This morning an article titled “Tyler Perry, Stop Vilifying Black Success“ appeared in my Facebook newsfeed. It was written by a young man, Ernest Owens, a Communication & Public Service major at the University of Pennsylvania. What made it most salient for me, a middle-aged black man, is that it came from a young black man.
You see, young black men are becoming an endangered species. They are stereotyped as violent and irresponsible. Nowhere in the discussion is the socio-economic conditioning that creates that reality examined in detail. Nowhere in the discussion is the truth that black men and other minorities form the bulk of the raw material for our private prison industrial complex that creates profits for a few, as corrupt governments uses the tax dollars of the middle class to take care of the imprisoned. The Plutocracy takes its profits from said prisons, a legal transfer of wealth from the taxpayer.
It is bad enough that the majority of the entertainment industrial complex has allowed a few rappers and artists to profit from the exploitation of females, black females in particular. Does anyone believe American’s would have allowed that denigration of white women as is allowed by the current crop of rappers? Of course not.
The denigration of black women and men is very profitable because, in our innermost being, certain types of negatives sell. The denigration of white women would be even more profitable if scaled, however, the masters of the entertainment industrial complex know their limits.
It is for this reason that Mr. Owens’ piece is so prescient. I have long stopped going to Tyler Perry’s movies. I have always described his work as the “Amos and Andy” of the 21st century. He has prostituted the race and in doing so prolongs the time where equality and mutual respect, even though codified on paper, is much delayed in Americans’ hearts and minds.
Tyler Perry is the pimp. His movies, the black stereotypes, are the prostitutes. His viewers are the unknowing johns.
Mr. Owens apparently saw all of his movies and, in doing so, finds evidence of the damage Perry inflicts on the black psyche, as well as his promotion of the black stereotype. He goes down the list of movies to illustrate the negative stereotypes of successful blacks, while endearing to the less successful. The following three paragraphs illustrate it best.
[Huffington Post]
In your recent disappointment in cinema, Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor, your leading actress (played by Jurnee Smollett-Bell) get infected with HIV and loses her marriage based on her ambition to overall pursue a better career as a marriage counselor. Given that she is unhappy in her current marriage with an aloof, underachieving husband (that rather her cook dinner every day for him and go to church more to become “a better wife”) Smollett-Bell’s character is less understood given that she instead pursues a man that matches more of her professional, sexual and intellectual desires. If anything, the unfortunate moral of the story is: the more you aim high, the less happy you are.
Such a pathetic motif continued in your other movies, where in Madea’s Family Reunion, successful black actors such as Blair Underwood is a controlling and abusive black attorney who loses his fiancée. Gabrielle Union in Daddy’s Little Girls is a snobby uptight Ivy League alum turned attorney who “humbles” herself for a mechanic with previous children. Sanaa Lathan in The Family That Preys plays an educated accountant that is a doomed cheater that is scarred by a white man. Robbie Jones in Temptation is a successful black social media tyc00n with HIV that is a womanizer who cheats, beats, stalks, controls and infects the many women around him. And the list goes on…
As for the many falsehoods and fallacies that play out in your movies, the biggest stereotype might just be that with black success come negative atrocities. If it means anything, your films continue to place blacks who aspire to do more be hesitant to achieve such for preconceived consequences will follow.
While Tyler Perry’s rags to riches life has, in effect, made him powerful enough to disregard criticism, it is important that everyone irrespective of race or creed be willing to speak out against him. It is bad enough that others knowingly vilify a people. It is unforgivable when it is one of your own.
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/04/08/tyler-perry-shows-no-shame-as-he-prostitutes-his-own-race/
