I'm Afraid of Tyler Perry

This video is a long time coming, and because of that, I wanted it to feel special. I wanted to find a way to share it with everyone who made it possible. So, I called up some of my friends, and we got together to build a table.

"Come on." And you know, we serve a great God. We give all that God a great praise. We're on an ultraite. This is a God dream. THIS IS A GOD DREAM. This is everything. This is everything. We're like dream. All my life, I wanted to be the man who owned the house.

"We're on AN."

"Please be careful."

When I started the business, I knew that there were certain things that I had to do to make it work. Love is PURE AWESOME.

"LORD."

"Okay, let's get some important announcements out of the way. Firstly, this video is obviously very long. It's possible that some of you who clicked on this can't believe that a YouTube video could be this long for any reason. Think of this as a Netflix documentary miniseries. And if you need to watch it in parts, that is perfectly fine. I figure that might be the case. You might also be asking, why not split it up in episodes then? Well, because YouTube doesn't really like when you do stuff like that. Trust me, I I understand it's a long story. This video is split into three major parts, so you can stop there for natural sections. Trust me, I am not going to waste your time. Also, on that note, it's possible that by the time you're watching this, there might be little chunks of the video missing. YouTube has a really bad system where companies can force you to delete parts of your video or even mute parts of your video because they feel like they own those parts. Even though that's not how the law works, but because of how YouTube works, sometimes you don't really have an option. You can either cut the part out or not get paid. It happened to my Kendrick versus Drake video. It happened to my Beyonce video. It happened to my Diddy video. It happened to my Charlie Kirk video. It happened to so many other videos. And I'm very confident because of who this video is about that it will probably happen to this video, despite the fact that I'm going to do everything in my power to not let it happen. If you want to see this video uncut with no ad breaks, you're going to want to sign up for my streaming service, Nebula, and watch it there. I'm going to talk about Nebula more later in the video, but understand early that there's a strong chance that that's the only place this video will be uncut because Tyler Perry is known to not take nicely to being criticized. In fact, Tyler Perry is..."

"The grand opening of Tyler Perry Studios included a lineup of stars that impressed even the big man himself."

"I'm so excited that Sydney Portier is here, and Cicely Tyson, and Oprah's on her way. It's just, I am extremely excited. When I built my studio, I built it in a neighborhood that is one of the poorest black neighborhoods in Atlanta. So, the young black kids can see that a black man did that, and they can do it, too."

"Tonight was a monumental night, not just for Tyler Perry, but for everyone here in Atlanta."

"This is civil rights. This is movement. This is everything. Rise up, Tyler Perry. Rise up."

"Now, that land is owned by one negro."

Yeah. So, Tyler Perry is a lot of things. I'm here right now at the original Media House. This is the house he bought like, probably 2003, 2004, where if you saw a Tyler Perry movie within that early time frame, and there was a scene with Madea at her house, it was probably done right here. I initially thought I was going to be able to do something like this at his studios, but that was probably kind of dumb. My bad. But this is still pretty good, right? This is, this is dope. This is emblematic of just how much power, cache, and like success this man has had. But nothing compared to his studio and the power that his studio brings him. I'm going to insert some B-roll right here. But what you're looking at is literally probably the biggest, most state-of-the-art movie studio in America, if not the world, here in Atlanta. Not Hollywood, not LA, not New York, not Chicago. Atlanta, Georgia. Owned by one man, one black man, as he will tell you over and over again. And that's significant because what it means is that Tyler Perry has the power to kind of do whatever he wants. As I'll explain later in the video, the average person that you think of that's black in Hollywood making any type of media, whether it's big budget films like Ryan Coogler or small, more art house stuff like Boots Riley, all of them have to put in the effort to go find people to fund and budget whatever creation they want to make. All of them, to be real, kind of have to beg for scraps considering what black people usually get to make our art. Everybody, including people like the legendary Spike Lee.

So, if you know anything about the history between Spike Lee and Tyler Perry, you know that early on, Spike was who, I guess, Tyler Perry must have aspired to be when he started making movies. He was the first black superstar director, writer, creator person of the modern film era. But because Spike likes to run his mouth, over time, he lost his ability to just make whatever he wanted. He had to beg, fight, and plead even to get something like Malcolm X made. And when Tyler Perry came on the scene, because Spike is not one to hold his tongue, he definitely let it be known how he felt about Tyler Perry's work and success.

"Because each artist should be allowed to pursue their artistic endeavor. But I still think there's a lot of stuff that's on today is buffoonery, and I know it's making a lot of money, breaking records, but we could do better. That's just my opinion."

Now, throughout his career, Tyler has been known to clap back at his detractors more explicitly, whether it be through the media, whether it be in his work.

"I will punch the hell out of you. Say something else."

"That is my answer to Spike Lee. Go to hell. Go."

"I will punch the hell out of you."

Whether it be behind the scenes with the power he's amassed. But with Spike, he did probably the most gangster thing he's done in his whole career. He just outgrew him. He just outpowered him. And in all the work and research I did for this video, probably the most like vivid and lasting image I have is of Spike Lee at Tyler Perry Studios' like gala celebration opening, low-key begging Tyler Perry for a chance to work with him. That's power.

"You've been critical of Tyler Perry. Do you think Tyler Perry, are you lumping him in for that?"

"I think of all this, everything I need to say about Tyler Perry has been said. The man's a brilliant businessman. He's doing what he does. God bless him."

"What do you mean by 'God bless him'?"

"May God bless him. He told me to go to hell. I say, God bless him. Don't tell me to go straight to hell. That's even different."

"But do you..."

"God bless him."

A few moments later.

"One of the most important things that happened is you named a sound stage after Spike Lee."

"Listen, I don't care if you, if you, you got beef with somebody. That is what it is. But the truth is, you cannot deny what he has done, uh, in the film industry and how he's been on the forefront to help me and everybody else get to the place where we are. So, you know, Spike called me a few years ago when he came to my house, flew down to Atlanta. We sat down, we had a great conversation, and, and the beauty is, that's what I'm hoping that people will understand. Like, when Oprah and I worked together, it was a huge moment. But this moment for me and Spike is a huge moment. So, I'm hoping that we as people start to come together and understand that, hey, everything's all right. Everything's cool. You can have your opinion, I can have mine, but we all are going in the same direction. So, I just wanted to honor him for what he's done, man. For sure."

"What do you say about that?"

"Look, I love Tyler. People..."

"You love Tyler?"

"Yes. People notice, but I went to his house. He'll tell you I know he told you."

"Let me just tell you, I wasn't going to front. I mean, I was going to..."

"No, no, we're cool. We're mad cool now."

"Yeah. You're mad cool."

"Yeah. My criticism of him was was just the imagery. Oh, hell. WOW. ACT IS CATCHING ME, BABY. I'M A FLY. CAN I FLY? I CAN'T [ __ ] HER."

"For me, it was just taste. He has a way to see stuff. I see it differently. He's doing a great thing. We're cool."

"You're cool."

"There's no, we got no drama, no friction. And one day we might work together. He's one of the richest, most successful, most prolific, hardest working, and most powerful directors in all of media of all time. Period. Full stop. There's no joke there. There's no pathy way to undermine it. That is just the truth. And I don't mean just black director. I mean director, period. As far as I can tell, among other creators in the film industry, only George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are worth more money. And neither's making a lot of anything these days compared to Tyler Perry. Lucas is only worth so much because he sold Star Wars to Disney. And Spielberg is directly partnered with Universal under Universal. Meaning they had to connect with mega corporations to get to the level that they're at. To get to Tyler Perry's level that he got to with pretty much no owners, no partners, no bosses. No one else comes close to that level of independence and autonomy. No one else owns their own private state-of-the-art backlot for which they can make their own movies. No one is close to Tyler Perry's level in all of media except for maybe Steven Spielberg, the man that gave us E.T., Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, and so many other classics, along with George Lucas, who gave us the Star Wars Extended Universe. And then Tyler Perry. Tyler Perry has directed 14 different films starring his original character, Madea, a 6'4" caricature of a large elderly black woman loosely based on his own mother and aunts that he dresses up in drag to play. All that said, if Tyler Perry has no masters and got all this money and power on his own, shouldn't he be universally seen as a great black inspirational figure? Shouldn't he be off limits for a video like this?

Those of you new to the channel might figure that I'm just going to clown Tyler Perry for how bad his movies are, the bad acting, the bad wigs, the bad plots that seem like they're not fully planned out halfway through his films. And yeah, we'll be doing a bit of that. I'm not, I'm not going to lie. You maybe even are expecting some mild misogyny and homophobia since that tends to be where a lot of people take criticisms of Tyler Perry, considering his presentation in the media and what he's most known for, i.e., essentially a drag performance. Not to mention the recent accusations of sexual misconduct that have come from multiple other men. That's something I'll get into, but I'm going to try to address that tactfully because my goal is not to just use low-hanging fruit to tear this man down, 'cause I don't want to tear him down. There's black folks out there who feel like you should never talk bad about someone black and successful, regardless of the dirt they do. And I also know that someone in the comments is going to say, "How can I say anything bad about Tyler Perry considering how much he does for black people in the black community?" Does he? But what really scares me is the many ways in which Tyler Perry is an exception to the rule for a lot of my political beliefs. I just finished saying Tyler Perry was a billionaire, one of the few media moguls to be one, and even fewer that are black. But it's not as simple as him just being a black billionaire. You might be mistaken to think that Tyler is an ethical billionaire. He's definitely the only billionaire to make his billions solely off the value of black people, which theoretically shouldn't even be possible. Most black American billionaires are former entertainers. Jay-Z, Kanye, Rihanna, Oprah. The rest are real estate and oil moguls across the world, maybe some in the tech industry, etc. But most black American billionaires are former entertainers who flip and parlay their fame and success and money through various other ventures. And almost every time they got to that billion-dollar status 'cause they found white investors. I won't say they sold out. I like to use the term "buying in" because them becoming billionaires doesn't explicitly make them against black people or selling out black people. In reality, they cash in their connection to black people in order to get access to those billions. For example, let's take Jay-Z. Jay-Z used his fame and clout to get into numerous investment deals, probably the most prominent when he brought the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn and helped sell that commercial land project, which in reality wasn't very good for the black people of Brooklyn, to those same residents, touting him as an owner of the Nets, which was true, but in reality, he owned less than 1% of the team that he eventually sold once the deal was done. But he parlayed that deal and the connections he made from it into a multi-million dollar deal with the NFL, as well as a multitude of other ventures, making him, in comparison to his peers, the most successful rap entrepreneur ever and probably the best overall businessman in that particular group. Because unlike, say, Kanye West or Rihanna, who basically just made one really big deal with large multinational corporations, Jay-Z did a lot to hustle and will and deal to continuously build up his money. But all of them, Jay-Z, Rihanna, LeBron James, I'm hearing, were only able to do this because they were able to sell blackness, to wager their connection to something valuable within black art and black communities, to a predominantly white audience desiring to buy it. Black kids on the South Side of Chicago really can't afford Yeezy's clothes or shoes. Oprah's billion-dollar empire of media was initially built off the support of white housewives that watched her in the '80s. This isn't meant to take anything away from their talent and hard work for the most part. Aside from the fact that again, there's no ethical way to be a billionaire, but it is to point out that Tyler Perry stands alone in how he got his money. Tyler Perry is not a hot commodity in white spaces. Never has been, probably never will be. He does have a white fan base. I'm sure there's evidence that Tyler has always aimed at white fans in some ways, but for the most part, his shows, his movies, the deals he's made from them, that's based on black eyeballs. And it's somehow us that's put him on the level of Steven Spielberg. And that's not supposed to be possible. Every bit of black leftist literature will tell you that capitalism doesn't work for black people like that. And they're right. Unless we're talking about Tyler Perry. Shout out to Dr. Jared Ball. You've seen him in the last video. Great book, "The Myth of Black Buying Power." All that talk about $1 trillion of black buying power for black people, pretty much [ __ ] unless you're talking about Tyler Perry. Somehow he did it. He is the challenge to the doctrine that can't be denied. He breaks the rule, invalidates the black capitalist ideology. And if one person can break it in that level to that degree, shouldn't we maybe start thinking differently about it? Should I delete all of my anti-black excellence videos? Let's revisit this in a few hours.

Before we get to that, we first have to explain what Tyler Perry is and why he's important and relevant to the nature of not just black media in this country, but the black experience as a whole. Why his story is on one end inspiring and in some ways horrifying, and why you should care and why you should listen to what I have to say about it for however long this is. If we're just getting started, I don't know what number is right here, but I I figure it's probably a lot. And it's a lot because there's so much that we have to talk about. There's so much I want to say. And that's because, yes, this is the Black Media Breakdown. Dragic one, black media has a problem. I want to start out with a bit of personal lore. We'll get to Tyler in a second. We got to establish some things and lay some groundwork. And with that, maybe tell you a quick story from my own childhood. A story that probably explains why I am the way I am when it comes to black media. In fact, it's 1995, and I'm in eighth grade. The town I lived in was in maybe a transitional stage for the neighborhood because it was at one point a predominantly white working-class community that was becoming predominantly black. And this meant that in my middle school, we had new, younger black teachers coming into the community to teach the black student population that was becoming more prominent. But we also still had older white teachers that had been there forever and a predominantly white administration. Although I was lucky because I was in Mr. Scott's class both in sixth and seventh grade. Shout out to Mr. Scott, by the way. One of the best men I've ever known in my life. Sadly, Mr. Scott could not save me from this coming cannon event in 8th grade. This is before DEI or critical race theory or even just race consciousness in how we organize schools a lot of times. So, a lot of these white teachers that were still in charge were just not socially equipped for the predominantly black student population they were dealing with, but they were trying. The problem was that they didn't know what they were doing. So, some of those tries were really bad decisions, and them trying to cross a cultural divide that they didn't fully understand. And one of the ways I remember vividly was their choice on what we would watch at every movie day. See, instead of rewarding us with classic kid films from the '90s, such as The Sandlot, Home Alone, The Lion King, and of course, the classic A Goofy Movie, these teachers felt like it'd be more appropriate to show us things that were culturally relevant. So, we watched Sounder, The Color Purple, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. If it had a slave or something that looked like a slave in it, we watched it every other Friday at Dirkson Middle School in 1995. Now, I'm not saying I was a young Huey Freeman at this point in my life, but I knew a little bit. I was still raised by Hoteps, and I recognized even then that media wasn't just something we consumed passively. It had an effect on people. And in this instance, the idea that I would work extra hard all week just to be forced to consume images of black pain and suffering, that didn't sound like a reward to me. And because of teachers like Mr. Scott, let alone the multitude of Afrocentric learned black people in my life, I knew that there was way more to African and African-American history than us being slaves. So, it didn't take but one or two times to watch these movies and recognize a pattern before I got sick of it. So, one day, in the middle of some slave movie, I stood up and said, "Why are we watching so many slave movies?" This was an odd outburst for me, 'cause I was mostly a quiet, well-behaved kid. But here I was, interrupting movie night. I don't quite remember what happened next, but I know at some point I yelled that we could be watching The Lion King. And that was the last thing I said before I was sent out the room. I was sent to the room where kids who misbehaved or didn't do their work were forced to sit during movie day. I was sent to the punishment zone. The first time I came there, I remember one of the younger black teachers being confused, as I was one of the good ones, and I didn't belong there, but there I was. And there I would remain every movie day for months to come. I remember the days before movie day asking what we were going to watch. And whenever I found out it was something with slaves in it, I immediately just knew to go to the other room, and I would bring some comic books with me. Maybe a GamePro magazine. Shout out to all the elder millennial gamers that even know what that is. And I would just chill out for an hour in the bad kid room. It wasn't until many years later that I revisited those moments and realized the low-key racial trauma in all of that. Both in how the white teachers, who weren't bad teachers, they weren't overtly hateful or racist, but they had little understanding of the harm that they were engaging in. But also, I recognize how the black teachers either didn't think to speak up or maybe weren't in a position to. They had no capacity to control the situation. But more importantly to this video, this is only possible because of a bigger problem that was going on. The problem was, if they wanted to show these black children something that looked like them and connected to their reality, there wasn't much for them to do. On some levels, I get the plight of the teachers. For black people at the time, there were only a few genres of film. It was either these black struggle core movies from the '70s with lots of slaves. Maybe a few other recent things like Dangerous Minds or worse than that, Lean on Me. And then there were the crime dramas, Menace II Society, Boyz n the Hood, Dead Presidents, hood classics, but maybe not appropriate for 12-year-olds. For a lot of black youth then and before then, to see yourself in media, you basically had to project onto things that weren't actually black. Hence the aforementioned Goofy Movie, a film that is looked at as a black classic that any black person that watched it will tell you is a black movie, even though all the characters in the movie are technically dogs. The best we had was the classic Bay Kids, but again, maybe not for a bunch of 12-year-olds, right? So those white teachers knew enough to know that they should show films that were culturally relevant. But their options at the time were highly limited, as was their understanding of what cultural relevancy really meant. So they made the poor decision of drowning us in black struggle images and punished me for daring to reject this enticing offer. Hyperfocusing on individuals for systemic issues tends to let the system off the hook and allow it to persist unencumbered. And I was failed by numerous systems, not just by people, but none more than the film and TV industry of the time. The sad truth is that black media then was extremely limited and underdeveloped and had been for decades at that point.

Today, there's tons of black stuff to watch. If I sit my kids in front of a screen with minimal effort, I can have them veg out all day and look at mostly black faces. There's Doc McStuffins and Craig of the Creek. There's Family Reunion and a ton of black kid shows between Nickelodeon and Disney. There's even black superheroes in Black Panther, Black Lightning, Spider-Man, and even Captain America. Now, at some point, DC is going to realize they have literally the best young black superhero of all time, collecting dust in their basement, and they will add Static Shock to the ledger. But recognize this long roster of black-oriented media took a lot of effort and blood and sweat and tears over the last 30 plus years to build. And if you know anything about Hollywood, you also know that all of those shows were under-supported by their studios, and their actors were underpaid, and their original runs were shorter than they could have been, and all the things that we know Hollywood tends to do around black-centered media. Historically, black media has always been treated like black people have always been treated in this country: second class. Or more insidiously, black media is used to build up a media entity and then abandoned by that same entity. While the movie game wasn't so great for black people in the '90s, TV was probably better than it's ever been. And this is because of the fact that new networks understood how desperate black Americans were for media that reflected them in any meaningful way. Sometimes it was good classic shows like Living Single, A Different World, Martin, Fresh Prince, Moesha, Family Matters. Sometimes it wasn't so good stuff like Homeboys in Outer Space. That's a real show. To all my jinzers out there, yes, there was a show called Homeboys in Outer Space. And it's not even the worst thing to ever happen.

"She's my great-grandmother."

"Granny, got back."

"It's the new hit comedy you can really get behind. Homeboys in Outer Space."

In general, networks like Fox, UPN, and the WB, for a time, would create these types of black media that shaped a generation and in some ways maybe even spoiled us. Unlike black media today, these shows really weren't interested in white viewers. So, they were explicitly aimed to satisfy a black audience and what we desired. Today, shows like, say, Atlanta or Black-ish are greatly made, in part, for the white gaze. This doesn't make them bad. Atlanta is one of the greatest shows of all time, but it's not the same as what A Different World was back in the '90s. Both Atlanta and A Different World have the same fundamental challenge. They're both beholden to the power of the pen within a predominantly white administrative structure that cares more about the bottom line than the quality representation of black life in their media. And over time, networks like Fox, UPN, and the WB would slowly abandon the black audiences they built up with great shows and slowly replace those shows with other shows explicitly targeting a white audience 'cause that's where the big bucks were. Black audiences were valuable, but they were never the top dollar to seek out. So, we would always have to be prepared for short-lived success and scraps in the aftermath once our work, our value within the media machine, was done. So, my teachers back in middle school were only able to so mishandle that situation because they existed in a media environment that severely underserved black people, especially black youth. And even today, in a much healthier and varied state, there's still a ton to be desired in terms of the access to resources for black people to tell their stories. All of their stories.

This is why I talked about Ryan Coogler so much in my last video about Sinister. And his distribution deal. For those under a rock or that didn't watch that video, which you should definitely watch after you finish all of this, finish your whole plate. Finish your whole plate. Sinister, directed by Ryan Coogler, was a box office smash. It is the highest-grossing horror film of all time, the second highest-grossing original film since the 2010s. But more significantly, Coogler got a special deal with Warner Brothers to give him the rights to the movie after 25 years. Coogler was the first black director to get such a deal. And a big fuss was made of it. Coogler has proved himself a unicorn, an art black director that can pretty much do whatever he wants, and no studio at this point is going to say no because they know they're going to get their money back and then some. But even Coogler had to start his career off with black struggle core. Hollywood has always had the hood movie going back to black exploitation. And we love a good hood movie. Shout out to Prim's Hood Cinema. But the hood movie was made firstly for a black audience and tends to have a different level of heart and connection and levity, even when it engages with tough subject matter. But then there's black struggle core, as I alluded to earlier, which tends to consider whiteness, whether through actually inserting white characters into the story to make sure they have someone that they can connect to, even when they don't belong to the story. I mentioned Dangerous Minds earlier, the character being played by Michelle Pfeiffer was actually a Latina woman. And even when that doesn't happen, these movies are still created with the sense and the voyeuristic view that white people are meant to see it more than anyone. It doesn't mean that they're bad movies. In fact, the challenge is that they tend to be very well-made, very engaging films. Fruitvale Station is amazing, but the nature of Fruitvale Station's story hinges on humanizing this victim of police violence, showing us the fullness of Oscar Grant's reality, both good and bad, before his life was snuffed out. And that's not a story for a black audience. Black people don't really need to be reminded of our own humanity and how it is always under constant threat by so many factors, including the police. But for white viewers, this was an opportunity to safely and vicariously engage in that subject without having any of the consequences. It's a movie I'm sure my middle school teachers would have loved. But criticism aside, it's what Coogler had to do to show his value to the machine. And that's the reality for every would-be creator in Hollywood, not just the black ones. Hollywood is an industry, not a creative collective. Their goal is to make money, not to make art. However, as I stated in that previous video on Coogler, this is different for black filmmakers. Not only do they have to make art that makes money, they also have to tread a line of expectations from black audiences, even if those audiences aren't who their art is intended for, while also not being too disruptive to white audiences or the forces that control the industry to give them money to make that art in the first place. You have to be black, but not too black.

"Just having us understand that we're at a disadvantage because we're black, and this is not our town."

"Right. We've got to come in and understand how they play the game."

"Sure."

"And realize that we can get in..."

"And get to what we want to get to."

"By not selling out, not doing anything crazy, but by understanding how they play the game."

This barrier has pushed some of black Hollywood's most talented and successful creators to the fringes, such as Spike Lee and Ava DuVernay. Two highly successful filmmakers who still struggle to get their films made, even after going through the proving rights of passage for the machine. This is what Spike did with movies like School Daze, and Ava with Selma. Despite those prior successes, both filmmakers have had to fight to get funding for their projects since those high points in their careers, greatly because their work, which to be honest wasn't all that provocative or revolutionary, was still too challenging to the status quo. Because this is the way the Hollywood game tends to be played. Independence is actually highly attractive to black creators such as Tyler Perry. But before Tyler Perry, there was Robert Townsend, who I somehow have not mentioned at all in the five years I've had this channel. Robert Townsend is legendary. He broke on the scene with the classic Hollywood Shuffle, a movie he financed on his own by spending up his savings, maxing out credit cards, and making everything dirt cheap over the course of a year, while also somehow spawning some of the most legendary figures in black media today before they got big. And the movie itself was a direct critique of the experience and plight of black creators in Hollywood, featuring such classic scenes as the black acting school where black actors are taught how to act black by white people. It's, it's amazing. It explicitly addresses that uniqueness of the black Hollywood experience, that added black tax when you want to be a creative and get access to prove yourself to this machine. 'Cause it's not just proving your ability as a creative. It's also proving your blackness and your willingness to utilize blackness in that specific way that the machine finds valuable in the moment.

