, these are caricatures, these are stereotypes’ — I was so offended because my aunt’s fat. My mother’s fat. My cousins are fat. People who are like, ‘How dare you — these harken back to Mammy, Amos ’n’ Andy.’ I would hear all these things, and I would go, hmmm.” When Amos ’n’ Andy is mentioned, it’s usually code for minstrelsy, but Perry disagrees. In fact, he thinks the real shame was not that black actors played roles on Amos ’n’ Andy, but what happened to them later, when they lost work after the NAACP boycotted the TV show and it was canceled.

It comes down to the question of who gets to decide what’s good for black people. Should all kinds of blackness be shown, or should its representation be curated? To Perry, no one should have the authority to make that call. To others, however, there is a clear line between what’s good for “us” and what isn’t. Much of the backdrop of the intellectual debates between scholars like Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois came down to this, too, whether good fortune and success is dependent on some approval from whites, as well as on using a group of select blacks to represent the whole. We’re a century removed from those thinkers — but in some ways, we’re still debating those ideas, and Tyler Perry’s work is at the center of it.

We highly suggest that you read the whole piece HERE.

What do you think of Tyler Perry and his blackity-black works.

Image via WENN