"I, I, I can't do this."

"What do you say?"

"Said you can't do this. So what are you talking about? You can't do this."

"This is not the kind of acting I wanted to do. This is [ __ ]."

But as bad as that can be, when it works, it works. And when you are independent, you maybe don't have to do as much dirty work to get to that point. Because the success of this movie he filmed on his own dime, gave him access to the machine. And then he gives us The Five Heartbeats, one of the greatest pieces of black cinema ever made. Also, Meteor Man. And like, I'm pretty sure that [ __ ] was out in the '90s. I really could have watched that in 8th grade.

This is the problem of black media, and it brings you back to stuff I talked about in that last video, such as the Vernon doctrine of black media avoidance. In short, this posits that whenever you watch black media made within the mainstream media structure, you should always be aware that some form of distortion is in play, that some political message is being employed, even when it seems like the politics are in alignment with your own. And that you should always keep in mind why you like what you like and how that is being used to alter your perception and your behavior. That is why the machine's specific image and flavor of blackness is favored in our media historically, and while some images of blackness are not. That is why Fruitvale Station had to come before Sinister, why Selma came before Origin or The 13th. And it's again, not to say that these films are bad, but to say that their political intentions are still aligned with the status quo, even as it appears that they struggle against it. But it can't be undersold that in this framework, we still get amazing art. The process is flawed. The system is ugly. But when artists get in their bag, they make amazing stuff for us. And we can use that to support each other. Without Hollywood Shuffle, we don't just get The Five Heartbeats from Robert Townsend. We also don't get I'm Gonna Git You Sucka from Keenan Ivory Wayans, or probably even all of In Living Color. When John Singleton put Ice Cube in Boyz n the Hood, Ice Cube parlayed that along with his rap fame into getting a deal to make Friday. And then Ice Cube got F. Gary Gray to direct Friday. And then F. Gary Gray gives us Set It Off with his next movie, which is another classic. And that really jumpstarts the acting career of Queen Latifah. And there's probably this giant web and tree of all these black creatives going into the machine, extracting what they can, and then returning it to the community so that more people can make more things, and then that gives more to the culture, even if it's flawed. Through that process, the fight continues, and we don't just survive in some moments, we thrive. And this practice of engaging with the machine and extracting resources to spread them around to other black people is why my son, who's soon to be in eighth grade, will never have to watch a slave movie in his life if he doesn't want to. This is reflective of the historical tradition of community building that black people have done across the diaspora, not just in America. And it's given us great art, great films, great shows, great cultural moments. But there are limitations, barriers, and caps on what could really come from this framework. Because at the end of the day, the problem with black media is that it's still under the machine's control. The machine has the power over everyone. Everyone except Tyler Perry. And yeah, something about that bothers me. I mean, look at this place. Tyler Perry is a billionaire media mogul who owns his own studio. I can't say that enough. Doesn't have to get approval from anyone to achieve his artistic desires. And considering how once in a lifetime this achievement is, it is inspirational, maybe even aspirational. But think about some of the names I've mentioned thus far in the video. Think about what they did to get where they were, what they did when they got to that position, and what they did after that position was secured for them. And think about how Tyler Perry's moved.

Before we get there, let's talk about Tyler specifically and his unique journey to be independent of the machine, and why it explains a lot, not just about the problems with his films, but the problems with him as a filmmaker.

"I saw an open show and she said, 'Where was it cathartic?' She said it was cathartic to write things down. So, I started writing things down that I had been through. So, a friend of mine read it and he's like, 'Man, this is a really good play. You should do something with it.' And that became the impetus for my first show. I know I've been changed."

"And uh, and no one showed up that first..."

"Yeah. And all of that, all of that wasn't about me trying to do everything. That was about being broke. I couldn't hire anybody to do it. So, I had to build the sets. I had to, had to learn how to do the makeup. I had to go on stage and then sell concessions and programs at intermission. You know, there were about 30 people in the audience, and I thought I'd see 1,200 over the course of the weekend. That was a hard moment and hard lesson learned. From there till about '98, I was doing one show a year, and every time I would do the show, fail. I got up to an audience of 1,200. I got up to an audience of 300. You still couldn't pay all the bills, but out of every audience, there was somebody who encouraged me to keep going and said they wanted to invest."

Part two, Lemons to Lemonade. Tyler Perry was born Emit Perry in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1969, putting him towards the beginning of the Gen Xers, which while I don't put a ton of weight into generational stereotypes, especially for older communities, it does track like a lot. And I think a lot of Gen Xers, especially black Gen Xers, were raised in a harsh era saturated with trauma. Xers are born at the end of the Civil Rights Movement, coming of age during the crack epidemic, entering adulthood post the '94 crime bill.

"100,000 more police on the streets. Expand the death penalty. That's how we'll protect America. Let us roll up our sleeves to roll back this awful tide of violence. We have the tools now. Let us get about the business of using them."

They faced a harshness that would make the average black millennial or Gen Z curl into the fetal position.

"Like most other major cities, Boston has declared war on drugs."

"Many people don't like the police crackdown. They say some innocent people are caught up in the sweep."

"The start of another hard year in the Big Easy. Four shot at Marty Grog. Then four others gunned down in this house in what's being called the Ash Wednesday Massacre."

"You had to come out. Yeah. How, what makes you afraid to come out?"

"People getting my pocketbook, this and that, all that. Young man ain't coming out your house at night like that."

"So you're literally, literally held captive in your own house, huh?"

"That's right. That's right."

"What, what do you think would solve the situation here?"

"Clean it up."

Perry grew up impoverished and in an abusive household. And the abuse Perry survived was universal. He was physically abused. He watched his mothers and his siblings suffer abuse. He was also sexually abused by both men and women. It cannot be understated that for all the negative attributions I'm going to hurl at Perry, he is first and foremost a survivor. And this survivor mentality can be seen through his work and the moves he's made as a businessman over his career, pushing him to develop his capacity as an actor and creator to begin with. Perry says that in order to survive his trauma, he would often dissociate. He would make up stories and characters and people to engage with when the reality of his life was too overwhelming.

"You said to distance yourself from your father, who, let's be honest, he sounds pretty brutal. He used to beat you relentlessly as a young man, which must have had an effect on you."

"Yeah. Well, of course it, of course it did. His first set or playhouse was a space under his porch where he would go hide when trying to avoid his father. To say that Perry has daddy issues would be an extreme understatement. His father was the arbiter of abuse in his home. And at times, he resented his mother for allowing his father to stay around. What makes things worse, but in some ways explains the abuse, is that the man that Perry thought was his father was actually not his father. Tyler actually says he experienced relief that the man that was so abusive to him as a child was not in any way blood related to him."

"You know, I was able to forgive him in my, in my mid-20s, and that changed my life because what I did was, what, what I think a lot of people don't realize or understand is that their parents have a story too now. So whatever happened in your life because of them is made you really need to find out the story so that you can understand it. But still to this day, Tyler financially supports the man he knew as his father. And he does so because although his father was abusive in all these ways, he never shirked on his role as a provider. In fact, Tyler credits the fact that his father was abusive yet a provider with shaping his own idea of work ethic and dedication. This concept of forgiveness, of perseverance, is so incredibly key to understanding Perry both positively and negatively. Perry credits his ability to forgive and persevere for making his success possible. But as you'll see later, this framework that he's abided by has a downside. Maybe not necessarily for him, but definitely for everyone else. Man, one thing my father gave to me is the man had the most stupid work ethic I've ever seen in my life. Rain, sleep, hurricanes, lightning, he was going. Even though we don't speak, he gets a check every month. I, I bought a house and he's taken care of because he, I'm giving him exactly what he gave me. And I feel good about that because no matter what he did, he still made sure I had food on the table, right? So coming from that place, watching his work ethic, I definitely have that 'cause I don't know what kind of man I would have been had I seen a man that didn't work, that was laying home on the couch all the time, you know? So yeah."

I don't think I have to do a lot of explaining to engage with how unintentionally revealing that is about Tyler Perry as an entrepreneur and a business owner and a filmmaker. The fact that he credits his abusive relationship with his father as shaping his own capacity to work and run his business is not something to just be passed over. Tyler also credits his mothers and his aunts with shaping his world. Tyler had an undying love for his mother, who was his only solace for most of his life. They were incredibly close, and when she passed in 2009, Tyler states he went through a deep depression. And the media character is loosely based off of his experiences with her and his aunts, both in the character's bombastic and comedic stylings, but also in the toughness and tough love ethos that is inherent within the character. The other highly significant force in Tyler's early life that we have to engage with is the black church. I hope to one day make a standalone video about the black church in the future, so I'm going to gloss over some things here. The black church deserves a deep discussion on its own, but you cannot engage with Tyler Perry as a media figure without recognizing how his success and power is intrinsically tied to his connection to the black church and the black church's most important marketing demographic, black women.

"Like, what were the underground behind-the-scenes moves that you made to create like relevance for this?"

"Church men and black women."

"Okay."

"Man, black women like, like, Maze right now. Maze hadn't done an album since 1911."

"Right?"

"But, but, but they can, they can sell out a building, an arena right now because that loyalty. And these, these women that I went to church with that I grew up with, you know, I was, I was speaking a language that..."

They understood because of my mother and my sisters growing up, their hip watching their pain and all the hell that they went through. So that they endeared to me, man. I was cousin, uncle, brother, you know, and and they have been my soul support the whole time.

Perry came up in the church and for a moment he thought he might go into theology. However, he surprisingly didn't have the knack for preaching. This didn't stop him from engaging with the church. However, his plays all follow in the long tradition of the gospel church stage play. While later in his film and TV career, Perry would divert from overtly religious themes and messages more consistently. Everything about him in his earliest days as a playwright and his first films is based on the gospel stage play tradition as well as what's often referred to as the chicken circuit or more appropriately today the urban play or theater circuit.

In the 1900s, while still under Jim Crow, the chitlin circuit was essentially a loose network of theaters and venues where black music and art and plays could be seen. Not every black artist at the time was in the Harlem Renaissance. There was only one Duke Ellington, and many black musicians, playwrights, and performers were only really viable in black venues and had to travel from venue to venue to make their wares. But the threat of Jim Crow and sundown towns made the perspective of touring music or film a hazardous activity. So this network of venues became integral in establishing the who's of where black art could be seen for decades in the South, Midwest, and Northeast. It eventually earned the moniker of the Chitlin Circuit.

Not quite sure why and where that term was first used, but it is highly appropriate for this arts movement and for Tyler Perry in particular because of the nature of what a chitlin is. For those who don't know, chitlins are stewed pig intestines and they are known for a strong bad odor that they give off when being cooked for obvious reasons. Chitlins date back to slavery as they are one of many forms of cuisine created out of necessity by enslaved Africans due to the fact that they were often disallowed from getting the more viable parts of any farm animals. Slave owners would take the key parts of any animals for themselves or for sale and leave the remains to the slaves who eventually developed modern soul food staples out of them such as ham hawks and pig feet. However, again, for obvious reasons, chitlins have fell out of favor in terms of soul food delicacies. But it is an example of black American ingenuity under duress. Similar to things I said earlier about black creators trying to enter Hollywood. It's an example of black people making the most out of what they have and sharing that with others. Literally in this case making salad out of [ __ ]. And that's what the Chitlin circuit was when Perry emerged on the scene in the early '90s. He was one of many uninspiring black creative making viable independent art with shoestring budgets, church singers, and a dream.

Perry moved from New Orleans to Atlanta in the '90s in pursuit of becoming a playwright and worked on his first play, I Know I've Been Changed, on the side for years until it debuted in 1992 with pretty much no success, costing Perry his life savings. I had worked selling uh used cars, selling uh I was a bill collector. I've worked really, really hard. I I I did not mind working. And I worked really hard, saved my income tax check, and I had saved about $12,000. And I moved to Atlanta, and I decided to put all the money into this play called I Know to Change, my first show. And I thought, I'm going to put this play up. I know it's going to be successful. I know it's going to work. Uh, I'm going to see 1,200 people over the course of a weekend. I put all the money in. I rehearsed it. I pung the lights. I had everything ready to go. And nobody showed up. There were 30 people in the audience. >> And I knew all of them. >> But he didn't give up. He continued to work on and refine it while bailing up his resources to the point of being homeless and sleeping in his car for a second. But six years later, he brought it back with a vengeance to sell out crowds, giving him enough resources to eventually rent out the legendary Fox Theater, which he also sold out and gave him more resources, catapult him to the top of the chipling circuit and really beyond it.

In I Know I've Been Changed, we pretty much see everything that we think of with Tyler Perry today. It's a story that focuses on issues of abuse and neglect, surviving sexual trauma, addiction, and of course, how God can solve all these things. It's a musical, which has always been a key factor in the gospel play tradition, something that never reemerged in Tyler's films until recently from what I'm told. It stars several extremely talented big voice black women who fall in that tradition of church belters, women who can bring the house down from the pull pit. Think Patty Leel, Fantasia, Jennifer Hudson, etc. But really, probably better. These are the people that inspired them, right? There's no media yet, though. Perry does play Joe. While not exactly the same character we would see in Media movies in the future, he's still very much the same character, which is something that'll come up later. But if you watch the handful of clips that are around, you can kind of see the early version of what Tyler Perry would become.

His next play, as far as I can tell, seems to be an adaptation of TD Jake's self-help book, Women Thou Art Loosed. Now, the book was a piece of self-help non-fiction, but the play is a story of a black woman with a traumatic past, substance abuse, abusive partner, yada yada yada. At least, I think it's kind of hard to verify because the original work of non-fiction has been reimagined so many different times as so many different spin-offs and actually two, it seems, different movies. So, I'm not going to say a lot about it here because I don't quite know exactly what this play was, but it is said to be the second play he brought to the stage and was also highly successful and probably further entrenched him in the larger community of black church play, black church in general spaces.

His third play was I Can Do Bad All By Myself, and it's also where he finally introduces the character of Media to the world. Medadia was actually intended to be a small role in the play that he did along with another actress, but when that actress no-showed a show, Perry ended up having to rewrite this role on the fly. And as the show continued, this thing that he came up with out of necessity at the last minute was so effective with the crowd that he ended up reworking the entire play to have as much Media in it as possible, and an icon was born.

I got you nothing. >> He started out with Daddy Joe and I know it been changed and then he moved to the character Medadia. The first stop we did was in Chicago. It was media and another artist that was supposed to be in the play. >> Sold all these tickets out in Chicago for her to be there and she never showed up. So all these people come in looking for her and she wasn't there. It was really scary. I had to go on stage and do the media lines and her lines. >> You got bigger laughs. >> Well, how I look today. >> Oh, you look nice too much, man. THANK YOU SO MUCH for having me. >> By the time we got to the end of the weekend, the theater was full and everybody was horrible. He had completely worked the play. Media had become the star.

I Could Do Bad All By Myself is again the story of a black woman suffering abuse, relationship, trauma, drug abuse, sexual abuse, etc., etc. And of course, ending with God giving her the strength to get over it. And I'm yada yada this because this is 50% of all of Tyler Perry's films, if not more. And a unique complex aspect of his legacy which again stems from his connection to the black church. The black church is a unique, important, and very powerful cultural force historically among black Americans. And this goes all the way back to slavery. Churches were initially the only places many enslaved Africans were allowed to collect together in private without overseers or watchful eyes of slave owners. And this led them to be unofficial community organizing spaces. Many a slave rebellion or escape was planned in a church pew.

Fast forward to Jim Crow into the Civil Rights Movement, and that tradition is still in place. In fact, at that time, the church was an extremely powerful institution, not just spiritually but politically, as it was the southern religious tradition of activist pastors like Martin Luther King who fueled the Civil Rights Movement. However, as with many aspects of black culture going into the '70s and '80s, there was a great shift that would make the church more friendly to a black capitalist message and less engaged with any type of resistance and organizing that churches were known for. Prosperity gospel became the theme.

>> Because that says that I'm right there next to my miracle. I'm right there, right at the door of my due season. >> Megaurches began to emerge. This also coincides with the crack epidemic, and the church took on almost like a triage space for many black women who had nowhere else to go. And we also saw many black men abandon the church either because of drug use or because of crime or really a multitude of reasons. I'm really glossing over things there, but just understand at a certain point, the church stopped being a communal space and started being highly dominated by black women in terms of numbers, but not power. Not at the pull pit, mind you, but in the pews. The black church was and still is a patriarchal institution, but it had lost its political role and had become more of a bomb during difficult times, providing solace to downtrodden black women who were nursing addicted family members, praying for sons and grandsons, and trying to avoid mistreatment from the society at large. And they were doing this all while still doing their best to uphold patriarchal frameworks in their own way. Hence this transition of who made up the church never being reflected in who ran the church. To this day, only about 10% of black churches are ran by black women.

And this also reflects in Tyler Perry's success and his ability to constantly rely on that audience for resources even when he's not putting the most into his art. While there's virtue in some of Tyler Perry's work that we will discuss, Perry was not serving black women a healthy media diet with his plays and films. However, he was serving that population like no one else had. This is another challenge we have to face when criticizing Tyler Perry. Regardless of how he might feel about his work, he came up by providing a service in black media that no one really was or seemed to be fully invested in. And specifically for working-class black women that have found himself erased, Tyler Perry targeted them and centered them in his narratives. Black women as a whole were struggling. But when there was representation for black women in the '90s and early 2000s, you'd be lucky if they in any way resembled what a lot of black women looked like or were experiencing in the world. Consider how black men felt about hiphop in the '80s and '90s and how hiphop gave black men this way to imagine themselves in the world that nothing had done up until that point. And in doing that, often created barriers for black women to appreciate it in the same way. There was engagement with black women's experiences in a lot of media regarding white supremacy and poverty and patriarchy. Think of like the women of Brewster Place, Krooklyn, Claudine. But they were few and far between and tended to blink when it was time to really get into the ugly nitty-gritty of what some black women were experiencing and wanted to see. When it was time to show the raw ugly reality that some black women faced at the hands of black men in this time in the crack epidemic in the '94 crime bill era, a lot of black male filmmakers may be held back as to not to contribute to further demonization of black men in the media. A complex challenge that black women have had to navigate for generations. But Perry had no such trepidation. In fact, you might even say he reveled in it. Perry was willing to put out there everything that many black women were going through. Physical, emotional, and sexual violence, often at the hands of black men, sometimes even at the hands of other black women. Struggles with addiction and self-worth, fear and pain on motherhood, and lots and lots and lots of trauma. Perry gave voice to this in a way and at a scale that no one else would early on. And he added the Christian undertones to it. So he ended up replicating the type of emotional and physiological release that would often keep these same women coming to the congregation every Sunday for church.

Further, something Perry doesn't get enough credit for is his maybe not necessarily robust but insightful class analysis. Perry centers his films around working-class and impoverished women's experiences. When we look at the greater landscape for black women-oriented media and entertainment, it tends to skew toward a petite bourgeoisie image. Shows like Insecure, Girlfriends, Living Single, Being Mary Jane, etc., all focus mostly on a middle and upper middle class black woman or something aspirationally connected to that class position. This is not a bad thing, and in many ways, it's meant to counteract much of the other ways that black women are represented in our media. Black women as a whole are the most educated population in the country, so there's good reason to have such representation. However, this simply isn't all black women or even the majority. Most black women, like most Americans, do not have a four-year college degree. Most black women, like most Americans, have moderate to conservative beliefs. And black women are more religious and attend church more than any other racial or gendered demographic. These were women that were constantly invisibleized by black media, even black media made by black people or other black women. And Tyler changed that and made them the center of his media all the way to the bank. I can argue that Tyler's work was on the whole still very damaging to the image of black women in this country, and I will. But you can't argue that he filled a void that no one else was filling and he should be commended for that.

Perry never purported to be August Wilson. He never imagined himself as a visionary auteur. He's always presented himself as the workman's creative, making a lot out of a little, making soul food out of scraps, and that's valuable. This may sound blasphemous to some, but Tyler Perry is closer to William Shakespeare in terms of the role he plays with his plays in society than say a James Baldwin. As wild as that comparison might seem to you, what people often forget about Shakespeare is that what made him a big deal in his time was his ability to bring together everyone for his plays. For his plays to be consumed both by royalty and nobility, but also by the peasants and commoners that had to save up money to go to his shows. And Perry pretty much did the same. Even if you were a second-generation H.B.CU student like my wife, you likely still had women in your family that remind you of the Media character. You probably weren't too many degrees removed from a cousin or neighbor who had a substance abuse issue that went undisussed. And you probably had some memories of being in a church pew all day on a Sunday. Tyler's plays were fodder for black Twitter conversations before black Twitter was a thing. I remembered even as a Muslim turned atheist in Atlanta in the early 2000s, hearing about his plays on my college campus, on a regular basis at the local malls, the barber shops, even my radio and music internships with other college-educated black folks. They were still talking about how much they loved his plays. Tyler had done something special that everyone could get behind at this point. Something that, as I said, was really hard to do. He had gotten rich and successful completely off of us. And few can say that, pretty much actually no one can remember that for later.

The Chitlin circuit was never supposed to be this lucrative or create this type of cultural phenomenon. And it didn't. Perry wasn't the first pew baby to make a play and hire some gospel singers to act in it. And he won't be the last. I remember many people trying to capture the success of the chitlin circuit stage play as he emerged as this phenomenon. But it makes me think of that line from Jay-Z where he says, "I heard [ __ ] saying they made Hoveve made Hoveve say, 'Okay, so make another Hoveve.'" You couldn't. It could only be a man as driven and as uniquely talented. And I mean that sincerely, uniquely talented as Tyler Perry. Before a single movie, before a TV deal, before the massive state-of-the-art studio, just off his stage plays, Tyler had made himself a multi-millionaire purely off catering to the black church and the black women who populated. By 2005, after numerous touring plays, he had grossed close to $150 million between ticket sales, video, and DVD sales along with merchandise. However, as inspiring as that is, I can't not be a bit cynical about how this relationship and this devoted audience has also worked to shield Perry from criticism. Whenever Perry is called out for a multitude of good reasons, he is quick to say something along the lines of, "My audience is all I care about," or, "People don't care about the population I'm telling stories about, so why should I care about their opinions?" And these things are in some cases true, but they don't change the fact that Tyler Perry was a hack. Right? Going back then, there are countless accusations of him stealing from other players, not paying people what he said he was going to pay. The Media character has been rumored to be stolen from a variety of people, although I don't agree with that cuz first off, that was happening all across black media at the time. We'll get to it. And we have to talk about the fact that he was catering to an audience that simply didn't have the highest standards in their entertainment and really just wanted to see a black man succeed. And he knew it. But this really didn't matter because it was still this internal, very black, very southern success story. And it was only the beginning.

So this massive studio backlot is where Perry does all of his work. But this is not where things started. This is actually the fourth piece of property that Perry has called his studio, and obviously the most grand. He started out on Hulk Street in northwest Atlanta and then he moved to Crag Street where the now Crog Street market is. Then he went to Greenbryer over on the southwest side. And this was a big deal at the time because he was becoming Tyler Perry and suddenly he was attaching himself, attaching his grand vision to black people in Atlanta. And the same thing can be said for his current studios in Fort McFersonson, which is still on the southwest side of the city, still in a black community, but a much bigger chunk of one. Perry says that he moved so much in part because he wanted capacity and autonomy, and he has it. This is his monument, his playground. So, what is he doing with it? What is Tyler actually doing with all of this power? What is he giving us or, to be fair, his core audience with the resources he's amassed?

>> I have no writer's room. Nobody writes any of my work. >> Never hungry and the lights were never off. Right. Sickness. So I give him that love because my work ethic is insane. I look at myself sometimes and go, "Are you kidding me? Kidding me? Kidding me? Kidding me?" >> So, I have minimal skills with my hands, right? I can put together like IKEA furniture. I can do basic stuff. But this was my first time using a saw probably since high school. I wish I could say this is because I was too busy getting a bunch of degrees and being a smarty-pants negro, but two of my homeboys here also have advanced degrees and less student loan debt. So, yeah, I have no excuse. is just something I never done. And that's actually really important. I could never do this without them. I would not be here, be in this position without community. I would not have gotten this far without all of you.

Part three, the Tyler Perry movie. So now we have to begin to discuss Tyler Perry as a filmmaker leading up to where he is now as a media mogul and cultural icon. I will not be discussing all his films in this already very long video. There will be a separate very long video released on my side channel that is more light-hearted and will create the ultimate Tyler Perry movie tier list. I'll also not be discussing his shows much because there's just too many of them. He's directed, I think, like 2,000 episodes of television in the last 20 years, and I can't. This is long enough. We'll discuss the TV stuff a bit later for other reasons, however. Instead, I'm going to discuss what Tyler Perry is as a filmmaker and what his films have to say about him and conversely, what it is that he wants to say to the world through his films.

Earlier I talked about the state of black media historically and how the fact that black people have always had to filter our desires for art and images that represent us through a white supremacist capitalist framework, and this framework only cares about our art as far as our art is able to make them and the system money, all while also not being too upsetting to the status quo. Even with those constraints though, we have gotten amazing film and TV from gifted black artists throughout the years. And every so often, we've even gotten radical and provocative work as well. However, at a certain point, things began to shift. The media landscape has changed, not just for black people, but really for everyone. There's a lot of reasons for this. There's the Telecommunications Act, which changed who gets to own media in our country. There's changes in technology, which dictate how we consume media. There's the presidency of Barack Obama, believe it or not, which really shifted the norms of how black people are perceived in media and the ways in which people think black people should be presented in both good and bad ways. And there's just the fact that society is slowly crumbling under the favors of late-stage capitalism. So everything is more exploitative, more extractive, and more crappy than it seems like it used to be. Things have changed, arguably for the worse for a variety of reasons. And one result of this is that someone like Tyler Perry now stands as one of the most powerful figures in media due to his immense resources, dedicated fan base, and the fact that he is still highly independent from the machine and all the flaws within it. You may look at this as an unfair or maybe inaccurate position to put him in, but no black person has had more capacity to represent the interest of black people in the world of media than Tyler Perry because of everything I spoke of in the previous section. And it's been like that for the better part of like 20 years. However, in those 20 years, You ain't got no damn >> My Chinese friend died from Korea. They put him in a box and put him some rice in it and send him down to Vietnam River. That was when I was in the war and I RAN. >> WATCH YOUR GLASS, BIG [ __ ] >> Is she okay?

Most of what I'm going to say about Perry's films is going to be focused on his thematic, symbolic, and political elements, or lack thereof. And there's a lot to say there, but first I want to make it clear that even if Tyler Perry's films didn't feel like minstrel, didn't have awful political messages and spread harmful ideas about black women, black men, so many other things in between, he'd still be a bad filmmaker on a technical level. And I know this is a very cold take. What is interesting though is that he's always been bad, but unlike other filmmakers, he's oddly gotten worse over the years. Like the Tyler Perry movies that were distributed by Lionsgate in the mid-2000s and the 2010s are really much better, at least on a technical level, than the slop he's been putting out directly through streaming since around 2015. It's like a unique form of inshitification. If you're not aware, inshitification is a term usually used to talk about social media apps in the tech space where an app starts out cool, builds up a dedicated user base, then after it gets enough people is purposely redesigned to be worse than what it was when you started liking it. And the reason for that is because it needs to become more profitable for the app's owners. Think about how Facebook and Twitter are basically unusable at this point to anyone who's just not locked in there because all their friends are there. Now, take that and then apply it to Tyler Perry whenever he talks about his core audience not complaining about his movies. This would be a recurring topic. But once Perry recognized that there was nothing he could do wrong in the eyes of his core audience, his response wasn't to serve them with the best films he was capable of making. It was to instead milk them, to use their devotion to his films to parlay bigger deals with streaming services and TV networks all while cutting as many corners as possible to maximize profit, which in turn makes his content much, much worse than it needs to be.

As mentioned earlier, Perry was making black-oriented films with topics and subjects that few, if any, black filmmakers were talking about and gearing them toward a working-class black audience that was either ignored or exploited, mostly by other black films. On top of this, he also takes advantage of the wide belief that black folks need to support other black folks, especially in the world of art and business because of our desire for liberation and to see other black people succeed. So for years into his film career, he could guarantee a great box office return no matter what slop he put on the screen. And that's still the case today. In fact, it's probably worse. Wider black audiences suffered through his earlier work because he wanted to support a black creator making black stories. And our repayment has been for Perry to give less and less effort over time.

Hot off his success on the chitlin circuit and having already become a multi-multi-millionaire in 2005, Perry signed a distribution deal with Lionsgate Films, likely already with his first film, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, finished. Perry was a complete outsider then as he is now. But he was always completely self-made and self-controlled. Unlike most filmmakers like the aforementioned Robert Townsend, who had to charge up his credit cards, Perry from the beginning could invest in and bet on himself, self-funding his first film and every film after, setting it up where he doesn't have to share profits with pretty much anyone else, which, as you'll see, is an extremely important pattern that will come up later. Perry is well known for a few things today, mainly writing, directing, and acting in almost all of his films and TV shows, filming at a breakneck pace and on a shoestring budget, and being completely in control. There is the infamous post he made years ago about his writer room being empty because he is the sole writer and director for all of his work. To which many replied, "We can tell, Tyler. We can tell no one else is writing these things or helping you get these scripts better." This would be impressive. And it is somewhat impressive, especially in a pre-AI era, but it's really not because Perry is greatly recycling the same stories and themes over and over again, constantly leaning into tropes and cliches, as well as a lot of improv and movie plots that make little sense and feel like they've been changed on the fly. Tyler Perry movies are infamous for having bad acting, bad cinematography, nonsensical stories, and of course, the bad wigs. And he's all but said himself that this is a result of his filming schedule being more important to him than the actual quality of the films themselves.

>> Love to know how do you go into sculpting the look of these characters? >> We had a knockdown dragout argument about the wigs on on in one of the scenes in in one of the scenes. It was very, very emotional for for her. I am always asking for things I need, feel I need as a character, as a woman and a woman of color. Our hair is part of the journey. So it is very, very important and for some people it's hard to stress that that is that important. >> No, I think hair is very, very important. But figure that [ __ ] out before we get on camera is my whole thing. So long as y'all figured it out before it's time to shoot, I'm good. I don't have time to wait 5 hours and spend $10 million while you trying to figure out which curl is better for you. >> Which way to do? I I see you. I see you. >> In more typical film productions, there's the studio and the filmmaker working together, but in separate spaces. The studio, which includes various producers, dictates budgets and makes hard decisions on what creative elements to a film will have to change based on those budgets. And then a filmmaker's role is to realize their creative vision under those constraints. Sometimes a filmmaker will have a ton of freedom for what they want to do, which can result in something like Sinners or something maybe less good but still unique like Sucker Punch. Sometimes a film's constraints creates more innovation and better ideas, such as in the original Star Wars trilogy. In a perfect world, the artist would have less restraints, but as I said in my last video, Hollywood is an industry, not an art collective, so it exists to make money. However, one would think with his level of control and alleged creative drive, Perry would be more lenient on himself to make sure he's making films that fit his creative vision. But it's pretty clear from the quality of most of his films that Perry is much more of a producer and studio owner than filmmaker. He puts self-imposed restrictions on his filming process and they come out poor. Not because Perry can't do better. In fact, he's proven that he can be a competent filmmaker when he wants, but it's because he is more concerned about the bottom line, which says a lot about him as an artist. For a wide example of this, think about what Adam Sandler has been for the last decade plus and most of his straight-to-streaming movies on Netflix versus some of the really awesome things he's given us when he's actually gave a [ __ ] about what he's creating.

So, let's talk about the actual movies. And again, I'm not at any point going to get into TV shows, but I will say that because they're cheaper, some of these technical issues don't carry over as badly versus what you expect from a major motion picture, something that you're going to commit 90 minutes to 2 hours to watch. And in Tyler Perry's case, very close to 2 hours a lot of times. He does not have an editor that says, "Maybe you should cut some of this shit." Perry's films can be separated into three categories: Madea movies, black thriller/drama movies, and his attempts at prestige films. And each genre has its own sets of patterns and features worth discussing. Out of these three categories, Madea films are the most infamous and most cheaply made and to be honest, the most embarrassing. But there's actually two types of Madea movies. There's movies with Madea in them, such as I Can Do Bad All By Myself, Madea's Family Reunion, and Madea Goes to Jail, which are movies where Madea is a side character or comedy relief that is actually a drama centered on other characters, every once in a while with bigger stars mixed in like to Taraji P. Henson. And then there's Madea movies which are movies starring Perry as Madea as well as two other characters, Madea's brother Joe and Joe's son Brian, as the focus of the films, such as in Madea's Halloween and Madea's Christmas and almost anything started with Madea as the film title. This distinction is important because it marks a difference in Perry's like philosophy on making his films. The earliest Madea movies released by Lionsgate in theaters are much, much better than the later movies released mostly straight to streaming like Madea's Homecoming and Madea's Destination Wedding. Both of which are some of the laziest, cheapest efforts that Perry has ever put to film. Like take this scene from a Destination Wedding that's supposed to be in a DMV, but it's clearly him in an office and he's using a file cabinet as a camera stand. It's one of the weirdest and most unrealistic things you'll see in any other movie. Except in Perry movies, this just happens all the time. Things weren't that bad in his earlier films released under Lionsgate. And that's because under Lionsgate, while Perry was still trying to solidify himself as a filmmaker, he felt the need to be better, is the best way to put it. And by the time he gets to streaming directly to Netflix and wherever else, he's like, "Enjoy your slot, people. This is exactly what you deserve."

Madea films all exist in the same universe with several long-standing characters and storyline such as Brian and his family drama with his ex-wife who's went from struggling with addiction to being married and then divorcing a millionaire. Madea has a variety of elderly and not-so-elderly side characters to do slapstick with such as Madea's ex Mr. Brown, whom she had her daughter with until it's revealed later that the daughter is not Mr. Brown's child. I think Madea has a large extended family, which is important because the members that come in and out of her life and need support serve as the plot devices for pretty much all of these films. There's always an aunt or a cousin or sibling with some type of dramatic something going on that Madea has to insert herself in to figure out a way to help out. However, even with all these characters, there's entire scenes of many of these movies with Perry just talking to himself as three different characters: Brian, Madea, and Joe. And to be fair, it's actually kind of impressive when you really think about what's happening here. It's the most technically impressive thing that Perry does consistently. And the way he does it makes you sometimes forget he's literally talking to himself. Now, these scenes do carry on for far too long most of the time, and they're incredibly indulgent, but they're still impressive. To be fair to Perry, he's actually a pretty engaging and magnetic character actor, and he has a great screen presence, whether as Madea or whatever other characters he plays that's not Brian. He was good in Gone Girl. He was fun in Ninja Turtles. Alex Cross exists.

>> YOU MAKE YOU YOU MAKE TDX. YOU MAKE A TDX. I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT. >> ARE YOU MAKING TTX? >> I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT. >> There's an alternate universe where Perry never fully figures out his unique formula for filmmaking and is just a great black character actor like Keith David or Ving Rhames or something. And we see this in most of the Madea films whenever he's not playing himself.

The other most common type of film from Tyler Perry are his drama/thrillers such as Daddy's Little Girl or The Family That Preys. Those two being his earlier efforts that were released in theaters. And then when he got to streaming, he had more thrillers like Acrimony and A Fall from Grace. None of these are good, but they are more competent and effortful than his Madea movies. Overall, with Daddy's Little Girls and The Family That Preys specifically, these seem to have been the efforts for Perry's to really have crossed over traditional success. These movies starred more relevant and accomplished actors, often without Madea, in order to get different audiences to come that were probably turned off by the Madea character. Something to note going forward is that none of Tyler Perry's movies have been box office juggernauts. All but one movie has made less than $60 million at the box office. So before his streaming deals and his TV deals, I figured Perry felt that he'd have to find a way to cross over his films to get to the big money because traditionally black films just don't get tons of money and they definitely don't make money overseas. An all-black audience just doesn't have the same level of value as a much larger white audience or an international audience. All of which are not interested in anything having to do with Madea. So many of his early dramas try to tap into that hood drama or prestige drama bag. Then there's Tyler Perry's sexy thrillers, which again are feeding an underserved audience. The sex thriller specifically is a genre that even white audiences have less of since the mid-2000s. Movies like Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction were huge deals. There was that one movie that I feel like I watched 500 times in college starring Harrison Ford and I think Michelle Pfeiffer. I don't remember what it is, but if you're my age, you know that was the dorm room flick to put on. And then we had black versions like Too Close or Devil in the Blue Dress. I still don't know how to pronounce Too Close. People that have been with me since the very beginning, get that joke. If you haven't, you never will, cuz that video no longer exists. So, this whole genre of film is basically out of theaters and only on streaming services, and Perry has cornered the market in the black version of it. Paradoxically, while his non-Madea movies are less embarrassing to like watch and better made overall, they end up being worse because it's clear that he's trying at times and the failure is more glaring in that regard. The Madea movies are filmed basically like plays half the time. And I would often give them a pass because while a lot of the stuff is bad in them, it's very clear that he's just following a formula and giving the people exactly what they want. You know, you can't complain too much about that. But in these other movies that were supposed to be taken seriously, that are supposed to be for more people, for example, Why Did I Get Married? That's probably the last Tyler Perry movie I saw of my own volition. And it's where I realized just how bad he was as a filmmaker. In this film, on so many occasions, especially at the beginning, actors just come into the foreground and basically explain their whole story and their characters to the audience. Scenes still feel like they go on forever because Perry doesn't know how to tell a story without the actors just sitting there and reading their plot off a page.

>> When we in college, did you think that we'd be doing what we said we'd be doing? I mean, look at me. Pediatrician doing well, private practice. Diane's top litigator at her firm. You top architect. Trisha is a bestselling author. Man, I'm I'm I'm proud of us. I think we did all right. >> There's this whole beat scene in this movie where none of the men are wearing shirts except Tyler Perry, of course, but also somehow they're not wet at all. They're clearly very oiled up and shiny to make sure we can see every muscle and vein on the man. A motif of Perry's that we'll talk about later. And they just explain the plot and backstory of as many characters as possible for a good 10 minutes before the movie actually starts. And it's really amateur storytelling and it's something Perry does all the time in all of his films. And these are the films that seem like they have more effort, but they end up showing his artistic limitations.

Then finally, you have his prestige films, of which I'd say there are only four. These films only seem to happen every blue moon. Often, I'd say when Perry is working with material that's not his or the movie is being produced by someone else where he doesn't have to foot the bill. When Perry is working outside of his personal brand, it's like he feels the need to show he has the ability to be much more competent, which is a damning indictment for all the things I've already said. His first truly out-of-character effort, For Colored Girls, is bad on a lot of levels, especially in terms of how he mutilates the original messaging of the story. Not to mention the fact that he essentially forced out the original intended director and writer of the film, in Giza Stewart, in order to take full control of it and of course take all the profit. But it is a much more competent film for him. And there's moments of genuine creative brilliance like the back alley abortion scene with Macy Gray. Then there's Six Triple Eight starring Kerry Washington, which was done in conjunction with Mandalay Films. So this is a serious movie and there's nothing really especially bad about it. It's competent but unremarkable, although there are some elements in it that reflect other problems we'll get to later. There's also The Jazzman's Blues, which is a film that's actually just good. It's just a good movie, and it's something he did all on his own under his production company for Netflix. The weird thing here is I had never heard of this movie. He didn't do anything to promote this movie. I've never heard anyone talk about this movie. It's like he wanted to hide it in order to hide evidence of him being a competent filmmaker, lest his audience might expect that from him all the time. And then I will also put A Fall from Grace here, one of his most recent films, even though it was clearly made relatively cheaply because it was all filmed basically in one spot and I think in like a week, but the acting is much better. And the premise, while extremely heavy-handed, is a really, really good idea for a story. These stories about someone being driven to the edge by extreme circumstances. They've been done to death, mostly with white men in films like Falling Down or Arlington Road. Denzel even got a version of it in John Q. But we've never seen a black woman centered in such a story. And I think that's an excellent idea to explore overall, cuz if anyone has a reason to snap, it's probably black women. Especially this one who's having the most Tyler Perry black women day possible in all of the history of bad days. And don't get me wrong, a lot of parts of this annoy me, but it's again a pretty competent, well-made film. I even didn't predict the twist this time around. Then again, I don't know if you could ever predict Tyler Perry's twist because they make absolutely no sense. These movies have no awful wigs, competent lighting, less improv. They're just decent movies. But the fact that they're so rare says a lot. It says that Tyler Perry is not about the art. He's about the money. He's a producer more than a writer or director. He undermines himself in ways that other artists hate to be undermined by their studio execs and producers. And it forces his work to be rushed and slapped together.

Tyler Perry, when he wants to be, can be funny. He can come up with some interesting story ideas, but that's not his primary goal in the creative process. For example, there's this sequence in one of the worst late-stage Madea movies where out of the blue, Tyler Perry comes up with this sketch where we follow Madea back in time to the 1950s and she comes home to find her boyfriend Archie has left and she realizes he might have left her for her roommate Rose. So, she calls up Rose's job at the NAACP looking for her. And when they tell her where she is, she goes looking for her again and finds her on a bus. And then we realize that Rose is Rosa Parks. ROSA, I DON'T GET OFF THE BUS, ROSA. ROSA, don't sit there like bus driver. You better I don't give a damn. You better open this door. Get off the bus, Ros. I'mma get you, Rosa. >> And this is presented as the real reason that Rosa Parks didn't get off the bus and that Madea accidentally started the Civil Rights Movement all by herself. Now, you might find that offensive, and you probably should, but I laugh my ass off here because it's so bizarre and creative that I couldn't help but laugh. And I'm thinking to myself, if you could come up with this, where is this? Why are we doing pee and poop jokes for half the movie, half the time in these Madea movies? Perry has ideas when they're there, but he doesn't care. He wants cheap. He wants quick. He wants the widest possible profit margin, so he will put out projects far

less than what he's capable of putting out because he knows he's the only one with the product and his audience will watch it regardless. Thus, because of his need to make things cheap and easy, actors and staff are not having fun on set. This is a well-known thing amongst the acting in Hollywood spaces I'll get to later. They also don't get enough time to prepare, so they have to like change different emotional veillances all through these long filming days, which is why the acting always seems so bad in his movies. He's also often only taking two or three takes of a scene and then moving on without proper coverage, leaning on improvisation and last minute rewrites and editing to make the story come together to make some semblance of sense. And sometimes even that still doesn't work.

For example, in the affformentioned media's homecoming, the story first revolves around one of the characters sons coming home for his college graduation with a big secret to reveal. He's gay. Initially, this actually is a big deal for Tyler Perry. Despite rumors about Perry's personal life, which we will get into, Perry's films have not been very kind to queer people due to the focus on black church sensibilities. So, this is a welcome development to have a film that takes a moment to engage with the experiences of gay men and the types of communities that media movies are a part of. But, I feel like maybe Perry got cold feet halfway through. As the story unfolds, initially the audience is led to believe that this character is coming home with his gay partner. Both of them are very gaycoded. There's a whole uncomfortable scene with Joe making homophobic jokes directed at both of them. Of the two actors, one actually is gay in real life and the other has most notably played a gay character. So, this seems like it was originally meant to be the plot through and through. But then halfway through the movie, they wrap up the gay part of the plot pretty much offscreen damn near. The gay son basically disappears and suddenly the movie is about this friend who we thought was gay, but he's not. He's actually dating the gay guy's mom somehow the whole time. Like it makes no sense cuz they were traveling what seems like was very far away for, you know, graduation or something. So like at what point in time was this affair happening? Also, now there's a deadbeat father that wasn't here, but he's here now cuz he's an [ __ ]. But the deadbeat father is dating the mother of the gay son's best friend, which is also a secret. And then the gay son's assumed the partner who's actually dating the mother is half Irish. So now we have an excuse to bring in I believe her name is Miss Mabel who is basically Irish media. Me and I patch Wolf had this sad when doves cry Simpsons moment when we both realize that Ireland literally has its own media character with all of the same offensive problems. None of it makes sense like it all. But Tyler Perry knows it doesn't have to. Tyler Perry relies on characters to behave in ways that are completely devoid of human behavioral patterns in order to allow or his plots to change at the drop of a dime to make sure that he doesn't need to reshoot anything or rewrite anything to save him money.

In another media movie, the affformentioned media's destination wedding, we see Brian's daughter all grown up and having had an incredibly sudden wedding proposal at the behest of her once aranged and drugaddicted mother who's now rich and posh because of her new husband who's a millionaire. But then we find out halfway through the movie that they're getting a divorce for no apparent reason. Like I don't know why that's happening to be honest. And despite the fact that this mother was not around and was an addict most of this girl's life, the daughter and her brother seem to be perfectly fine with her and is listening to her to get married to a man that only the mother has met. Meanwhile, Brian, the father that raised her this whole time, is completely in the dark about the whole situation. And then we meet this guy at a dinner that looks like it's at Red Lobster, but you know, whatever. Tyler Perry. In this scene, this guy that the daughter is marrying acts like every bad caricature that old people have about young black men. It's low-key offensive. He's so bizarre and inhuman and like says the most disrespectful possible things in this scene. >> Uh, who who are you? I'm your daughter's man. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. What's up, my [ __ ] >> What is happening right now? >> Yeah, that's because I wanted to be sure. >> I'm sorry. Are you sure about what? Did you want to still date him? What? What? >> [ __ ] More than that, I don't be hitting that. >> Okay, stop. >> What does that mean? >> But nobody seems to realize that except for Brian. So, you know, we just have inhuman nonreal characters this entire time. But 45 minutes later, he's basically a whole different character. He's with this woman we haven't seen yet. They're also in the Bahamas. I'm pretty sure this is just an excuse for Tyler Perry to take his friends on vacation, but whatever. this other woman here in the Bahamas with him is assumed to be and kind of presented as a side chick and like all the characters come together and they have this whole conversation where he's accused of cheating and seemingly the wedding is called off and the daughter's there and she storms off. This is the big like almost falling apart moment and this new female character doesn't say [ __ ] this entire scene. She just looks around and mugs at the camera. I am positive she did not know what character she was playing for this scene. But two scenes later, she shows up again and she's actually this guy's mother who wasn't invited to the wedding. Why didn't she say this in this moment 10 minutes earlier when it mattered the most and could have fixed all the problems? Cuz Tyler Perry doesn't know how to write a [ __ ] plot. That's why. And then all of a sudden, the boyfriend talks like a normal guy and him and Brian piece it up so a wedding can happen. And it's really bad and really dumb and I feel really sad for the thing I'm about to say next.

I don't know if there's any way to get around saying that Tyler Perry's core audience is simply not an audience with developed taste for quality in media. To put it as nicely as I possibly can. I would love to not come off snobbish or to offend anyone to not fall into the trap of being someone who points at something that brings others joy and looks down on them for it. Cuz who am I to do such a thing? I still like professional wrestling. I don't watch as much as I used to, but I still love it. And professional wrestling is very [ __ ] stupid. In fact, I have trash taste in so many ways, but I balance that out with other things in my media diet. And I don't know if that's happening with Perry. But what I will say is that this is not unique to Perry's audience. Trash rules in this country at this point. Remember the bluecollar comedy tour? That was a huge thing in this country. Joe Rogan is still one of the top figures in all of white media right now. The Hawk tour girl went from being a meme to a multi-millionaire because she said hawk tour spit on that thing. The real question is who's Jesus. That's the real one. And one of the weirder ones that people think this is a stupid take, but I don't care. Uh Jesus is born out of a virgin mother. >> What's more virgin than a computer? M so if you're going to get the most brilliant, loving, powerful person that gives us advice and can show us how how how to live to be in in sync with God. >> Who better than artificial intelligence to do that? Artificial intelligence could absolutely return as Jesus. Not just return as Jesus, but return as Jesus with all the powers of Jesus. M. >> So clearly this is just the metal right now.

So there's a lot that could be said about what I would say is a purposeful degradation of media tastes in our modern capitalist systems media production apparatus. When people aren't given variety in their media diet or challenge with different things, they will develop shitty taste. For an extended metaphor here, I was a latch key kid growing up and I would get home and get in the house and I would be by myself and sometimes I'll be hungry and so my mother kept cans of Chef Boyardd beef ravioli as an easy snack I could warm in the microwave myself and eat until she got home to make actual dinner. And sometimes actual dinner was real spaghetti or lasagna made from scratch with mostly fresh ingredients that was pretty damn good. So, I learned both to love the shitty stewed horse meat and soggy pasta and ketchup sauce that was Chef Boyardd beef ravioli and cheese or whatever, but I also learned to like real Italian food or at least real black Italian food, but still, you know, better than [ __ ] in a can. But if I only ever ate beef ravioli, how would I ever be able to enjoy actual Italian food without thinking that it tastes wrong? Cuz it doesn't match what I'm used to eating. In fact, if I were to judge from comments I get from certain folks or just I mean, y'all know certain conversations you've been privy to with people that watch certain things, they'll say [ __ ] like, "Ain't nobody watching that deep stuff." What What was the line? Rapping like you trying to free the slaves. I can't believe I managed to bring up Drake. I'm sorry, but like that [ __ ] was the top rapper in the world for like a decade and a half. Tyler Perry. I think this is basically what Tyler Perry's core fans are dealing with. They aren't uniquely dumb or bad. They're on par with most Americans when it comes to entertainment cuz American entertainment is purposely made to be cheap and lowquality for the sake of profit. So, in many ways, Tyler Perry is just reflecting the environment that he's built his empire in. But that's kind of the thing that pisses me off the most because unlike every other black person in the history of Hollywood, Tyler Perry does not have to do this. That should bring me to talk about him more as a businessman, but that's the last chapter of the video cuz we have to go a little bit deeper cuz it's easy to point and laugh at Bad Wigs and inname plot holes, but it's harder and to me more important to explain why his films aren't just badly made, they're bad in their messages and intentions.

When I first said I was going to make a Tyler Perry is bad and here's why video years ago in my head at the time it was just going to be talking about why his movies are bad in a deep level. Not just technically but socially and politically. The quality of Perry's work is one thing, but it's another to recognize the harmful ideas they spread and normalize within black communities. to recognize Perry's lowercase C black conservatism for what it really is and his toxic religion-based authoritarian inclinations, his underdised internalized antilackness, and to be blunt, his weird psychosexual misogyny and misandry that bleeds into so much of his work, possibly due to his repressed sexuality himself. So, we got to do all of that before I ever start to like pocketwatch exactly how this man became a billionaire.

If you're watching this on YouTube, it's likely you've already encountered a dozen ad breaks by now. There's also a strong chance that there's been a lot of censorship and different clips in the video being edited in weird ways. Considering that Perry is known to be highly pettied about criticism, which we'll get to again later. And although this should be completely legal, I doubt I'd be able to get through all of these clips without heavy censorship. I want to again take the moment to let you know that if you want to see this video in its original form and without all these ad breaks, you can click on the link in the description to sign up for my streaming service, Nebula. I won't go into the full details now since this is the section everyone's been waiting for. But if you have $3 a month and want this and a ton of other videos, go on ahead and click that link. That said, the best way to organize the topic of actually talking about the content of his movies is probably a good oldfashioned listical since this is maybe the possible last video I ever get to upload. So, here are the worst things about Tyler Perry's movies from a thematic standpoint in no particular order or maybe in order for how much they piss me off.

I am dark skinned and bald, so I hate you and I hate Jesus. >> Let's start with Tyler Perry's colorism. One thing Tyler Perry made embarrassingly clear in his early work was that he was blatantly colorist, only changing his ways after years of criticism. We usually focus conversations around colorism on black women and for understandable reasons, right? But Perry is actually guilty of his colorism with men, especially in his earlier films. Aside from Adris Elba and Daddy's Little Girls, Perry almost always found a darker skinned male actor to play a villain and a lighterkinned male actor to play a hero. And although Daddy's Little Girls does break this trope a bit with the men, it actually still reverses it with the women because Tasha Smith is the villain and Gabrielle Union is the heroine in that movie. We see it in Diary of a Mad Black Women with Steve Harris and Shamara Moore. Then again in media's family reunion with Blair Underwood and Boris Kojo. Then again in Why Did I Get Married One with Richard Jones and Lamar Rucker. Then again in Meet the Browns with Philip Edward Vanlier and Rick Fox. And then again and I could do Battle All by Myself. And this time it's actually a lighterkinned black actor in Blair White. But he's going up against a Latino actor in Adam Rodriguez. So there you go. For almost all of his early films, Tyler Perry repeated this trope to the point where it's one of the most wildly known aspects of his films that people tend to make fun of. Now, with black women, Perry has been less overt in his colorism, but it's still there. Perry tends to cast darkerkinned black women in leading roles, which is nice, especially at a time when darkerkinned black women were and are being erased from prominent media. But this also means we get constant images of these darkerkinned black women in dire struggles situations being beaten, stalked, assaulted, or in some other form of duress. And conversely, there are examples of lighterkinned women in his films clearly being played to be more feminine and damsels in distress in need of rescuing. So, it's all there and it's all a mess. And it's not incidental. It's a pattern and it can't be excused because Perry has never addressed it. Now, he did improve on it later in his career, but this still requires further examination, and my exoration of this phenomenon leads me to finally have to touch on the touchy subject of Tyler Perry's questionable sexuality. I'm going to try to not be lured or gross about it, but it really can't be avoided if I'm going to honestly analyze and discuss Tyler Perry and his various issues as a filmmaker and his position in our social world, as black people. And Perry has never publicly stated, I want to be clear about this, for legal reasons, that he is gay or by or that he has had sex with men. There is a level of transgression I'm participating in by speaking of him in this regard. But it's just kind of a line I'm going to have to cross because you can't engage with a lot of Tyler Perry's issues without engaging with him as possibly a closeted gay man. And if Tyler Perry were gay but in the closet, you would really understand it because of the fact that the black church has been his core audience this entire time. And the black church has a paradoxical don't ask don't tell type relationship with gay people, especially gay men who are very prominent in the black church. As I stated earlier in the video, the black church is paradoxically a institution driven by black women, but still ran by black men and very much encompassed in a patriarchal framework of how things should be. And because it's so black woman focused, it also attracts a lot of gay black men as there's just synergy there. That's where so much of black femininity, whether it be exhibited by a man or a woman, gets its image and aesthetic from. Another thing that black people have pulled out of the church is music. The black church has been an unofficial conservatory for black musicians for the last 75 years, probably only really going away in the last 20 years. Mind you, R&B has also disappeared in the last 20 years. That's not an accident. So much black music has roots in the church because of the fact that that's where instruments were. That's where instructors were. That's where people regularly got to practice that craft. And everyone from Whitney Houston to D'Angelo and so many others got their start in music out of the black church. And for whatever reason, at a certain point, it became common for the black church choir directors and various other artisans within the church to be queer black men. Sometimes the pastor himself would also be closeted, which wasn't as common, but still existed. And this would be an open secret in many churches that the choir director was definitely gay. and not just like a butch closeted guy, like pretty flamboyant and obviously affeminite and everybody was okay with it as long as it was kept private. Again, a don't ask don't tell policy. And if these text messages that were published by Forbes magazine about Tyler Perry are valid, then Tyler Perry also is adhering to this don't ask don't tell policy. And this is again understandable because if he were to be openly gay, he would risk alienating a significant portion of his most dedicated fan base. There's more to dive in there around queer black men's experiences, but I don't have enough cache to speak of it with confidence. Also, you can check out Revelis, Prince Shakur, Philosir, Over Me to get those stories, but I will present this one hot take hill that I may die on. We'll see. which is that historically black gay men are colorist as hell. No shade intended. Just calling it as I see it. And this is because black men historically have been colorist as hell. This is not unique to them. It's just that we don't really get to engage with that aspect of black gay male culture because it's a culture does not get spotlighted from the outside world. But if you are in community with gay black men in any form of fashion and just pay attention, you know that that is a thing they deal with. Colorism is not something black people invented out of the blue. It was a response to the effects of white supremacy. And white supremacy affects everything in the black community. So, it makes sense that everyone would have distorted beliefs and opinions about what the amount of melanin in your skin meant about you as a person and how you should be valued. And that's for all black people, straight, gay, male, female, and everything in between. I think one of the reasons why we had so many light-skinned men early in Tyler Perry's movies, and if you've seen many of his stage plays, that is a tradition that carried on from his stage plays, is because we're actually dealing with Tyler Perry giving us his ideal type. And if we venture to analyze the presentation of men in Tyler Perry's movies, as if Tyler Perry himself was attracted to men, it starts to make a lot of things make sense. Because if you know anything about straight women versus gay men, then you know that this scene and this scene and this one and so on, these are not really the ways that straight women like to consume men for the sake of thirsting over them. Compare Tyler Perry's tradition of oiled up beefcake musclemen to the way that say Kofi Sirobei is filmed in the movie Girls Trip, which is also directed by a black man, but one who's more skilled at presenting a male image for the female gaze. Instead of Kofi being oiled up with muscles rippling and glistling all over the place, instead of the over-the-top facial expressions, Kofi is fully clothed, well-groomed, well-dressed. He's making eye contact with women. We're staring at his whole body, not just his arms and his chest. This is because women will like to observe the way he walks and see if he walks with a air of confidence. And I'm not saying that this is exactly how women tend to thirst for man in media, but I do know it's usually not oiled up muscle guys with veins popping out looking like they're coming straight out of a gay porn. >> You know, I remember when I sat down to write my first play, I asked Jesus, "Will you coowrite with me?" And he said, "Yes." And I told Jesus, "I want to write plays for women. What do women want to see?" And Jesus said, "Sexy men." >> I talk about this in my male desiraability video, but that's just not the ideal male physique to attract women. I don't even think this is really for a lot of gay men, to be honest. This is really just for spectacle and for Tyler Perry's preferences. Tyler Perry, who by the way took a lot of his male models from his play days and would make calendars to take around to his traveling theaters and sell as a part of his merchandise. I remember seeing these calendars and they were very much semi- pornographic. There's no evidence that they exist right now, but I know I saw them cuz I was here in Atlanta. If you happen to have a mama or auntie that got one of them calendars like sitting in a box somewhere, please take a picture of it and tag me on Twitter. I need to make sure that other people know that this exists. So, at least as it pertains to the man, what we're really dealing with with the colorism in Tyler Perry's movies is him putting his preferences out there. And to me, the most clear proof of this, that the fact that these light-skinned men are for Tyler Perry and not the core audience of black women that he caters to is recognizing that, no shade, black women have for the longest time preferred darker skinned black men. Light-skinned men have barely been holding on by a thread for the last like 40 years. Shout out to the one light-skinned lighteyed dude that's in this new Boaz movie for the Tyler Perry helped make. Like, he's holding it down for light-skinned brothers everywhere. But other than that, it's rough on y'all. Oh, new Green Lantern dude. Those two light-skinned dudes are holding it down for the culture right now. Shout out to them. But they're working against the tide of dark-kinned black men that have always been the ideal towards black women. So, if you're saying to yourself, "These images are for black women," Tyler Perry should know that that's not what they're really looking for in that regard. And Perry wouldn't be the only creator to do this. Tim Burton always puts his type of woman in his videos. Hideio Kajjimo, who made the Metal Gear Solid Games, did the same thing. Of all the things I'm going to take issue with Tyler Perry about him letting his goon brain take over his casting decisions early in his career is one of the least harmful things in his films, to be honest. But don't worry, we're just cracking at the surface. >> How can you do this to me? Get out. I'm going to marry this white because you are too virtuous and strong and might make me a better man.

Next, let's dig into Tyler Perry and his depictions of black men. Perry has a lot of other issues with black men outside of colorism. Overall, it's just clear he has a low opinion on black men and is not overly interested in showing black men in a meaningful sense the same way he does black women. Now, I'm not really complaining about this. I actually think it's dodging the bullet to have Tyler Perry really engage with masculinity in his films. It's probably better for everyone involved. It's something to notice in a movie like the 68 where this historical story of these black women military figures that like the main female character is somehow spurned into wanting to join the army because of this white dream boy that she had a crush on from high school. In the army in real life and in the movie, she meets a black man that she eventually marries. And this black man she stays married to for the next 50 or 60 years. But the movie acts like this [ __ ] is like a second thought. like is who she settled for despite the fact that this is who she spent her entire life with and this one white dude that she has freaking hallucinations of is staying on her mind. That's like the surface level of how Tyler Perry thinks about black men. Perry has a lot of other issues with black men outside of colorism. Perry's pinchion for flat on oneote characters and cartoonishly evil villains tends to land more roughly with his shallow and almost exploitative depictions of black men and is awful. But we do have to recognize that to parts of his audience, the villains depicted in his films are not so unrealistic. It's reflective of their life's experience. I've often seen some black male intellectuals complain about Perry's movies or movies like The Color Purple depicting black men as villains and abusive and patriarchal. And we should be critical of those depictions and their prevalence in our media, but not to the extent that we act like this isn't the experiences of some black women and thus relevant to these stories that they tell. And as I said before, Perry has been more unflinching in his engagement with these issues of abuse and sexual assault and child molestation and addiction, etc., in a way that resonates with his audience and shouldn't be disregarded. We can't act like those images aren't still needed when we also have chunks of black folks proclaiming the innocence of R. Kelly, Bill Cosby, Tory Lanes, and probably eventually Tyler Perry. Further, Perry has also been a pioneer in showing how patriarchy is often perpetuated and made possible by black women. He doesn't get enough credit for showing how many black women align with abusive patriarchal practices within black communities and protect abusers and silence their victims. But all that said, the underlying messages and tropes around black men in his movies goes well beyond telling some people's stories and into exploitation and antilackness. Because as we see the pictures of abuse and trauma in Perry's films, they're mostly used as plot devices and not really effectively engaged with. The viewer is low-key just left to see that some black men are just naturally abusive and predatory. And that's really bad. Abuse in real life is a cycle. It's a product of structural barriers, economic factors, mental health, etc. The way that we fix abuse should focus on addressing those problems. But in many of Tyler Perry's films, especially in his early work, abusers are evil for basically no discernable reason. They're seldom given a backstory of any kind. They're just kind of monstrous evil men cuz that's how some men are or that's how some black men are. And the fact that they're also darker skinned makes things even worse. But again, we've already touched on that. >> Excuse me. Uh, may I rake your leaves? At first, she acts like she doesn't like the light-skinned gardener, but eventually she gets to know him and sees a sensitive side. >> Now, I know that to you, I'm just a poor light-skinned gardener who can't even afford a shirt. But I love me some Jesus, and I love me some you. >> Oh, Lord, thank you, Jesus. I never thought I'd ever be with a man so loving and light-skinned. In those few moments where villainous women exist, they still at least get some type of backstory, some type of explanation for how they came to be cruel and abusive. Often presented as a response to abuse they experience from a man. But the black men in his movies get no explanation of that sort. No dramatic monologue, no backstory. Perry seems disinterested in engaging with how and why patriarchy actually works and manifests in the black community. And there's a reason for that, but again, we'll get to that later. And I can't not consider this a reflection of Tyler Perry's own experiences with abuse and trauma. Especially when we look at the most overlooked but worst example of his depictions of black men, Tyler Perry himself playing Uncle Joe. For all the criticism Tyler Perry rightfully gets for pretty much everything, but especially the character Medadia, it is a bit telling that the greater media critic community has not said much about the character Joe. Because in all the ways that media is an awful character that plays on black women stereotypes, so is Joe for black men, if not low-key worse. Because at least media, while being bad, still has elements of quality and virtue to her character. She takes care of people. She's the matriarch of her domain. She gives the tough love speeches at the end of the movies. And it shows these rayward souls how to figure things out in their lives. So it's understood that Wamadia has a lot of problems in universe. She is good, but Joe is just irredeemably awful. He's just an awful, ugly, horrible human being who's just there and serves only as comic relief, negativity, and mischief. Now, YOU MIGHT HAVE AN uncle like that. I lowkey might have an UNCLE LIKE THAT, BUT not like that like that. Even your worst uncle still have something about them that still makes them lovable or valuable on some level, but not Joe. Joe is an abusive criminal absentee father who beat his kids, used to pimp women, and as far as can be seen, is completely relying on media for continued sustenance at this point in his awful life. Joe is everything awful that the world believes about black men. He's lazy, homophobic, criminally inclined, and predatory. He's all these things, but played for laughs. So, you don't really engage with it critically and think about why is he here? And I remember early on feeling like that in Tyler Perry's second movie, Medadia's Family Reunion, there's this scene where Joe is sitting at a table playing cards with a bunch of other older black men, which goes to show that clearly this is a universal problem. And this gorgeous girl walks past him. And I remember this because this girl went to Clark University with me. I don't remember her name, but I vividly remember seeing her on campus cuz I mean, look at her. Amazing. So, I'm in theater all excited seeing this former classmate in the movie, but then I realize she has no lines. She's just there to be uncomfortably augled at by these older black men who within the story she's related to. So, Joe asks her to reach in and get him a soda from the cooler so that he and the rest of these older black men whom she is related to can augle her without her knowing. And it's the grossest thing in the movie and one of the grossest things in any of his movies ever. I can't for the life of me understand why this scene wasn't quietly cut after all these years. It's up there with that scene from Two Can Play That Game that I keep bringing up and I'll bring it up again cuz that shit's awful, too. >> Why must Mexican and black people cause so much ruckus in a white man's apartment building? So Tyler has all these movies where abuse, including familial sexual assault, is at the core for his characters. And we're supposed to be serious about that topic at times, and he's collected this audience of predominantly black women who relate to this experience and are watching him because they want to see this issue be addressed seriously in media. But here he is taking that same predatory, abusive dynamic and putting it on display for laughs. This scene again is at a family reunion. So, this is their great niece or grand niece or whatever. This is someone's daughter probably at the reunion in the moment and they're just staring at her ass and it's supposed to be funny. And I remember in the movie theater, nobody was laughing cuz it was just weird. And because media movies exist in their own pocket universe, if you care enough to care about the continuity, you realize THAT JOE IS ALWAYS AROUND LITTLE girls in these movies. And this is not the only time he's done low-key creepy [ __ ] in the films. >> I don't know why he has some cigarette in this purple. >> It's an accidentally incredibly insightful reflection on how abuse is perpetuated in black families when the predator is known but just ignored by the community as a whole. I won't act like there's not elements from Joe that aren't funny. He is roasting people left and right, even when a lot of those roasts just rely on homophobia or transphobia or fat jokes. But it's hard to look at him knowing who he represents and his behavior and not be thrown off. It's somewhat frustrating that for all the criticism of Perry over the years, Joe's never really gotten a lot of critique cuz Perry has openly said that media is based on his mother and his aunts. And with that in mind, it stands to reason to think that Joe is based on Tyler Perry's own abusive father. And if you need any proof of this, consider how Tyler Perry spoke of his father earlier in the video and how he still takes care of him in real life. And the fact that Brian, the only character that Tyler Perry plays in his movies regularly, out of costume, is Joe's son. Much of their banter together is often Brian arguing with Joe about the way he was raised and the way he's trying to do things differently. And media's also there sometimes taking his side. And then it just hits you that Tyler Perry is just talking his [ __ ] out by himself as three different people instead of going to therapy. Perry feels no obligation to depict black men with more tact grace or humility. Though, as you'll see, that's low-key true for everyone. But at least in this case, I think it's on purpose. But it's reflective of how black men are positioned in black spaces, especially the church. There's always the image of the black ideal male who can do no wrong, who's perfect in every way. And in Tyler Perry's book, probably kind of light-skinned. And that black man literally is above reproach. And if anything with him ever goes wrong, it must be someone else's fault. But these other dudes, black men like Joe, or like Tyler Perry's black male villains, these black men don't measure up to the patriarchal ideal, which technically in real life is all black men. If you actually understand how patriarch works and the fact that it's a white construct that was never meant for us in the first place. Please read your afropesimism and your Sylvia winter. These lazy, deviant, good for nothing men deserve whatever they get and have not earned even the benefit of being understood. Their dysfunction is in their very nature and that's why these men are abusive but don't get any reason to explain why. That's just who they are at their core. So what you realize is that black man in Tyler Perry movies are either there to fulfill fantasies or confirm stereotypes. That's really it. And he doesn't get a ton of critique around this. Mostly because many of the black men that care enough to critique Tyler Perry just call him gay and a crossdresser and haven't actually tried to analyze what he's actually presenting about us. But also because he's just way way more harmful to black women as a whole. Well, at least I have Jesus and a strong love of a black African beautiful INDEPENDENT BLACK WOMAN. CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT. THIS ISN'T WORKING. I CANNOT WORK LIKE THIS ANYMORE. I'VE WORKED WITH JESUS.

Of all the groups that can take issue with Tyler Perry, no group is more exploited by him than his black female fan base. It's really insidious, manipulative, and morally bankrupt as a griff that he set up for himself where he's created this reputation as a champion for black women. One of a few men willing to represent black women's needs and interests at his level. But when you really look at what he's usually saying and doing in his media, it's much more serving to him than them. It's hard to know where to begin here, but let's just review what we've already said. We're going into maybe hour two or three at this point. You may just be returning to the video. So, here's what we got so far. Tyler Perry is seen as a champion of women greatly because of his ties to the black church. But what this really comes down to is Tyler Perry being a lowercase C conservative. A lot of people when they hear me or others call certain black folk conservative, but they're also Democrats, they get confused. When I say lowercase C conservatives, I'm not talking about black Republicans. I'm talking about respectability politics blacks, hyper churchy, hyper capitalist blacks. Folks that say stuff like pull up your pants and blame everything on the youth as if they weren't raising the youth. That lowercase C conservative. And don't get me started on how they feel about women and gay people. There's a part of me that respects and empathizes this old school ideology because those are the people that raised me. And I know at the end of the day, most of them it comes from a loving place. But a bigger part of me sees what all this manifests as and sees the harm that it usually does often to vulnerable black people who don't easily fit into those old school frameworks. And many of these people are often black women. In the grand scheme of things, Tyler Perry's manipulative media taking advantage of his devout church following is probably not as overtly harmful as other media institutions. Hip hop is not and has really been very kind to black women in its depiction of them. So much mainstream white ran media for generations has not been kind to black women. And social media today is a cottage industry of manufacturing harm and outrage against black women. We now have literal nonreal AI black women acting ghetto and ridiculous just for people's entertainment which then gets transmuted onto real life black women who have nothing to do with that nonsense. So, I don't want to be hyperbolic when I criticize Tyler Perry here to make it seem like his harm is so uniquely awful compared to the harm that black women encounter in so many other ways, but what makes Perry unique in one regard and probably worse is the way that he gets away with it. Because of his church aesthetics, he gets a pass, and that is very much worth addressing. I think the first place to start is to examine how Tyler brands his media as pro black women. Because Tyler has went on record as saying that he sees his work as a healing ministry. In a New York Times article way back in 2007 after his first few film successes, Tyler said, "I have this unbelievable pull to have people see these movies and be healed." He said, "So many people are in need of healing." And he's right. It's just concerning about how he approaches this concept of healing and whether that's actually what he's trying to do versus recognizing how vulnerable this population is and how much they desire healing and giving them something that he knows they'll buy regardless of whether or not it accomplishes that goal. I came across this statement from one of many papers examining Tyler Perry's toxic relationship with black women. This one titled Take Your Place: Rhetorical Healing and Black Womanhood by Dr. Tamika El Kerry of University of Virginia. And I like this one because it provides a pretty solid summation of all the things that I also think are wrong with how Tyler Perry engages with black women. At best, what he does is misguided. At worst, it's manipulative and cynical. Carrie writes in her intro, >> yet as numerous black Christian women continually support his films, and as Perry defends his representations of black womanhood with the claim that quote, "As long as people walk away from my shows feeling better, whichever way I lure them to hear that message, so be it." Key questions remain. What, for example, are the themes, images, and arguments Perry uses to appeal to black women viewers? Further, how can we make sense of Perry's insistence that his message, one we can assume is influenced by his goal of healing, justifies his characterization of certain black female characters as incomplete without a man. >> Using some of Tyler Perry's movies, Carrie points out multiple tropes in this same vein around how black women should be healed. According to Tyler Perry, the necessity for black women to return home and re-engage with domestic and family service in order to be safe, that their real power is in their position under men and under the church. The not so subtle glorification of bluecollar men, which isn't wrong in isolation. There's definitely an issue of classism that happens in black spaces, especially around dating, but it mostly comes with the implication that black women need to lower their standards and not be so bigheaded about what they think they deserve and include working-class men in their romantic options, which is wrong on so many levels because black women are more likely than any other group in America to date and marry men below their social, economic, and education status. Tyler also consistently presents women's rightful anger at the ways they've been treated as inappropriate and a barrier to their alleged healing. Carrie goes into how in a diary for a mad black woman, the main character, Helen, is abused and mistreated to an almost cartoonish degree, of course, by her dark-skinned rich black husband, culminating in her being kicked out of the home, requiring her to move back with her grandmother, media. And in the process, she meets the legendary light-skinned man with cornrows. >> Excuse me. Uh, may I rake your leaves? who must now brace against all of her misplaced anger and bitterness in order to get the opportunity for him to heal her with his love abs and cornrows. Carrie goes on to state, >> "What makes this attempt to identify with black female viewers through the Heling character problematic is that it teaches viewers to see women's assertive behavior as a potential justification for intervention and to measure women's behavior according to a code that privileges heterosexual Christian men. For example, when Orlando tells Helen that he chose to reject the bitterness of his own heartbreak, his confession works to enforce the code that women must rise above mistreatment and get over it. Helen has no excuse for mistreating Orlando. Thus, in her rejection of his marriage proposal in favor of honoring her commitment to Charles, viewers see a threat to the continuation of the black family that Perry's rhetoric of healing resolves. When women like Helen are unable to see love, honor, or choose the good Christian men in front of them, families suffer and communities regress. >> The message is clear here. Fulfillment and healing for black women is almost always an external thing. It's in a man. It's in the home. It's in the church, but seldom within the power of black women themselves, unless they're giving that power up to a malan institution. And you might think that this like the colors and stuff is something that Perry improved upon in later movies, but not really. Almost 20 years later with Divorce and Black, we have a film with almost the exact same story beats and structure as Dire of a Mad Black Woman. A doting beautiful black woman is married to an awful black man. This time just browns skinned. So, we do have that one fix. He divorces her. She moves back home to her country roots where she's reintroduced to an old flame with big biceps who's a blueco collar good Christian man looking for a good black woman to heal with his love. We do get a few changes most interestingly being the fact that the evil ex-husband at least has some backstory and explanation is even suggested that he should go to therapy. Unfortunately, the end of the movie makes that impossible. So, while the details are a bit different, we're still telling the same story of healing, where the healing hinges on all these external factors. What Tyler characterizes as healing stories are really often moralistic parables about what happens to black women when they wander away from their appropriate paths and suffer as a result and then return to their appropriate path for healing and greater fulfillment by low-key giving up the things they dreamed about in the first place. According to Tyler Perry's ethos in his films, the appropriate path is always at home with a man in a survile role. Black women who dare to stray from the normative Christian wife role are punished and depicted as fallen and evil. For example, going back to Daddy's Little Girls,

We have our first true female lead villain from Perry and Tasha Smith as Jennifer. And Jennifer is just as cartoonishly evil as the black male villains that we see from Tyler Perry. She emasculates and undermines her heartbreaking ex, good man, right into the arms of Gabrielle Union's character, while she runs the streets with a local drug dealer.

"This is your mother's funeral, and you know she wanted these girls to go with him. Jennifer, you know it. You out hoing around with these thugs. She didn't want these girls around all of this foolishness."

"Let me tell you something. All right. These are my kids. Do you hear me? YOU AIN'T JUST GOING TO TAKE THEM FROM ME."

Tasha uses her financial superiority to take his kids away from him and shows herself almost immediately to be a neglectful and corrupting force to her daughters, offering her 12-year-old daughter alcohol as she vaguely suggests pushing her into prostitution.

"Baby, you old enough to understand some things. Okay."

"All right. Now, you ain't going to just be sitting around here living off of me. Look at me. It's time for you to start your own hustle."

The film, of course, ends with her and her drug dealer husband heading to prison. While heavy-handed, you could reason that Jennifer is deserving of her fate, but it still implies that her corruption is due to the deviation she made from the ordained path of black women. And she's not the only one in these types of character roles. In the family that praised Tyler's other attempt at crossover prestige drama, Saiia Lean plays Andrea, a toxic, self-serving, ungrateful, and disrespectful woman. She makes the grievous mistake of being both emasculating and adulterous to her god-fearing, working-class black man. And at the height of their conflict, when she reveals that she has been unfaithful to him, he backhands slaps her with enough force to send her flying over the table. While seen as a dramatic and intense moment and not necessarily played for laughs, it is definitely meant to be something cathartic for the audience who would have come to hate her up to this point for her actions. So, violence and abuse toward women is wrong in Tyler Perry's films unless they deserve it.

But probably the grossest example of Tyler Perry punishing black women for getting out of line is from the movie Temptation in 2013. This movie is one of those joints where the story happens in the past and someone's telling the story to us in the present. So, we have this woman talking about her friend's fall from grace.

"Too much temptation. Sit down. You're in for a treat."

We have Journey Smlet playing the character Judith. And unlike most of Tyler Perry's characters, probably because she's light-skinned, she's already found her good, simple man. And he's even dark-skinned and he's not even blue collar since he's a pharmacist and they live in D.C. So maybe we're breaking away from some things. Except while this should be any black woman's dream, especially according to Tyler Perry, Bryce, her husband, is lame and kind of takes her for granted and is really just an awful dude on a lot of levels. Part of me feels bad for him because of what he goes through. Part of me is like, you are dumb and stupid and deserve everything you get and possibly were into this thing the whole time, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

"For once in your life, Judith, damn. Come on."

"It's not that easy. Okay."

"Where is he right now?"

"He's watching the game."

"Touchdown. Yes."

"Mom, pass the ball."

"Look out."

"Mom. I'm I'm sorry. That was my boss. She just called. Needs me to run an errand."

"What? I know. It was ridiculous. I'll see y'all later."

"That happened a lot."

"No. No."

Because Bryce is lame and dumb, Judith is bored and unfulfilled, even though she has again, everything she should desire as a black woman. Later, enter Harley, a black billionaire tech bro who's also dark-skinned and is infatuated with Judith and wants her bad. Also of note, right about at this time, 50 Shades of Gray is popping off. So, you can kind of see where this is going. I'm inclined to not be overly upset with Judith's sense of unfulfillment because the reality is that many married women, once they get married and start getting into what domestic life is, find it unfulfilling despite the fact that they've been told from childhood that that's what they should desire. But that's not very Christian of them. So Judith's reasonable sense of despondence is depicted as a moral failure and corruption on her part. Don't get me wrong, a healthier woman in Judith's situation maybe should go to marriage therapy or just dissolve the marriage before they start cheating on their husband, but it still freshness me at the same time because Bryce is the dumbest boy ever and definitely didn't pay any attention to his wife this entire time. However, there's not much fun to be had with the film around this because while it's clear that Judith is attracted to Harley's bad boy billionaire routine from jump, she remains solid and faithful until he rapes her on his private jet. And it's after this where she goes full force into accepting her desires for him.

And now, if you've seen the movie or are just thinking to yourself, "That sounds awful. Why would her being raped by Harley make her step out on her husband like that? What kind of weird porn logic is this?" You might be saying, "Wait, is that actually what happened on the private jet? Did he sexually assault her?" Here is a frame-by-frame, word-for-word reproduction of the scene that's going to be done a little weirdly here because it's copyright, but I want you to know if you go back and watch it, I am not misrepresenting what happens in this scene that Tyler Perry filmed and put out to movie theaters to millions of people.

"What are you doing, Harley? Stop it. I don't want to. Please stop. Please, Harley. Please stop. Get off. Get off me. Get Get off. Get off me. Stop."

"Stop it. Stop. You stop. Stop it. Now you can say you resisted."

Even in the aftermath, the drive back to her home is tense. She is wanting to create distance from Harley and everyone else. Her hair is disheveled and like Bryce is like, "Hey baby, what's going on?" He's talking to his mother. The mother is like this kind of awful caricature of like an overly Christian black woman. We see Judith given this pensive stare in the mirror, but as she does this, looking like a woman that's just been through something horrible, she's actually having flashbacks to this sexual encounter in a pleasurable and fantasy nature. So, she liked it. Great. We're coached by the film to see that maybe she didn't technically consent after telling this [ __ ] no multiple times and trying to fight him off, but deep down she really wanted it. So again, Perry being very careless with assault and predatory behavior.

Over the next 30 minutes or so, we have a montage of sorts of Judith falling for Harley and essentially discovering that she prefers a toxic, dysfunctional love affair on some Cardi B [ __ ] versus a stable, predictable relationship that Bryce might have offered. And even that doesn't in and of itself bother me if not for the fact that it started with this dubious consent element that most people didn't catch in the theater. Eventually, Bryce finally realizes that maybe his wife shouldn't be spending all this time with the billionaire playboy for whatever work reason she was making up and comes to get Judith at a nightclub, which is clearly meant to symbolize hell. Get it? Temptation. The last temptation of Christ or something. I don't I don't know. Maybe I'm not Christian, y'all. I'm I'm sorry. Perry gives us the first and probably only time we've seen a gay intimate act in his films at this club scene, which is not an accident because again, this is hell, and that's where gay people go. Nice one, Tyler.

The end breakup scene between Bryce and Judith is ugly, but I mean, it's a real thing when people are mismatched and grow apart. Judith doesn't want Bryce, and at least she's finally honest about their problems and that they no longer match. But because Harley is the devil, later on in the movie, she ends up fighting him and he beats her and then Bryce finds her and then gets his look back on him and then runs off with Brandy. Oh yeah, Bry's in the movie. Bry's in the movie because she's the character that we've been being told about, we think, or something from the beginning of the movie, who we also find out is Harley's ex who was also abused. But then you start to realize, oh wait, Bryce has been giving her HIV medicine this entire time. And oh no. So now we cut back to the present and we see that it's actually Judith that's been telling the story the whole time. She was being played by a different actress and she goes to Bryce of all people to keep her T-cell count up because she's also living with HIV. That's right, y'all. Everybody got AIDS and [ __ ] except Bryce. Bryce being the good man he is, he doesn't have any problems. Just Brandy and Judith for making the foolish decision of sleeping with Harley, consent be damned. By the way, this isn't even how HIV works. But Tyler don't care. He just had to make sure the message was clear: Black women who don't respect their men and their marriages get AIDS. But hey, both men are dark-skinned. Progress.

And this is the man who champions black women and thinks they need a lot of healing, who's built his career off their money and devotion. We have to engage with the fact that in his own specific way, Tyler Perry is a misogynist. Not the typical Kevin Samuels manosphere way that we think of misogyny. Kevin Samuels being the now-deceased former king of the black manosphere who, you know, had a lot going on. But Tyler, in a way, is more insidious and maybe more dangerous because actually, wait. Tyler Perry is a lot like Kevin Samuels. For those who aren't aware, Kevin Samuels is once the king of the black manosphere. I have a long video about it. I won't go into further detail about it, but the short version is the black manosphere is really bad and really hateful toward black women in an explicitly overt sense. And Samuels exploded on the black man scene back in 2020 after going viral for publicly berating a black woman who was looking for dating advice. This moment and several others like it had his platform balloon to well over 1 million subs in around a year. And it's mostly because he kept clowning people calling into a show for dating advice, mostly clowning black women, calling them linebackers, saying they needed to be humbled, and that black women are the least desirable women, and if they didn't get their act right, they would die alone. And then suddenly he died of a heart attack in 2022. Despite only being relevant on social media for a few years, his legacy looms large and he has a ton of clones that try to carry on that legacy, both male and female. And I point out the female clones on purpose because one misconception about Kevin Samuels is that his blow-up was the product of only musty black incel types who appreciated his propensity for tearing down black women in his content. But that's not an accurate depiction of Samuels' rise to fame in the early 2020s. What people don't realize about Samuels is that the only reason he blew up the way he did was because at a certain point, he pivoted from only giving advice to men and started targeting the exact same vulnerable population of socially conservative black women that Perry targets in his films. Black women made up a huge amount of Kevin Samuels' core audience. I've had black women fans of Kevin Samuels tell me that it was his socially conservative leanings and presentation and appearance, almost as a church pastor. Though unlike Perry, Samuels was a lifelong Republican and an uppercase C conservative. They said that his direct and harsh advice was what they needed, even if it came with overt abuse and beratement, and the fact that actually his advice wasn't very good most of the time. Now, there was a strong backlash from black women towards Samuels for obvious reasons, especially from black feminists. But at the end of the day, he and Perry offered the same thing: a conservative, anti-feminist, submission-based framework for how black women should solve their problems. They both said to black women, "You are unhappy and will remain unhappy until you find a man to submit to and get in line with your natural state of being." And in recognizing this, we do have to engage with the harsh reality that a whole lot of black women, maybe even the majority, are much more amenable to this type of message and this type of energy than we like to believe, especially here on the internet where everyone's had their black feminist reading list but acts like they don't know these women that exist in the real world. Samuels was more extreme and offensive, but at the end of the day, they're both telling black women to stay in their place. And they're both doing this because they both believe in a specific societal structure of lowercase C conservatism. Or more insidiously, they're doing it because they know a lot of black women are vulnerable to these types of messages and will follow and enrich them if they play into that reality. They know that society tells black women that if they don't succeed within this conservative structure, then they aren't real women, they aren't worthy, and they should never be happy. So men like Perry and Samuels sell that dream back to them all the way to the bank. But the difference is that Perry is just more slick. It's vinegar versus honey in terms of how he gets across his message. And because he doesn't openly spout disrespectful misogyny and doesn't really have a male fan base, what he does goes relatively unnoticed and unchallenged outside of black progressive spaces. And one of the reasons he's able to get away with it is due to his most iconic creation.

Let's end by talking about media. Explaining all the problems of media character is hello.

"How do you do? We're so glad you joined our crew. Welcome to our lovely compound where it all goes down. Hot boiled bananas and greens, white unicorns and wet trees. Rainbow and lace. So, it makes me want to scream. Anything is possible with Jesus on our team."

Too much. This video will be 10 hours long. But let's get through some of the easy stuff real quick. The black man in the dress discourse that's often following the media character that has been popularized by quasi-manosphere hot figures like Umar Johnson and Boyce Watkins. They promote this myth that there's a concerted effort to feminize black men through images like media, but it's it's really stupid. I feel like I've talked about this a hundred times and it's kind of old news to engage with this nonsense. However, there still are a lot of people where that's where their analysis of Tyler Perry begins and ends. Let me just make it clear: no, this isn't a thing. Boyce Watkins even one time was most hilarious repudiation of this nonsensical argument. He tweeted out an image of a bunch of black men in drag and saying, "When have we ever seen white men do this in Hollywood?" Does Boyce Watkins watch movies? I don't know. But like everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Liam Hemsworth, the dude that played Miss Doubtfire, there are so many images of white men dressing in drag for the exact same reason because they think it's funny. This is not a conspiracy for anything. I don't I don't have time. Just no.

What's really happening here is that media is doing her damage to black women and black trans women. While Medea is not depicted as trans and is not overtly played to be an anti-transwoman caricature, the character still ends up employing a gender performance that is inherently transphobic because it's basically a mutilated, wrongheaded version of a drag performance. Drag is inherently queer, inherently engages in a discourse around gender, and those performing and consuming drag performances are usually aware of these ongoing discourses sent to them with some sense of care. And yeah, drag may have humor and it may spoof femininity, but it's inherent to the performance that everyone is in on the joke. It's a safe space for that type of comedy, but Perry's movies are not. You know for a fact that most of the people watching Perry's movies do not have a high opinion on queer people or trans people. So when Perry's doing some of the same routines with media, it's much closer to minstrelsy than a drag show. More often than not, the performance of media is to be mocked and not celebrated. And that turns the entirety of the character on his head in a negative way. And this is a shame because I think Tyler Perry would probably be a dope drag performer, low-key. Like Tyler again is a good character actor. And after watching so much of his movies in the last couple of years at this point, I think he's more himself as media than he is as himself as Brian or any other character he's played. It's like how you know Batman is the real person and Bruce Wayne is the alter ego. I think that's Tyler Perry and Medea. And considering Tyler Perry's questionable sexuality, there may have been space for some interesting queer performance art here, but it never becomes that because the media character is not meant to celebrate drag, queerness, or even women in any way. Instead, media mostly serves as a vessel for Perry to subterfuge his own social and political beliefs into his art while deflecting from the scrutiny that one should have whenever a cis black man offers guidance to black women the way Tyler Perry or Kevin Samuels has always done.

The first thing to understand is that in the universe of these movies, media is a woman. She's not a man in drag. She's not a transwoman. She's a cis woman. She's borne children and has no questions about her gender. However, her size and overtly manly features are also canon within the story. We are meant to see Medea both as a woman, but also see her as overtly masculinized by her size and physical presence. Understand, Perry is a big dude. He's around 6'5", probably pushing 250 to 275 lbs, making him bigger than all-pro NFL edge rusher Micah Parsons. That's a big guy. Thus, other characters, especially Joe, also played by Tyler Perry, constantly hurl inherently transphobic insults around her. Her weight, her height, the size of her hands, even outright calling her a man at times. And at random times, for no apparent reason, Perry would just break character as media and talk in his naturally much deeper voice for comedic value.

"So, you just got saved, Miss Media."

"Sometime getting saved like a bad perm, repping. It just don't take."

"The wedding. If she don't come back, I just want y'all to know that's a dude."

So, the whole performance ends up serving as a mockery of the trans woman's experience in the drag tradition it pulls from and echoes ways in which black women have been stripped of being seen as feminine throughout history. It's important to note that transphobia has always affected cis black women in general, as the womanhood and femininity of cis black women is constantly under attack in a white supremacist society. This is why it has never made much sense to me to engage in transphobia as a black woman. Because at the end of the day, all you're doing is contributing to a problem that will inevitably be weaponized against you. The same rhetoric that might face Laverne Cox will also be heard at Serena Williams. Radio personality Jess Hilarious has had many a transphobic moment in her career that she's rarely if ever apologized for, but has also herself been attacked for being secretly a man. It's a very weird hill to die on, but I digress. The point I'm getting at here is that the transphobia of Medea's character is really just an extension of that character's mockery of black women in general. Medea is loud, tends to mispronounce words for no apparent reason. She's petty, quick to temper, and has a scandalous hypersexual past, and of course, is big and strong and unfeminine at the same time. Medea is very much a sapphire stereotype. And while this trope has often been embodied by black women in media for maybe less harmful reasons at the time of Medea's origins, it was a highly common trope for black male comedians. Eddie Murphy, Jamie Fox, and Martin Lawrence also participated a lot in this comedic tradition. While again, the nature of drag and gender bending has room for humor and fun, the overabundance of this trope for a time betrays the fact that black women, especially fat black women, are easy and effective targets for mockery, which is doubly tragic because the traits and strength and sassiness that goes into this performance of archetypal black femininity or the big mama image is the same thing that makes big mama big mama in black communities in the first place. These are pillars of our communities a lot of times, but these women are mocked and disrespected for the same things that make them so needed and valuable in black culture.

Perry has often characterized media as a tribute and in some ways this is fair. As stated earlier, it's based on his experiences with elder black women in his life, specifically his mother and aunts. But there is this cynicism underneath it because Perry playing this character doesn't just serve as a tribute to that big mama matriarch role. It also allows him to subsume the protections of that role and become more valuable in black communities than he's actually earned. And in doing that, it allows him to insert his conservative politics and opinions on the world and black culture and the behavior of black women without real consequence. And all of this is done under the guise of tough love. That someone like Medea, a big mama, is often the one that's needed to teach lessons to the community to thrive and survive. So for every moment with media that you feel connected to because it reminds you of some big mama black woman matriarch in your community, understand that's not what it is. This is a man in drag playing the character and also writing the character's dialogue and the whole story for that matter. This isn't a real big mama's advice coming across the screen. This is the advice and wisdom of a middle-aged black man, much of the advice tinted with a patriarchal perspective that had Perry not been in drag, the audience might say to themselves, "It's kind of weird that this dude is telling these black women what to do with their bodies, their trauma, their husbands, their children with no sense of hesitancy."

Media is somewhat subdued in her first on-screen appearance in Diary of a Mad Black Woman, only offering stern advice and guidance as a side character this time.

"Think about the goodness of Jesus and all that he has done for me."

But by Media's Family Reunion a year later, she's got her own subplot which has her assaulting children left and right. Medea's propensity for violence is always played for humor, even when it's against children, even when the children in reality are highly vulnerable and the last thing they need is somebody beating them, as in the case of Kiki Palmer's character in Medea's Family Reunion. This is a child who's been neglected and needs a foster home, which ends up being Medea's home. And after mouthing off to Media on the way from the courthouse in the car, she beats the child while Perry playing Brian as well just kind of laughs. Mind you, Perry is like the lawyer, the guardian ad litem or something. So, he's a mandated reporter. He should lose his job for this, but he's just chuckling like, "Uh, good old media beating children." Media also whips her later for skipping school. And this later beating is treated like the breakthrough needed to get the child to open up and get her life back on track. She also slaps a young boy mouthing off to her on a bus and flips out on a little girl for just playing around the house. I won't further nitpick the real-life ramifications of such behavior in terms of legality and realism because this is cinema sins. But I do find it concerning that the violence and tough love against children is always a viable solution in the Tyler Perry universe because I don't think that's how it works in real life.

Now, I understand that Medea uses violence and abrasiveness as a facade to hide the deep care she has underneath. Media takes in all who need when she can: wayward children, addicted family members, even folks hiding from the mob, somehow. In between her hysterics and slapstick comedy routine, she's good for offering words of wisdom and support. The character works because again, it draws directly from the real communal care tradition in black culture. However, when you listen critically, you realize that you're not always hearing media. You're usually hearing Tyler Perry.

"Hard to forgive, though."

"It is. It is. But it's very necessary because what I found that is this, and this is so true. If you do not forgive, you hold on to this thing inside of you that can change your life for the worse and take you in the wrong direction. Nine times out of 10, the people that have done things to you are asleep and at peace, and you're holding on to it, and it can really literally become sickness in your body and make you physically ill. So I think that forgiveness is beyond important."

"So you know what I, this is what I learned in all these years on this earth. If somebody want to walk out of your life, let them go. Especially if you know you done done everything you can do. You done sat around and been the best man or the best woman you could be and they still want to go, let them go."

And media goes to jail. Medea finally goes to jail for whatever contrived reason from her typical criminal behavior. And while in there, there's a therapy session led by Viola Davis on forgiveness. And this message is fine and mostly based in an ethos I can't take issue with. Forgiveness isn't for the other person, it's for you. I think that's actually pretty good. But when one woman in the session fails to get on board with that framing, Tyler Perry as media feels the need to jump in and drive the point home in her tough love kind of way.

"But this child over here talking about what her daddy did. Honey, your daddy is somewhere living his life and you on lockdown. Honey, you in jail because of what you did. Learn how to take some responsibility for yourself, for your own stuff. I can't stand folk want to be the victim. This person did this, that's why I'm this way. Everybody in this place got a story. Your mama and your daddy done gave you life. That's all they were supposed to do. No matter how good, how bad the life was, it's up to you to make something out of it. People, all of y'all up in here need to understand something. Okay? Everybody got a life and what you do with that life is up to you. Stop being the victim. That's all I got to say. I ain't I don't feel like preaching all that stuff. I'm going to leave that to you. Matter of fact, I don't even want to be here. Don't continue to be victims. Get over it. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps."

Even these are wild things to say to a person who we can only assume, based on her response, was a victim of violence or sexual abuse from her father. And even if it was a real big mama having this conversation, that [ __ ] would be weird. But step out of the context of the film for a second and recognize that the point of this in other scenes like this is for Perry to express his beliefs on harm and recovering from abuse to these black women who have a whole different way in which they have to address that harm and have had to their entire lives. That [ __ ] is gross. Get over it. Forgive your abuser. Move on. Nothing about accountability. Nothing to address the bigger systemic problems that create that abusive dynamic. Only don't be a victim. And if you're being real, considering how this scene takes place, don't burden other people with the fact that harm has been done to you. This is Perry once again telling black women how to think, how to believe, how to act, and how they need to be more quiet about their victimizations.

"What I did was what, what I think a lot of people don't realize or understand is that their parents have a story, too. Now, so whatever happened in your life because of them is made you really need to find out the story so that you can understand it."

"Hard to forgive, though."

"It is. It is. But it's very necessary because what I found that is this, and this is so true. If you do not forgive, you hold on to this thing inside of you that can change your life for the worse and take you in the wrong direction. Nine times out of 10, the people that have done things to you are asleep and at peace, and you're holding on to it, and it can really literally become sickness in your body and make you physically ill. So I think that forgiveness is beyond important."

This is Tyler Perry's ideology, his brand, if we want to be honest, because he's been saying things like this in interview after interview since he grew in popularity. That it's his ability to persevere and be resilient in the face of not just adversity, but outright trauma and abuse, specifically at the hands of his father, that actually led him to his success. When I see these clips, there's a part of me who is also a victim of abuse, who's experienced trauma that wants to buy in, that wants to get on board with this logic and this idea that forgiveness and perseverance is all I need and that I could use that trauma and that abuse experience to somehow push me to heights and success that I never could have dreamed of. That it would be in some twisted way my superpower. I wish I believed that all it took was personal responsibility to overcome trauma and abuse. But if you know anything about the effects of trauma, especially on children, it's not as simple as take responsibility for yourself and you'll end up a billionaire.

In a video on TikTok feminism, Nebula creator Brody Des Chanel references this concept of resilience and how it's often aimed towards women. Resilience proves itself especially valuable for a context marked by harsh austerity measures and rising inequalities. It calls on people to be adaptable, able to withstand disruption, and most importantly, able to make do with less. In this context, it is the poor and especially single mothers needing welfare benefits and other forms of social support who are cast as lacking resilience and the ability to bounce back. How to incubate and encourage resilience among poor communities and its emphasis that it is a lack of resilience rather than an unjust social system that keeps the poor in that condition. The poor are cast culturally as lacking the substance that would help them to bounce back from grinding poverty, precarious and poorly paid work, and insecure, expensive housing. On its face, that concept of resilience seems empowering. But when it's not matched with any type of systemic or social responsibility, it really just ends up blaming those people, those women, for the issues that they face that aren't their fault, for society's failure to support them or protect them. And this is especially true for those who are a part of Tyler's core audience.

"Is that fine?"

"It is. My audience and the stories that I tell are African-American stories specific to a certain audience, specific to a certain group of people that I know, that I grew up with, and we speak a language. Hollywood doesn't necessarily speak the language. A lot of critics don't speak that language. So, to them, it's like, what is this? But I know what I do is important. I know what I do touches millions of people around the world."

And don't get me wrong, there's value in this perspective on forgiveness. But when you leave out that aspect of accountability and then you take in the totality of what Tyler Perry has built his image, his empire, his brand on, it comes across at best as irresponsible and at worst, incredibly cynical. To never want the people, the same people you say you care about so much, to critically engage with the environment and those in power who are responsible for their victimizations. Forgiveness without accountability is just a cycle of abuse.

Now, there's an outside chance that you think maybe I'm exaggerating as I explain all of this awfulness. And to show you that I'm not. To prove a point, we're going to watch probably Tyler Perry's worst media movie, Medea's Big Happy Family.

"SABRINA PRONOUNCE HEY LISTEN."

"What is that? That's the baby mama from hell."

"Sorry."

Medea's Big Happy Family has pretty much everything I've complained about in his films thus far. Random cheap jokes about media actually being a man. Check. Medea is a former sex worker. And isn't that funny? Check. Medea beats a child. Check. Characters act ridiculous for no basic reason. Check. The only thing that is missing is the evil black male characters; instead, it's evil black female characters.

"HEY. HEY, SHUT THE HELL UP. SOUND LIKE A SIREN."

But Uncle Joe is still here, so we can check that box, too. And it's the same melodramatic plot of most of his movies. There's some wayward souls that have come under media's watch, and it's up to her to use her unique powers of tough love and abuse to take care of them. As I said, in this movie, the black men are the innocent, put-upon angels who do no wrong, while black women are bizarre, evil caricatures of dysfunction and unresolved trauma. However, as stated before, it's not exactly the same because unlike with his male villain characters, these black women at least have a backstory, horrible ones, but we'll come back to that later.

We start out with this meta moment that illustrates the real problem with media as a character and the concept. We have the character Shirley being played by Loretta Devine. And Loretta Devine being a legendary black film actress over the last 50 plus years. Her and Cheryl Lee Ralph probably had her uncles on lock as Dreamgirls back in the '70s and early '80s, and since then she's been an excellent character actress, often playing a variety of black mamas in a variety of films that all she's good in. Word to Prim and All-Star. So if anyone should be a big mama in this movie, it should be Loretta Devine, right? Wrong. Her character has cancer and her family's in shambles. So, she has to go get media. Again, a man in drag playing a big mama in a way that she, being a real big mama, can't. So, we already have this displacement of a black woman for her own story to be played by a black man in drag. A pattern for Perry at this point. Shirley has only a few weeks to live and she is hiding this from everyone. But she wants media to help her get her family on the right path before she passes. Her family includes her eldest daughter, Kimberly, who is our one-dimensional, stuck-up, angry, bougie black woman who berates her husband and is low-key abusive to their infant son. Then the middle child is Tammy, who's married to the hapless Harold, the rare non-uber-mensch blue-collar man because he's dark-skinned and fat and not light-skinned and with muscles. So, I get it. Tammy also berates and belittles her husband, but also has two boys who are the worst, most disrespectful children in the history of black children in real life and on film. Her oldest son calls her Tammy, which confused me so much that I was like, "Oh, is she the stepmother?" But no, this is his real mother. And it's like, "All right, Tyler, can we just try to make realistic characters this one time, any one time?" And then there's Byron, the youngest, played by Lil Bow Wow, who does a good job of acting in this role until later. But I think that's more the writing and directing problem than anything, but you get it. Byron is having baby mama issues with Tiana Taylor, who is pretty bad. And his current girlfriend is played by Lauren London, who is also bad, just in a different way. Byron is broke, mostly because he stopped selling drugs after he got out of jail for selling drugs. But both of these women want him to go back to selling drugs. Cuz yeah, the black women in this film are awful. But it's okay, 'cause here comes Medea, played by Tyler Perry, to fix everything through wise words and tough love.

First, Medea visits Tammy, her put-upon husband, and the disrespectful children. Medea fixes the children's behavior in an instant through, I'll give you one guess. Perry as Medea gives this ridiculous speech about the disrespectful behavior of young people cursing at bus stations in front of elders. And it's awful, but I can like hear old out-of-touch [ __ ] in the crowd clapping as she's saying this completely nonsensical [ __ ] that isn't real. But because people really hate young black people, especially young black boys that don't act right, we're supposed to not recognize how ridiculous the scenario is. Never in Tyler Perry's "the youth are going the wrong way" conversations does he do anything with structural violence against them. Talk about how their parents are reproducing the same dysfunction in the home. It just must have something to do with children not having enough women's ass. So he beats the children. And I want to be clear, I don't even want to really pass like extreme judgment against black parents who spank their kids because that's a complex and hard conversation that requires a ton of healing in an open and safe space to get people to recognize why that's not a good thing. But what needs to be understood upfront is that spanking your children as a form of discipline does not immunize them to structural violence that black children face and the main reasons why black children end up in bad situations. In fact, thinking all they need is a weapon is how we end up ignoring that [ __ ] like Tyler Perry will have children whose parents are abusers, rapists, and drug dealers, and media will fix that [ __ ] by giving them a weapon. Mind you, whole time media's living with a whole predator, and nobody says anything.

Later, there's a dramatic family dinner scene where a whole bunch of [ __ ] happens. Medea coaches Harold on how to put Tammy in her place as a woman, of course, arguing that the problem in their marriage is that she doesn't respect him or submit to him properly. So, we have this scene of Harold buffoonishly yelling at her while being coached by Medea in the background. This magically is all Tammy needed to stop being emasculating to him. Look at that. But more significantly in this scene, it's revealed that despite being so stuck up and haughty, Kimberly got pregnant at 13. And Byron, who everybody thinks is her brother, is actually her son, but he was adopted and raised by Shirley at an early age. And that's not all, but we have some more [ __ ] to save for later. This causes a huge blow-up in the family for understandable reasons, but for less understandable reasons, this makes Byron say, "You know what? I will sell drugs, actually." Because Tyler Perry probably didn't want to pay for appropriate lighting. Him selling drugs has somehow turned Atlanta into Gotham City. It's hilarious. Shirley then dies. Everybody cries and nothing is solved until after the funeral in one final scene in like the last 3 minutes. Media gives one last tough love speech to get everyone fixed and on their way for happily ever after. I guess she tells Byron's baby mama to stop being so mean. She tells Tammy and them to get their lives together. But the big reveal is that Kimberly is so mad and stuck up and angry all the time because she was actually molested by her uncle at 12 and that's how she got pregnant. So, yes, media reveals to everyone in this very public moment that Byron is a rape incest baby. There's a phrase I wasn't expecting when I started thinking about making this video. And of course, media's solution for Kimberly is for her to get over it, forgive her abuser, no accountability. We don't even see this dude. We don't know his status. It might be [ __ ] around and be Uncle Joe for all we know. But being consistent from Tyler Perry, it's her responsibility to address the trauma and no one else's. Not even the person who caused it or perpetuated it. And then that's the end of the movie. It just ends there. [ __ ] I feel like this is Tyler Perry's Atlas shrug. It's his thesis on the problems in the black community. Black children need more discipline and more beatings. Black women need to respect and follow their black men. Black men need to make better decisions despite the fact that they're in situations that make good decisions impossible. And abusers need to be forgiven for the health of the community with no discussion of accountability, all from the mouth of a black man in drag, literally displacing the actual big mama in the process. I know I've said this multiple times at this point, but this is gross.

Sometimes I see Tyler Perry as media as kind of this Norman Bates psychosexual type of thing. Perry is an extremely powerful man, right? It's clear that power and control are important to him. It's something that was denied to him as a child and that he lords over now as an adult and a businessman. But he's worked extremely hard in this public persona to come off humble and subdued despite his extremely powerful billionaire status. Comparing him to other black billionaires like Oprah, Jay-Z, Kanye, etc., he seems like the most down to earth. But I don't think that's real. I think media is the real spirit of Tyler Perry. That's who shows up when he wants to get an episode of The Boondocks taken off the air or clap back at his critics in the media. While he as Tyler Perry offers words of wisdom and inspiration on the value of hard work and supporting each other, media gets to pontificate about the plight of black people being low-key their own fault and telling black women how to follow and get their men. And whether this is a purposeful or unconscious separation, it's smart because while Tyler Perry gets flack for a lot of things, he doesn't get a lot of scrutiny for the politics in his films. And he is shielded from that criticism because I mean, how do you tell Big Mama anything? Big Mama, by nature of her survival in a world that has been seeking her destruction for generations at this point, has earned a level of respect and impunity in black spaces. A lot of us have and know a big mama. And some big mamas ain't that great. Some big mamas are just as judgmental, abusive, toxic, and clueless as media is. But we don't say nothing because that's Big Mama. She's earned that respect and that privilege through years of sacrifice and service to black communities. But Tyler Perry hasn't. Tyler Perry isn't media. Even though I think media is very much Tyler Perry, if you get my point, he has went through a lot and done a lot to earn a lot. Billions if we're counting, but that doesn't put him above critique for some of the awful things he's put in his media. He doesn't actually hold the sacred position of Big Mama in any black community, even if he cosplays as one.

And I'm sure some of y'all are thinking to yourselves, while Tyler Perry isn't Big Mama, he's still been a huge force for black people in this country, giving away millions over the years to a variety of black folks in need. And there's so many examples of this. And he does deserve credit for that. That is true, but different. Because see, unlike media or any big mama, Tyler Perry's service to black people isn't selfless. It's barely even a sacrifice considering how much he's made. In fact, his service ends up being highly self-serving. And considering all that black people have given to him, I feel like he should really give a whole lot more. In fact, as we get to the last section, we're going to peel back and look at just how Tyler Perry has made his billions. And once we do that, it becomes clear how exploitative he's actually been to black people, black culture, and black art as a whole.

So YouTube is not Hollywood. Not yet, at least. There's no billions being made here. At least not by most YouTubers. But what we do here is important as it's now the most watched streaming service in the world. And for a long time, if you were black on YouTube and you weren't doing a specific black thing, you were basically invisible. I recognized this firsthand spending a year in small channel purgatory trying to figure out a way to break through. And it only happened because another black creator gave me a shout-out.

And they understood to do that because they got a shout out themselves from another black creator. And from there, I took off. But I never forget that experience. So, I've tried my best to share knowledge and resources with everyone I can find about YouTube, cuz I know that work ethic can only take anyone, especially black people, so far, especially in a system that isn't designed for marginalized voices to be heard. Collaboration and community can create movement that one individual hard worker can never think to replicate.

Part four, Tyler Perry and his table. All right, we're getting into the last part. And if you can't tell from who's on my shirt, uh, we're going to go a little left starting here. So bear with me.

This is E. Franklin Frasier, and he is a black American sociologist who lived and wrote in the early 19th century. He had a significant career studying and writing and agitating for black liberation while also himself achieving significant status as a thinker on black issues and his name while less known should be up there with the likes of the boy Scarvey and Booker T. Washington regarding his work during this time. But sadly outside of getting an advanced degrees in black studies you're unlikely to hear his name much in these days. And I think I know why.

Despite the fact that Frraasier wasn't an overt leftist like say De Boyce or Hubert Harrison, nor was he as radical and bombastic as Garvey, Frasier's work and ideology is still highly transgressive to the ways in which black people orient their politics and values in modern America, and it's for one clear reason. Frasier didn't [ __ ] with bougie negroes like it all. As is made clear in his most notable book, The Black Bgeoisi, first published in 1957.

According to an article from the black agenda report, >> the publication of black bgeoisi in 1957 was shocking for its polical at times vicious portrait of the black middle classes with their inbred and elitist culture, their slavish filty to white organizations and their cold disdain for, if not disgust of the black masses. Fraser tore the veil off the closely guarded social secrets of the henchy world of negro gentry. For some, the book was embarrassing and Fraser became the subject of whisper epitas.

Frasier, like the boyce, had witnessed the struggle for black liberation start to disintegrate due to a combination of white terrorism, structural resistance, a lack of institutional support, etc. But also he came to recognize that this failure was made easier because many of the black elite are often self-appointed black leaders. Those who the boyce at one time might have identified as the talented tenth were more focused on celebrating, flaunting or faking their own progress and success and wealth than putting in the actual work needed to further the black struggle.

For that section of the black bushoisi, which devotes itself to society, life has become a succession of carnivals in cities all over the country. Negro society has inaugurated debutant balls or cultillians which provide an opportunity every year for the so-called rich negroes to indulge in lavish expenditures and create a world of fantasy to satisfy their longing for recognition. Very often these rich negroes mortgage their homes in order to maintain the fiction that they are able to indulge in these vast spectacles of makebelieve.

As I hear this quote, I can't help but think of mine and Tyler Perry's home right now. Atlanta, Georgia, hookah lounges, trap yoga. It sounds like PPP scams LLC and # entrepreneur in the bio. It sounds like the Obama era. white parties featuring pedophiles and sex criminals. Atlanta is a city that's had black mayors for 50 plus years and in that time has seen the wealth of the city increase steadily, often with black people being some of the main ones who benefit. However, not all black people, as Atlanta has one of the worst wealth gaps for any major city in the country. And this was written not in 2025 or 2026, but in 1957.

But that doesn't ruin the veneer of what Atlanta is in black culture, does it? because Atlanta represents the aspirational possibility of black excellence. And way back then, while Frasier may not have understood what Atlanta will become, he did understand that black excellence was a thing that may be a problem. He recognized that the spectacle and the image of black elitism often tinged with the white aesthetics gives the black excellence brunch crowd, as I like to call him. Shout out to Think Peace Tribe. That is a term that he made up from his short film, The Black Excellence Brunch. Make sure I give credit to that. But the Black Excellence brunch crowd has a vice grip on the hearts of black, poor, and working-class people. They use the veneer of their success, whether real or not, to pantomime a better life that the regular black folks aspire to and then use that desire that they have for liberation and freedom and success, to sell a dream back to them. Often, sadly, in conjunction with white power brokers, this dream never comes true.

This quote, however, shows both the timelessness genius of this book, but also its limitations. To be fair, Frasier has maybe a little too much smoke in parts of the book bordering on antilackness at times. He denigrates the idea of black entrepreneurship almost in a way that implies that black people are not capable of such success in the world of business. And this is probably the most enduring shortcoming of this work. While Frasier still did accurately clock that the black bgeoisi exploit and mislead the black masses, what he did not foresee is just how successful some black people would become through this strategy and how that success and power would eventually become the dominant framework through which blackness was meant to be seen in America. Frasier predicted black excellence as a concept, but he didn't predict that black excellence would win.

I've talked a lot about the mythology of black excellence in my content. This is because it is a concept that hits close to home. As an elder millennial, the child of two college educated black folks in Chicago, I was one of many patient zeros for the brainwashing process that instilled this idea of black excellence deep into the heart of my generation. I was in my early 20s when Barack Obama crystallized that black excellence imagery into my imagination. I had gotten my H.B.CU degree before then, my advanced degree not long after. I met my black excellence wife there and we had two chubby black excellence babies and were in some ways living proof of that concept all before I ever posted a YouTube video or read any France fanatic.

But even before then the whole black excellence concept still didn't sit well with me because while I did have the degrees in the aesthetics, I also worked in low-income schools and juvenile justice. It was impossible for me to spend my weekdays working with underserved black children and then spend my weekends at hookah lounges and not feel like something was wrong. And don't get me wrong, I wasn't like some super teacher SJW person all around. I hadn't figured out much then and I don't still know everything now. I wasn't even above the tough love concept for myself at the time. But I was on a journey of sorts to where I am now. And somewhere on that journey, it hit me that the whole Black Excellence thing was [ __ ] cuz I was in the club. I was lucky enough to have access to it. But I kept seeing and hearing things that didn't sit right with me. I kept seeing all the internal and external contradictions. I heard the way so many other black excellences talked about other black folks and even black children who technically didn't fit that mold. And I began to see how quickly and easily a lot of black excellence types were very willing to sell other black people out for their own personal gain to make sure they held on to that status.

But this was all just kind of ruminating in my brain, not really driving any real desire for a true political awakening. And I don't think that fully happened until one night in 2019 when BET gave Tyler Perry the ultimate icon award. And I heard him say the following during his acceptance speech.

"Trying to help somebody cross while everybody was fighting for a seat at the table talking about Oscar so white. Oscar so white. I said, 'Y'all go ahead and do that. But while you fighting for a seat at the table, I'll be down in Atlanta building my own.'"

Because >> now anyone that knows me personally knows that I had been for a while a Tyler Perry hater. That probably should be obvious. But I had also for years at that point started to just keep that to myself. I didn't have a platform to voice my grievances. And even if I did, I wouldn't have been saying much more than so many other critics of Tyler Perry where it really made a difference to say it at all from my perspective. But this speech made me feel different than just like, oh, his movies are bad or his politics are bad. It was a blatant slap in the face of so many black people who care about art and media and black liberation to have this literal billionaire stand in front of an adoring crowd and talk about the empire he built by himself off his talent, hard work, and dedication all while so many within the industry he dominates were begging white institutions for scraps. That didn't sit right with me. And it didn't because it didn't sound accurate.

To explain. A few years before this speech, the Oscars so white hashtag began to trend on black Twitter after all the winners of the Oscars in 2017 or 2018 went to white creators and very few people of color were even nominated that year. It was later revealed that 93% of the Oscar awards board were white and 77% were men. Again, while Hollywood gets accused of wokeness a lot, the reality is it's just as white supremacist a structure as any other industry in the country. And if you know anything about black media, it shows.

And this should make the narrative around Tyler Perry's rise to independent dominance more inspirational. The Oscars might ignore him just like they ignore a lot of us, but why should he care? They have no control or influence over what he does. He references this power and autonomy. In his speech, he talks about the fact that he bought acres of land once owned by the American Confederacy, literal slave owners here in Georgia, and now he uses it to make his movies. He talks about coming from nothing. And then he references the Oscars so white hashtag saying again, "While you fight for a seat at the table, I'll be down in Atlanta building my own." And the crowd goes wild.

Four months later, Tyler would officially open Tyler Perry Studios in one of the biggest celebrations of black excellence the world has ever seen. Inviting black media royalty from every corner of the world, even figures who denounce his work publicly, all to celebrate his achievement. An achievement that he speaks of as an achievement for us all. This speech went viral. It was shared amongst all my Black Excellence peers. And people talked about how inspirational it was. And I just kept quiet because to me this felt like someone super rich playing in our faces. And I was frustrated that I felt like I was the only one who recognized that.

From my perspective, even back then, he was just reproducing the same dominance framework that white people had over us in every other institution. Yes, Perry had managed to do the impossible and build a essentially dual power framework for black people in media, but in reality, if you know anything about Tyler Perry and his entire career in media, he's always refused to actually give other black people full access to it. So, when Tyler Perry says, "While you're fighting for a seat at the table, I'll be down in Atlanta building my own." I can't help but think no one else gets to eat at Tyler Perry's table. And it frustrates me to no end that this isn't something that other people realize about him.

And then as I research more about just how he built that table, it starts to make sense as to why. For magazine did a breakdown of Tyler Perry's fortune, and it basically breaks into three main areas. The two most important ones are his affforementioned studio and his media library, collectively making up around twothirds of his fortune. The last third is his liquid cash with houses and property and whatnot. And we'll just assume that this is money left over from the first two sections, right? That just makes sense. So Tyler's billionaire status is from his media library and his studio. And in these two spaces is where the real Tyler Perry becomes more visible.

Let's start with the media. Tyler has often bragged about his effort to film his movies and shows in short time frames and the fact that he writes and directs everything. So first off, it's important to understand that Tyler is not writing everything that he puts out there. though that greatly was the case for a large chunk of his career. And you can tell it's also commonly said that Tyler pays his actors what they're worth, more than what white Hollywood figures will often pay them. This again is also technically true, but as a great artist once said, that Mayweather money, looking funny and the like. What Perry often calls work ethic and paying people well is really a cover for producing low-quality content on the cheap and maximizing profits at the expense of everyone around him. As I said earlier, films are a business endeavor. Thus, the more you spend on a film up front, the more it has to make on the back end to turn a profit. So, Perry cuts as many corners as possible to maximize his profits. Again, this is why the wigs are so bad. More interestingly, by him being the writer, director, and producer, it means that he gets to triple dip on the profits from the film and his royalties. What I'm getting at is I don't think Perry writes and directs everything himself, cuz he's such a creative, hard worker. He does it for the same reason my mom used to cut my hair when I was little, cuz it's cheaper and save money, even if it wasn't very good. Probably why my hairline is [ __ ] up today.

Further, while Perry does pay his bigger recurring stars, well, that's not saying much. First of all, he still finds ways to cut so many other corners. For example, the movie Straw with Taraji P. Henson, one of Perry's most loyal collaborators, was filmed in only 4 days, which is ridiculous. And there's also a lot of stuff about like having cheaper productions when they're that short that he can get away with a whole bunch of stuff. I'll get to that in a second. But the wild tea and money-saving move there is that Henson happened to already be in Atlanta filming Fight Night, an actual really good miniseries on Peacock. And she just set her schedule up to go film with him on her off time, I guess, over the course of 4 days. So, because of that, Perry low-key didn't have to pay any of the expenses of having an A-list actress on his set. They were paid by NBC. NBC, y'all, I wouldn't go out like that if I was y'all. So yeah, under the circumstances, it's probably easy to pay Saraji more than what she's getting for other roles. But what about the actors that aren't A-list? What about the non-baked actors? They're getting paid as little as possible. And to explain this, I got to do a little breakdown of how television works.

The value in Tyler Perry's media library isn't from his movies. In fact, according to box office reports, Perry's 16 films released in theaters average around $50 million at the box office. And when you subtract the 20 million he spends on average to make them, you're not even halfway to that billionaire status, let alone the 1.4 billion number Perry is said to be worth right now. And I think this is why Perry pivoted to TV by the mid-200s and now has done literally thousands of episodes of TV in the last 20 years. While movies are more prestigious, if you have access to the right station, a TV show can make way more money for at the end of the day less effort. especially for someone like Tyler Perry because of something called TV syndication. Syndication is when a show has enough episodes, usually a hundred, to essentially be rented out to regional TV networks or in modern time streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, aka reruns. This is why when I was growing up, I could watch reruns of Different Strokes or Cheers or 227 on a variety of different channels over the years, or why today you can find numerous shows on numerous streaming platforms. Something like Seinfeld, for example, first aired on NBC in 1989 and then went on for nearly 10 years. But the show was so popular that it went into syndication in 1995, 4 years before it fully ended. Since then, Seinfeld has been everywhere and on multiple streaming services, netting billions of dollars for his creators, writers, producers, and the actor. And it's because of how lucrative that success is that Tyler Perry helped pioneer the concept of the 1090 syndication model for his own shows.

>> I again come back to Hollywood, some conversations with the agent, and they said, "Well, you know, this is how it's done. You do a pilot." I'm like, "No, I don't want to do a pilot. I don't want to do one show." I'm like, "What do you mean you don't want to do one show? That's how it's done." I was like, "No." Well, to me, I'm going, you need to put at least 10 of these things on the air to see how they how they're going to run, which which is this 1090 model that that a lot of people are taking credit for who really didn't create. Find somebody to do 90 episodes. That's how I'll do it. Give me 90 episodes. Give me 100 episodes. I want immediate syndication. Well, Tyler, that's never been done. That's not how it goes. That's not Well, that's what I want. I had an offer for 24. I had offer we get gotten up to 44 and they said, "We got 44." No, got another for like 52. No, I want not. And turn it comes with the 90 episodes. And that's how that started.

This is where a producer will complete 10 episodes of a show and shop it around. And if a network likes it, they must agree to buy 100 episodes immediately at a lower cost, allowing the show itself to enter syndication, meaning big bucks for the owners of that show. Big bucks that normally would take like a decade of hard creative work that can come now within 2 or 3 years and then be reproduced as the show is sold to other networks and other areas around the country.

Understand that because Perry's audience tends to be a little older, a little churchy, they also may be used to watching stuff on TV, they may not be as inclined to say, "We're going to only watch Paramount or Peacock or Netflix for their content consumption." So, Perry had something very valuable to a lot of these networks. And combined with his super cheap, quick production style, this makes for an incredibly high profit margin for Tyler Perry, even if it means cheap, poorly put together content. Perry would for the most part films Slop. I know his TV shows are better than his movies. I get it. But I know Slop when I see it. It is what it is.

>> What? >> And I know it's slot because he would film it on an extremely short time frame with minimal effort put into making sure their productions were done well. But the benefit is that suddenly now he has immediate syndication. Not a body of artistic work, not a show that people have built a relationship with over the years, but plenty of content to sell to whoever wants it. And even that wouldn't be so bad until you realize the insidiousness of how this process inherently cheats the core workers out of the value of their labor that are involved with this show.

In the old style of TV sitcoms and shows, when seasons were bought one at a time, this allowed the cast and crew to regularly renegotiate their fees. This wasn't always an easy process as actors and studios didn't always agree on what their worth was, but at least it was renegotiated, giving the actors a chance. But in this method, actors lock themselves in to the bulk of their labor at whatever rate they're willing to take up front, possibly 100 whole episodes, which severely limits their ability to make more money from their work over the course of the show's lifespan.

Perry has a clear history of anti-worker behavior and the clear evidence of it starts at this same time when he fired four writers who were working on House of Pain while he was developing that 1090 system. Perry says that he fired them because their writing wasn't good enough, that it didn't speak to his audience, which I doubt. But it was also revealed that it was them joining a writer's union that triggered him to fire them cuz he states he couldn't afford to do normal union fees on his shows. Now, I'm not in the Hollywood game. I don't know how the numbers or of any of this work, but I find it hard to believe that Perry, who was allegedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars at this point, couldn't figure out a way to pay quality black talent properly if he wanted to. But at the end of the day, unionized writers not only cost more, they also, as I mentioned earlier, get residuals and royalties, which is where the real money resides.

The same goes for ununionized actors. It's not abnormal for new shows to have ununionized actors because it takes a certain amount of work to eventually qualify for a union. But the 1090 model complicates that. In the old style of TV shows, actors and everyone else working on the show could regularly renegotiate fees, allowing them more power and money in the exploitation of their labor. For example, for the classic show Martin, Martin Lawrence got paid 75K an episode in the first season. But by the end of the series, this had increased to an alleged $200,000 per episode. Martin had 132 episodes, and his income theoretically went up every 10 to 15 episodes. That's generational wealth for him. And because he's unionized, he gets the royalties from that work from day one of his syndication. But what happens when, say, Lance Gross, who had minimal acting experience before House of Pain, has to film the first 100 episodes of that show in a matter of months instead of years. Did he really get his worth out of it all? Was he even unionized to get those royalties from it in the first place? I don't know what type of contracts Perry is signing with a lot of his actors, but I do know that this is not the last time that he clashed with a union. In fact, he is still on at least one union's nonwork list after he refused to hire unionized actors. But one of his stage plays back in 2015, over a decade into his career, Perry often tries to promote this behavior is him just working harder than the normal industry is willing to deal with or trying to give people opportunities that maybe wouldn't get them. But in reality, this is what we might call a race to the bottom.

The race to the bottom is a concept where businesses, corporations, governments, etc. will do everything possible to make their own overhead expenses cheaper, even at the cost of the quality of their product. The perfect example of this is McDonald's. Once upon a time, McDonald's served decent quality fast food and had real cooks in the kitchen making real burgers made of real beef. But eventually, they realized that being faster and cheaper and making burgers out of some type of pink slime was more profitable. So, they degraded the labor of how they made it along with the materials it was made from. So we can get ingredients that would make a burger at 99 cent still be profitable even if it tastes like trash or just basically salt. And now the people who work at McDonald's are super expendable. So they're low paid and can be treated like trash cuz anyone can do their labor because they can be easily replaced. The end result is that the consumer and the worker are both getting short ends of the stick while the owner gets the maximum profit possible. This is what Perry does in his media. This is what he does with our energy. This is what he does to black people. Perry purposely targets hungry, cheap black actors who aren't getting opportunities elsewhere, knowing that they won't have many other options. And even if they happen to be talented, his sloppy style of writing and directing would diminish their value. There's a reason why the bigger stars that Perry has worked with in the past never return to work with him again. You have not seen Adris Alba or Viola Davis in any Tyler Perry movies lately, have you? Meanwhile, House of Pain alone was sold for $200 million on its original run. And furthermore, he can resell it over and over and over as much as he wants without ever having to pay royalties to some of the actors while quadruple dipping as the writer, director, creator, and producer over most of those episodes. So, yeah, some folks like Taraji swear by Tyler, and that's fine, but her sentiments aren't universal.

And I guess now is a good time, as any to get into the sorted stuff that's been surrounding Tyler regarding his relationships with people that have worked with him or worked under him. Let's get into some of the ugly [ __ ]

Up until recently, Tyler Perry's most well-known conflict in the industry is related to the black balling of Mo'Nique. For those who don't know, Mo'Nique was a stand-up comedian who made the transition to TV in the late 90s with her first breakout role being on the show The Parkers. Mon'nique was very much in the camp of famous to black people and was doing fine. But suddenly an opportunity came for her to play the horrifyingly wicked broken character Mary in the critically acclaimed and award-winning film Precious. I talked about her role in this film in my black villains video, so I won't spend much time on it, but her performance was so good that she won an Academy Award for it. But this was a bet on herself because she took the role knowing what it might be for only $50,000. However, when she started getting Oscar buzz, Tyler, who was a producer on the film, along with Oprah and others, started to urge her to go out there and do more work to promote the film and promote herself as a person to win that award and she refused.

>> What happened was Kevin, I said no. And because I said no to Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, Lee Daniels, and Lionsgate, that's when the firestorm came because it was that how dare you say no to us. Well, I had no contractual obligation to you. I was done with my contract. I was done with my contractual obligation. And when y'all say, "Well, do us a favor." Well, here's my question. Could I call Lion's Gate and say, "Do me a favor. Let me hold a million dollars." Could I do that? >> No, you can't do that. >> Now, to be fair to Tyler and Oprah and whomever else, that type of work is usually not paid. However, usually people get paid way more to star in a film that is capable of winning an award. So, Mo'Nique basically said, "Either pay me for this extra work, especially since you didn't pay me much in the beginning, or do the [ __ ] yourselves."

Instead, Tyler and Oprah allegedly behind the scenes and I think admittedly from Tyler Perry talked bad about her to other people in the industry which got her black balled.

>> Growing into my star, you've been a star way longer than me. >> You know, one of the biggest entertainers in the world is Tyler Perry. And Tyler Perry told a lie on me. And that lie cost me 12 years of my career. 12. And I know that you work for that man. But as I told you before, and I'm going to say it again, until he fixes it, I will not stop. Because that's how the monster is created. We're too afraid. We're too scared. We're too fearful that you going to take something from me. So, I'm just not going to say anything. Harvey Weinstein is where? He's in jail. Now, that's been going on for decades. But everybody said, "Let it go. Don't say nothing." Which allowed that man to do more damage to women over the decades. I as long as I can help it. I'm saying Tyler Pearl, you will not do this to another as long as I can help it because you told a lie and you feel like you have the God complex. So, I ain't got to fix it. Because the community is saying, "Wait a minute, y'all. Hold up. We don't know this sister to be no [ __ ] We know she a loud mouth. We know she'll say some [ __ ] off the wall, but what we know about it is she true to her word."

>> And all I would ask you is one qu two questions. The first question is, did you not just say it was wrong, >> Tyler? >> Did you not just say it was wrong, Tyler, to say she was difficult for not doing something that she was not contractually obligated to do? Did you not say that you would feel that that was wrong? Or am I missing something? >> I I I absolutely said that. Yes. >> You're You want a public apology and you want restitution? >> Yes. And I say that unapologetically. You are on tape saying what you did to me was wrong. You are on tape. That's your voice, Tyler Perry. You called us. We didn't call you. You said what you did, what he did to me was wrong. And he was going to fix it when his movie Boo came out. When did Buu come out? 2016. We are now in 2025 and you've not fixed that.

Some might say her own behavior got her black ballalled. And to again be fair, Mo'Nique over the years has not seemed like a woman that is easy to work with, but it doesn't make any sense that she literally won an Academy Award for this role and has been in maybe one movie in the last 10 years since. To this day, Mo'Nique refuses to get off their necks about this and still wants retribution for what she sees as over 10 years of her career being completely derailed. And again, while this can't be proven in a court of law, I do believe her. One reason I believe her is because one thing we do know is that that wasn't the first or only time that Tyler Pierre used his power and influence to hurt other black folks in the industry.

Which brings us to the infamous episode of the Boondocks that I probably brought up a few times by now.

>> Winston Jerome is a closeted crossdressing cult leader whose love of the Christian faith is a mass for his true sexuality. >> That's the way it was described. >> Yeah, that's that's that's all >> it's a fair fair description. >> Yeah. >> From what I understand, Tyler Perry was furious over this. >> Furious. Yeah. >> Have you ever run into Tyler Perry in any capacity? >> I haven't. Um >> I see you haven't gotten hired for any Tyler Perry movies. >> No, but there was a time one time I was in Atlanta and um Michael J. White, who you know I've worked with on Black Dynamite, he was he was uh shooting something for Tyler and he was like um he's like, "Oh, you're in Atlanta. You should come by the set." And then I was like, "All right, cool." And then we got off the phone, he called me back. He's like, "Uh, second thought, I forgot about that. He's he's still no don't come by the set." I was like, "All right, I understand.

Back in 2010, Atlanta was a smaller town when it came to entertainment and black entertainment circles have always been closely knit. As such, Perry's bizarre and possibly exploitative working culture got around and got back to the creators of the Boondocks. And they made an episode satarizing Perry and the environment where he did his work. In this episode, the character Winston Jerome is a clear spoof of Tyler Perry, an eccentric, evangelical, highly successful playwright of questionable sexuality whose main appeal is the gun toading cursing character Ma Dukes, who is played by Winston in drag. The environment of the production is cultlike, and Jerome's character is overtly predatory towards pops, definitely giving off payforplay vibes, which we'll come back to later. Carl Jones purports in the interviews that the ideas for this episode came from the fact that they knew at least one person who had worked with Perry and that Perry was so affected by this that he personally got the show sheld and it never aired again for years. But also that he got so paranoid that because he knew he must have had a leak.

>> Well, I'll say this. So, so Gary Anthony Williams, >> who you know plays Uncle Ruckus, >> he he he also auditioned for a Tyler Perry movie or a TV show. And so we got a lot of inside information from Gary about what the process was like. >> And so this is why I think Tyler got so mad because from what I heard he he felt like there was some snitches in his camp. Like you can't look like him. You can't use his name. You can't nothing Tyler Perry related at all. So we named him Winston Jerome. We made him look different. And it when it aired he still got angry. and and he literally called the network himself >> and he said if that ever airs again it's going to be a problem cuz mind you our parent company is Turner >> right >> and he's going to meet the Browns >> you know what I'm saying he's going with Turner at that point >> so they were like NO PROBLEM MR. THAT'S >> I'M GOING tell you Tyler Tyler and Oprah Winfrey were were the two like those are the two people you can't touch.

Now, to be clear, Jones only speaks publicly about the prayer circle element of the show being directly taken from one person's experience with Perry. However, he does say that there are other things in there that people don't realize is real. Which now brings us to the most concerning accusations that have been levied about Perry thus far. As of writing, because it has increased since I started this video, Perry has two official people that have accused him of sexual misconduct in a court of law.

>> Some of the messages more sexual in nature. >> One is, "What's it going to take for you to have dealt with sex? Have you all found that in therapy yet? I would hope that you would let someone hold you and make love to you."

>> Now, the complaint also alleges that in January of 2020, there was an escalation from the text messages to Tyler Perry's behavior becoming physical. Can you explain that first alleged incident? >> Yes. We were over his house. We're having some drinks in his guest house and he uh it was late at night and he has a guest quarters and said that um you can sleep there instead of you know not driving and his house is far from Atlanta and where I was living and um I got into bed and and then I noticed that he hung into bed with me as well and and started rubbing my leg and I jumped up out of bed and um he had said you know turn around so I can look at you and and just comment on how I looked and then he got up and left. So I thought after that instance it was pretty clear that I was not interested in that type of a relationship. It was very very strange.

Both accusers alleged that Perry groped and/or assaulted them, that he offered them opportunities or paid money as a way to advance a sexual relationship. Both have released sex exchanges, although to be fair, the most recent text exchanges are not all that compelling. But as I said earlier, rumors about Perry's behavior in Atlanta were pretty rampant for years, but they're just rumors. But even within those rumors, there are still really compelling examples of Perry's alleged improper behavior that stem from someone within his circle, the affforementioned Christian Keys. Key seemingly got his start with Perry on stage plays as some of Perry's favorite light-skinned beefcake, which already, considering what I said earlier, kind of may raise a red flag. He was then a recurring actor in Perry's Extended Universe before being one of the few people to ever get a created by credit for one of Tyler Perry's shows, All the Queen's Men, in 2021. Then out of nowhere in 2023, Keys did a live stream where he alleged that a powerful black man in Hollywood was a predator and that that black man was a billionaire and had assaulted him. And he even said that he has tapes and all kinds of stuff. And while he never named Tyler Perry, it's safe to assume that that like everybody was saying that's I I I can't I don't know the legal ramifications of this, but knowers know, right? How many black billionaires are in Hollywood? In the moment, I'm like, what the [ __ ] What the [ __ ] and wanted to do. But you got a guy that's a billionaire and I got three grand in my bank account. Who they going to believe? Work was slow and a lot of the work that was coming was it had penis attached to it. I'm like, "Fuck that, man. I'm not that's not what I want. That's not what I'm about to do."

Keys purposefully never said a specific name, but also let it slip that he has tapes. But as soon as the media cycle started to churn and people started to ask questions, all of it quickly went away and he dropped it. Now again, to be clear, Keys never stated it was Perry who he was making these vague accusations about, but his and the other accusers stories line up pretty well. Derek Dixon, the first official accuser, explicitly names Keys as a person whose story matches his own. Now, I don't know enough verified information to say whether or not Tyler Perry is a predator. Everything I've heard is a rumor or an unstubstantiated allegation awaiting legal proceedings. Right.

But I do want to go back to Keys is created by credit for all the King's men and how unique that is for Perry and how Keys has expressed his feelings about this in the aftermath. Just this past January in another live, Keys insinuates that Perry tried to remove his credits from the show and that essentially he took the show over from him when he couldn't remove him completely.

>> Cuz I mean the studio tried to steal my creative by credit. So like they posted even this week, you know, end of the year la and you post my show like that's your show. It's you putting the show out there, but you're also the same studio, Tyler Perry Studios, that remove my creative by credit. And I had to call a union to have them make you force TPS to put it back on there. I wrote the pilot. I created the show. I wrote the first season. It was originally All the Queens Men was originally eight episodes, eight half an hour episodes. And unbeknownst to me, Boss Man went in there and added 10 or 15 minutes to each episode writing wise and then wrote the 10th episode himself. And I wasn't worried right away, even though I should have been a part of that. I should have been allowed to do that cuz I was the writer's role for season one. So, I wrote the whole season, but as soon as he popped in and now it's 10 1-hour episodes and he started writing on it. So then season 2, season 3, he just showed up and said, "Hey, here's the next 20 episodes and here's the next 16 after that." I didn't get a chance to contribute. So that's when it got real weird.

Now this is all just Keys word versus Perry's. And Perry has at no point directly addressed anything Keys has said. But it is odd that Keys is one of very few people to have a created by credit on the numerous Tyler Perry TV shows. The only other person that can say this is Mark E. Swintson, who is a longtime collaborator with Perry and notably is also facing allegations or sexual assault by an actor within Tyler Perry's media universe. But his show, the Michael Blackton show, only got one measly season. Swinton got another show that I think was under Perry, but I can't tell. The IMDb got a little confusing for me, but it also only got one measly season.

All right, so we're live from the editing bay for the first time in a long time, as this video is a special occasion of sorts. And I wanted to chime in here to bring up one more story that I touched on earlier, but as I was going through the video one last time, I realized that this is something I really didn't spend enough time talking about. And this is referring to what happened between Tyler Perry and Enzinga Stewart when it was time for him to direct for Colored Girls in 2010. I glossed over this, but for Colored Girls is like a siminal black feminist text. It's a big deal amongst black feminist artists, creators, writers, poets, and of course, like scholars in general. And everybody was kind of thrown and freaking out when Tyler Perry was announced to direct it. And one of the reasons for that is because he wasn't originally supposed to be the person to do it. Enzinga Stewart who had up until this point only directed like rap music videos Jay-Z and whatnot. Stuart had gotten the rights directly from Inazaki Shange and had gotten an initial deal with Lionsgate Studios who you know at the time was significantly partnered with Tyler Perry to make the film and she had been going through all of those Hollywood motions of trying to get the film made. And essentially what happened was the film was only going to be done if Tyler Perry produced it. And Tyler Perry doesn't believe in producing anything for anybody else. So essentially, low-key, it seems like he bullied her out of the spot. Basically said, "You can be a producer, you can get credit for all these different things, but the name, tagline, write it by, whatever, is all going to be Tyler Perry."

Here's a quote from a root article that talks about the whole situation. But another director had already taken that leap. Lionsgate, the company distributing the film, announced in March 2009 that music video director Enzinga Stewart was spearheading the project. 7 months later, it was announced that Perry, whose own production company, 34 Street Films, remember that for later, has a distribution deal with Lionsgate, will be writing and directing for Colored Girls. In July, Stuart told the Atlanta Post that she was involved in the initial child birth of the film. I talked to the author, optioned the rights, and wrote a draft script. She said, "Tyla Perry is one of those directors who finds his ways into the project by doing everything in the project, writing, producing, directing, and playing in it. Instead of writing and directing, Stuart is now listed as an executive producer for the movie. For her part, Stuart, who got her start directing videos for artists such as Jay-Z and Common, told the film blog Shadow Act, that she is happy the project will be in theaters. It is a beautiful work that deserves to be supported. She took the high road when discussing her original adaptation, which she said Shan Gay supported in relation to Perry's. It's probably better for me not to talk about my version of the script because I don't want to take away from the version that's being produced now.

So, if you read between the lines, Tyler bullied this woman out of the opportunity to direct this siminal classic black feminist text. And this is indicative of a lot of things I said earlier about how Tyler Perry views black women and deals with black women. I'm not even going to get into the many, many black feminist critiques that I've seen about how he treated this movie and all the things that were wrong with it. But I just want to take a moment to bring that up because not only is that significant to indicating how Perry does business, but it's significant to talking about why Tyler Perry is feared and why it's very clear that nobody gets to eat at his table. And again, Keys is one of only like three people in the now 30 plus years of Tyler Perry's media empire that have ever made anything with Tyler Perry's resources. for this entire time, Tyler Perry Studios and the table that Tyler Perry has built has only served Tyler Perry. And I don't think anything I've said thus far is a bigger indictment of him as a man, as a black man, than that fact.

So again, according to Forbes, Perry Studio is the other major key in his wealth and it's a major key in reframing how we should see him in my opinion. Perry Studio was built on the old land of Fort McFersonson, formerly a Confederate military base that was repurposed decades ago into a

normal military base and was one of the largest bases in the south with over 400 acres. It supported thousands of jobs in the southwest area of Atlanta, which is where I used to live.

When it was first scheduled to close, it was kind of scary for that area, cuz a lot of people in their jobs left the area and no one knew what would happen. There was this amazing initial idea that they would turn the fort into a science complex due to Atlanta's growing tech industry, especially with schools like Georgia Tech only 20 minutes away, let alone colleges like Morehouse and Spellman and Clark that could benefit from something like that.

However, the science center thing broke down and everything was radio silent for years. And then suddenly in 2014, it was just announced out of the blue that Perry had bought the land and it would become the home for his studios. He had somehow quietly bought 330 of the 400 plus acres for only $30 million. I don't know a lot about real estate, but part of me thinks that even in 2014, $1 million per 10 acres of developed, manicured land, complete with houses and other infrastructure already built, sounds like a really, really sweetheart deal for Tyler Perry. To put this in perspective, the city initially paid $30 million to start the Cop City project for only 85 acres of underdeveloped land that was essentially a forest. And that happened a couple of years ago.

This land sale elicited lawsuits claiming that the sale was unfair. But these lawsuits were thrown out due to issues of court authority, not necessarily regarding whether or not it was legal or fair. But because it was the iconic Tyler Perry, because it was a black man that would be one of our own, we were okay with him getting the deal. You really can't ask for a better story than for a black man to own land that used to be owned by slave owners.

As I say that, I want to be fair to again point out that Tyler Perry is an amazing philanthropist. Perry has constantly gave funds and charity to a variety of causes that serve black people. And I genuinely think that this really comes from a place of wanting to serve. But understand that charity and philanthropy are highly flawed ways of improving people's lives, especially black people. We've had charity and philanthropy in this country forever. And this is because charity and philanthropy are explicitly designed to maintain a status quo. They're there to serve for those for whom the system does not work for. In part because when people continuously have the system not work for them, they may rise up and try to destroy that system.

>> Hey Pooky, you clean yourself up, man. Maybe I'll give you a job.

>> All right, man. Yo, man. You want to buy a Texas? You want to buy a Texas?

I bring this up because as Christian Keys and the people he fired from his early shows and I'm pretty sure plenty of other people can tell you, Perry has done less than the bare minimum to actually empower black artists behind the scenes. He seems to only want to employ people to put them in a position under him, but behind the camera, in the executive suites, in the writer room, and the producer meetings and the director's chair, he is extremely stingy. Despite the fact that he literally owns his own studio and is a billionaire who purports to care about black people and our stories.

The problem with black media is that we essentially have to ask for permission to make our art. And in doing that, we become subject to the control of the people that write those checks: studio executives, stakeholders, producers, etc. There are so few black directors, writers, and producers and executives behind the scenes. And the same is the case with Tyler Perry Studios. Again, the behind-the-scenes details are sparse, but hilariously, we do have the one account that one director from Meet the Browns was Alfonso Rivero, aka Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and the experience was so bad that Roberto has indicated that he never wants to work for Tyler Perry again.

And so, you might be saying, what about Precious? And yes, Perry technically produced Precious, but that wasn't a part of his production empire. He was actually brought in in the aftermath of that film to give it more celebrity hype amongst black people so that they would go see it. And he did this along with Oprah. So, it's not the same. The only real example of this is the very recent Ruth and Boaz, which is basically a Tyler Perry movie not made by Tyler Perry and 2013's Peoples, the first and last major theater release that was only produced by Perry with his studio backing. And it bombed, which seems to be one of the reasons why Perry never tried that again.

And this is something I recognized about Perry years ago, that he likes to make a big show about his contributions to black culture, but he really is only invested in building his empire and showing it off to people. And he had the nerve to mock the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag when in practice he was just like them. He's just as exclusionary and stingy with resources as anyone else in Hollywood. He just happens to be black, which obviously makes it worse.

Going back to E. Franklin Frazier and this idea of black excellence for a second. Maybe I'm mistaken, but the ethos behind black excellence and the black bourgeoisie and this upholding of the best of us, the talented tenth, is that these people like Perry and his peers who get access to wealth and power are supposed to bring that back to the community to use it to uplift the community. I know I'm not making this up 'cause I sat in those classes. But if folks aren't doing that, then what exactly are they doing? And why should they get our love and support and dollars? Especially if they're giving us a subpar, shitty product in return.

>> Ownership was the key, man. Ownership. That's the thing that made me that has changed everything in my life. I own >> every play, every movie, every character, every TV show. It's all owned by me. And that is what has set the difference of me being able to say I'm going to set a path where I can open the door for everybody else.

>> Absolutely.

>> Or waiting for somebody to give me a job.

>> Who gets it? Numbers don't matter to me as much as who gets it. If I can get one person to get it, take this moment, run and jump, and create their own, then I've done what I'm supposed to do.

Now, some of you with the bootlicking gene are probably saying, "Well, it's not Tyler Perry's responsibility to push forward a black agenda." So whatever he's done, even if it wasn't much, it's good enough because he got that all on his own. He gives back. Is not required that he needs to be some type of great leader within black culture and black media if that's not what he wants to do. And you're entitled to your own bad opinion in this regard. But before you settle in that opinion, let's also look at how other people with much less power and much less money have done much more than him with much fewer opportunities to do so.

Earlier in the video, I mentioned Robert Townsend for a reason, because he helped put Keenan Ivory Wayans on the map, co-writing Hollywood Shuffle with him way back then, as well as Eddie Murphy's Raw. Townsend's breakthrough with Hollywood Shuffle was key at allowing Wayans to cut his teeth and build up his resume behind the camera, which allows him to eventually make I'm Gonna Get You Sucka, a hood classic, and eventually gives us In Living Color, the first and only black sketch comedy show of that '90s era, which birthed a multitude of legends in the game, including the likes of David Alan Grier, Jim Carrey, Jamie Foxx, but also his younger brothers Shawn and Marlon Wayans, who then got to go on to their own distinct film and TV careers. Marlon Wayans, while not perfect in a multitude of ways, has given us a ton of independent black media that has served black niche interests in a way that Hollywood never has. You can even throw Jennifer Lopez on top of that list. Like, that's how planting a seed and building a tree works. You never know where it's going to go.

Going back to Ryan Coogler, he got his big break in Fruitvale Station, right? And then he followed it up with Creed. But when it was time for Creed 2, Coogler was caught up with Black Panther, so he was out of the running. But he purposely campaigned for Sylvester Stallone Jr. to take over the director's chair. Stallone Jr. does well enough with Creed 2 to land a Transformers movie. And then Creed 3 is given to Michael B. Jordan, who gets to go from being an actor to a director for his directorial debut. And I didn't think that Creed 3 was all that great. But I still love the fact that Michael B. Jordan got to flex that muscle. And there's no telling what comes next from him because Michael B. Jordan, quite as kept, really good creator.

But nothing illustrates like the awfulness of Tyler Perry's lack of support of other black creators behind the camera than Issa Rae in her work and especially her recently released short docu-series on HBO called Seen and Heard. And watching this while preparing to make this video was surreal because one of the first people fully interviewed for this documentary is Tyler Perry. And I couldn't help wonder why. Why would she start this documentary about the grand struggle of making black media with a man that's done so little to actually help other black people in the struggle? Especially juxtaposed from her own ethos when it comes to black media and art.

The beginning of the documentary shows him driving up to his studio and he's saying the types of things that he always says about his studio, how it should inspire black people to build their own dreams, do not ask for permission, also probably not for help. And how he came from being nothing, blah blah blah blah. And by the end of the two-episode miniseries, I started to wonder if this actually wasn't on purpose and that maybe Issa Rae feels a little bit like me. I'm not gonna put that on her. Issa, I'm not gonna put that on you. Mara Brock Akil. I'm just saying.

'Cause see, early in Issa Rae's career, before she became the juggernaut she is, Issa coined the famous quote, "I'm rooting for everybody black." And she clearly means this 'cause Issa herself didn't have access to the Hollywood machine initially. And like Perry, she did make her own thing starting on YouTube. But unlike Perry, she was eventually connected with Larry Wilmore and he helped her develop Insecure with HBO. And this documentary shows how important that type of structure has been for black people to be both in front and behind the camera when it comes to our media.

And the documentary quickly moves from Tyler to Oprah to Debbie Allen to Mara Brock Akil to Stan Lathan to Swizz Beatz. It goes all over the map, all over black media and film history in the last like 60, 70 years. And one clear motif of the series is showing how almost all of these black people, all of these black shows and movies are part of one big grand tree, a network of artists and creators behind the scenes, working to open doors for each other and to share resources they've been able to extract from the system. It's meant to show how learning and mentorship is a key ingredient to developing things. Debbie Allen, for example, for better or worse, got her start from Bill Cosby and she got to helm A Different World. And in A Different World, she had an intern named Mara Brock Akil. And then Mara Brock Akil was mentored by Ralph Akin on the short-lived South Central. And then she managed to create Girlfriends in the game. When she was there, she mentored Lena Waithe. And then Lena Waithe landed a job on The Chi. And then Lena Waithe got to do things on her own that gave her an opportunity to bring other directors and writers and other black names into the background behind the camera and so on. And what you recognize from this documentary is that a great variety of black media and art only exists because people with power and resources shared them with other people to create pathways for other black artists. And this goes on for two whole episodes and it's a beautiful thing to witness. And then at the very end, they come back to Tyler Perry and he's showing off his studio.

>> Welcome to the dream building. This is media's house. Here we have the Georgian side of the mansion. If you want to be in a hotel hallway, like say the Ritz Carlton or something, then all of a sudden you're in a hotel hallway. Welcome to the White House. This is the 80% replica of the actual White House in Washington D.C. Then if you get sick and need to go to the hospital, turn this corner and you're in the hospital. Iconic window here. President's bedroom. Obama, my man.

And I may be reading too much into it, right? But it feels clear that he's not like them because Tyler Perry cannot say the things that these other creators are saying. He cannot point to anybody he's mentored, supported, or put on to do anything significant within the media field other than to act in other people's movies. It's very, very clear, at least from this documentary, that there's no one that is a part of his tree because he's planted no seeds. The only resources from his tree went into building his table.

And in a few minutes later, in the last scene of the documentary, Issa gives a short speech and it's basically the same speech I gave at the end of my Sanders video when I previewed that I was going to talk about Tyler Perry.

>> I think I just thrive off of community and I'm really come from a place of building what I want to see, building what I want to be a part of, building what I want to take part in, collaborating with others who who think the same. In a way, we're all just trying to navigate the system. So, you know, hopefully 5 to 10 years from now, we have our own [ __ ] Hopefully sooner.

Hearing Issa say here, maybe in 5 to 6 years, we'll have our own. And then I juxtapose it to how the docu-series starts with Tyler Perry showing off his own studio. Him showing off his own, doing it without a metaphorical black seed or tree in sight. I don't know. I feel like that was intentional. The message to me is clear. We as black people still don't have our own. That state-of-the-art studio in East Point, Atlanta, that's not ours. That's not the people's. That's his. That's Tyler Perry's. Because unlike Issa Rae, Tyler Perry isn't rooting for everybody black. He's only rooting for himself. And I need y'all to think about how inconceivably awful that is from a black-centered standpoint.

To me, the idea that a black man could be in possession of the levers of power for an entire institution of media and not use it to benefit black people materially, to not just employ and pay people for their services, but to give them those major keys, to put them in positions to expand the possibilities of black art, or just help them make their own black art with the resources that you've amassed from black people, unlike how Hollywood, because each one teach one, brother's keeper, opening up doors, all that [ __ ]. That's the stuff Tyler Perry's never been about. And mind you, Perry through 34th Street Studios has been more than happy to take dollars from Disney or Universal or whomever to allow them to film on his studios as long as they pay him. It's not a matter of never wanting others to use his toys. It's also not a matter of him losing money. In fact, it could be way more money in helping other black artists make good art.

At the end of the day, Ryan Coogler is a billion-dollar filmmaker. Insecure was a huge hit on HBO. Abbott Elementary is a huge hit for network television. There is no shortage of desire for black media today, just like there wasn't 20, 30 years ago with Fox and UPN and the WB. So, no, I don't think this is about simple greed, at least not in the terms of pure dollars. Instead, I think this is Tyler hiding again like he hid when he was a child. I don't think this is really about money and it's not quite about power. More it's really about Tyler and control.

What what started for me is I didn't have the world. I didn't have anybody to teach me how to do business, how to own the house, how but my father did in reverse. He like my father was there, but he was a horrible person. But the thing that that solidified it for me was he was working building houses for these white men and he would be so happy. He'd get his $800. He'd come home, I paid him $800, but then I'd watch the white man sell the house for $80,000. Wow.

>> So all my life I wanted to be the man who owned the house.

>> So that's when I entered this business, when I started doing these plays, when I started doing movies, I giving up ownership was not an option. I had to own everything.

Did you know that? Like, how did you apply?

>> There's a blessing in being underestimated because what happened is every time I made a deal, they didn't they didn't, oh, this this just some this folks at Hollywood, oh, it's just some play or just something black people doing. They thought Diary of a Mad Black Woman would do $5 million total. It opened at 20. Wow. So, when you're underestimated, you can make the best deals, right? So, that's why I tell people, don't go in the room giving your resume trying to impress anybody. See what deal you can make. Go under first. Mhm.

To be specific, I think it's Tyler hiding again like he did when he was a child. Tyler intrinsically knows he's not like all these other creative and talented black artists. He knows on some level he doesn't belong here.

>> Have you ever felt like the underdog? Like

>> Are you kidding me?

>> Even now still under.

>> Are you kidding me?

>> I am still fighting for But I am still fighting to get it.

He knows that if he were ever in community with real artists, he'd be made to feel his incompetence and incuriosity. I think that happened on Gone Girl. I was watching David Fincher work. I was watching him work and his eye and how he was watching the way the light fell on a leaf on a on a table. And we did a million takes based on the light on that leaf. He'd have to contend with the internal contradiction of being both so successful and so bad at his job at the same time.

>> And I thought, this is ridiculous. But then I realized the brilliance of what he was doing and the way he sees like the picture has to be the exact way he sees it in his mind. So listening to him and Ben Affleck talk about lenses and cameras and new technology, it it opened me up to be more curious. I can't help but think that maybe Tyler Perry is suffering from the most acute case of imposter syndrome imaginable. And who could blame him considering his films?

>> I got a lot of flack. I was leaving it flat because people were just like, "Oh, the quality of work, the quality of work." And it's always black folks that make me go, "Just shut your mouth because you don't understand what you're saying. The quality of work based on the amount of money I was able to get is phenomenal."

I don't think Perry's lack of investment in black artists and black culture in a meaningful and transformative way that only he's capable of is pure selfishness. I think it's mostly self-preservation because surely he knows what most of his peers think about his art. So what would happen to him if they were allowed to use his resources to make their own?

My question is is that how do you deal also with this issue of biology and family?

>> I just is because I think that the struggle that I've always trying to see is that

>> how do you keep at bay everyone that was there from the beginning that watched you struggle and suffer but then there's this automatic tension of what do I owe? How much do I owe back? Who do I have to bring along? How do I have to let some go? It's like doology and family. How do y'all struggle with that tension?

>> I fired my heart.

>> I I feel it.

>> At the end of the day, I think the most telling thing about who Tyler Perry is came at the beginning of the video when we talked about his father and how his abusive father is who he gets his work ethic from. 'Cause you want me to hand you the money, but you don't want to work for it. See, that doesn't that doesn't work for me. And it's the same way with my son. Like, he's 10 years old. Like, there are certain things that he wants. He has to do chores and work for it. I don't I don't believe in giving us things that are just going to handicap us. That is the worst thing you can do. And I've had family members that I've done that to because my mother has asked me to. And when she passed away in 2009, I sent all of them letters saying, "Listen, you got 60 days to become gainfully employed because I'm not going to keep supporting you like this."

>> Are you serious?

>> 100%. They all got jobs.

>> Tyler is always talking about work ethic, work ethic. But when you peel things back, we see there is a whole lot that is unethical about Tyler's work. When you consider that he sees his father as an example of that work ethic, that all kind of makes sense to me.

>> What I think a lot of people don't realize or understand is that their parents have a story, too. Now, so whatever happened in your life because of them is made you really need to find out the story so that you can understand it. And what I found about he he and his sister and his brother, they were all found by a white man in rural Louisiana in a ditch. He was 2 years old at the time. Was brought to a 14-year-old woman named May to raise. And everything that she knew to do to get these children to behave was to beat them. They she would told me about it and other people in the town, small town in Louisiana where he grew up, they told me about the story. So, it helped me to understand a lot of who he is, which was which made it easier for me to let go and forgive him.

>> Tyler says himself that his father never provided any type of healing or apology or accountability. So, he had to make peace with it on his own. Much like many of his characters, he was never able to hold his father accountable. No one did, not even when he was a child. And to this day, out of obligation, he still takes care of his father. Just like his father out of obligation took care of Tyler as a child, even though he wasn't really his son. But in exchange for that work ethic and the power that it gave him, he abused Tyler. And it's the same way that Tyler has been abusing black art since the beginning of his career.

I bring this up not as some gotcha, but to actually follow Tyler Perry's words and his methodology when trying to understand someone that you think is doing harm, to empathize with him. Tyler is a man who was never protected by anyone, not his parents, not his community. Society as a whole failed him in his youth and he came from absolutely nothing, from less than nothing. And no one gave him anything. He didn't earn or to be honest, take. He went from hiding under a house to escape abuse to filming his first movie at his own house that he earned from the Chitlin' Circuit. So, in that way, I get why Tyler has this belief in his head that it's all about work ethic, but it's not. For every story of resilience from trauma, for every Tyler Perry or Oprah or Jay-Z or insert black excellence billionaire here, there are millions of us who never make it, who aren't uniquely talented or driven or cutthroat enough to take advantage of their own trauma. And it shouldn't require this for black people to live decent lives. And to me, people like Tyler shouldn't just be positive examples. They should be catalysts for change. But Tyler seems to think that all he owes us is a lesson in work ethic.

Tyler sees this scene from Hollywood Shuffle and says, "But wouldn't it be better if I were in the director's chair?" He ignores the greater ramifications of the abuse he had to survive. And he's given up on accountability even for his own fictional characters. And to me at least, that just doesn't work. I don't want just a studio tour. I don't find it inspiring to see Tyler Perry eat by himself at his table.

>> To present the icon award to the one and only the hardest working man that I know. And I just can't fathom being like that.

>> Tyler Perry,

>> if we can take our collective power and stand together, you won't be sitting around hearing stuff about #OscarsSoWhite because you would have created a table not only for you but for everybody else. So that's what I've been trying to do in Atlanta. Create a table for all of us.

So with that said, when I told my friends about this idea of building a table allegedly the way Tyler did, everyone was immediately on board. And I realized when we started that this was the first time we had all hung together like this in probably years. It was amazing hearing my friend explain to me not just how to build this table, but how he even came to possess this knowledge.

>> Grew up doing a lot of this stuff. So, like we build deer stands, you know, y'all saw the shelter.

>> You stand on it when deer come by. So, you shoot it. Is

>> that really what it is?

>> Oh, how did you know that?

>> How did you know that?

This is obviously not a very nice table. It was whipped together for fun, just for the experience. And that experience is what made it worthwhile. The value was in the time I spent with my village. A village that helped me get to this position. But if like Tyler Perry, I made a table where none of my peers or community get to eat on it. If it's a table that's only a monument to my own accomplishments that I couldn't have done without them

>> in the water,

>> then the table is a lie. The table shouldn't exist.

If you still like Tyler Perry's films and shows at the end of this, that's fine. Great. Even if watching Tyler Perry's work brought you joy on some level, despite everything I've said, I sincerely hope that's still the case. Again, my goal isn't to destroy Perry or to tear him down to the point where nobody likes him anymore. But I do want you to re-evaluate the public image of this man and the role he plays in black media and black culture. And really, not just him, but every [ __ ] like him. Black people as a whole need to demand more from those who purport to be our icons and our leaders. The ones that have all the resources that they only can get because of us. These are folks that we rely on to act in our best interest in a political and media landscape. And they have been failing us. Or if we're honest, they've been succeeding at extracting value from us without giving us much back in return. Often they do this for the sole purpose of selling that connection to us back to the same white institutions they swear they're fighting against on our behalf.

At the beginning of the video, I said Tyler Perry is a billionaire off black people. That unlike someone from a Kanye West who got his money directly from Adidas or Rihanna who got her money directly from the LVMH corporation, most black folks have to strike a deal because they could promise these giant white-owned corporations access to the value that can be found in black culture. Value that we never ever get to fully realize on our own. And if you think about it, Perry is actually no different. If not for Lionsgate Studios, Turner Broadcasting, Netflix, etc., Perry is not a billionaire. He's only valuable to them because he sold them shows that he could guarantee we would watch, y'all would watch. Shows that he makes with the same care and expertise that a 70-year-old would make a McDonald's cheeseburger. And while he's doing this [ __ ], he's also doing everything he can to sucker folks out of their piece of the pie that they're helping to make because they're his employees and only his employees. In that regard, Perry is barely better than Fox or UPN or WB in how he treats and regards his black audience. And I bet if Perry were good enough to make content and films for non-black audiences, he'd abandon us just as quickly as those corporations did. So, no, Perry isn't an ethical billionaire. And from the looks of things, he's not even an ethical man. And I think we should expect better from people we call our icons.

At the beginning of the video, I alluded to the fact that I know there will be people who just see me as a hater who was never happy with anything or was never satisfied. And I got to ask, why would I be satisfied? Why should I or other black people be satisfied with the state of affairs we have in this country? How could we possibly be satisfied with what's happening right now and what's been happening historically? If you think I'm out of line 'cause I'm not satisfied with the fact that the most powerful, prolific, and accomplished filmmaker in the history of black media is Tyler Perry. I think something's wrong with you.

Yeah, I did it. That's it. Um, I alluded to this in the video at different times that this was a long time in the making. Um, this is something I wanted to speak about for a while, well before I even thought I would ever have a YouTube channel. And the deep lore is right when the channel started getting a little momentum. I jokingly tweeted out that I would make "Tyler Perry is Bad and Here's Why" once I hit 500,000 subscribers. But then that happened way quicker than I thought it would. Shout out to y'all. I appreciate that, but uh I wasn't ready.

Now, having watched the video, you see that, you know, Tyler Perry is not a person to be played with um all willy-nilly. And I felt like I wanted a bigger platform before I said anything just in case that petty energy that he has that I am around living in Atlanta um would blow back. I wanted to have a platform to defend myself if necessary. But I'm I'm crossing my fingers and just believing that I don't have to really worry about [ __ ] like that.

All that said, this was a goal for hitting a million subscribers and I want to thank all of you for making that possible, for making this video possible, for making the career and the platform I have today possible. And shout out to y'all.

And in that regard, I have to talk about this video sponsor, which is low-key also me and my streaming service, Nebula. Nebula is an independent streaming service built by creators like myself where we can make videos like this without worrying about YouTube's broken rules. Whether or not an algorithm is going to help us be seen or even mean and rude comments in the comment section. Nebula is a pure creative space where people aren't just making YouTube videos but short films. We have prestige series in development. We have travel shows. We have game shows. We have narrative podcasts and independent documentaries. All on top of your favorite video essays like this one, except without ad breaks or comment sections or all the other stuff that can sometimes make YouTube not the best platform for making content like this.

Because Nebula is now funding projects that are bigger than YouTube, I am now on that track. I have finally gotten the green light for my first full-on Nebula original series. I can't say too much about it because we're not in that stage of the game yet. But, you know, if you're paying attention to me and my other channels, you probably know a little bit about it already. And it is something that I will never be able to do on YouTube. In fact, a lot of ideas I have won't really work for YouTube. And that's why Nebula is such a valuable resource for me to have access to, as well as all the other really talented creators that are there.

So, if you want to support independent media, if you want to support artists and creators making stuff that doesn't have to be controlled by Google Corporation, please, please, please sign up for Nebula using the link in the description or following the QR code on the screen. And in doing that, you're not just helping me, you're also getting access to literally thousands of hours of independent content that can't be seen anywhere else, along with uncut and commercial-free versions of your favorite YouTube creators' content.

Thank you so much for watching this far. Thank you for everyone that made this video possible, which also again includes my streaming service, Nebula. I appreciate having made this so much. I'm taking a break. I'll holla at y'all next time. Peace.

Hello. How do you do? We're so glad you joined our crew. Welcome to our lovely compound where it all goes down. Hot boil bananas and greens, white unicorns and wet trees. Rainbows so it makes me want to scream. Anything is possible with Jesus on our team. Wow, that didn't play. I love me some Jesus and I love me some you.

>> Oh Lord, thank you Jesus.

>> So I hate you and I hate Jesus.

>> Jesus told me in my next play, Ma Duke should find herself a man. I asked Jesus, "Will you co-write with me?" And I told Jesus, "I want to write plays for women." And Jesus said, "Sexy men." And I found them. My shirtless men. And Jesus was pleased. You accepted Jesus Christ. Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, Robert?

>> Yes. Jesus told him to WEAR THAT DRESS. YOU just mad 'cause Jesus doesn't love you. Uh, there's some cash in my sock drawer. Praise Jesus.

>> Lord Jesus, you are a wonderful savior and an excellent producing partner as well.

>> We're so happy you're here with us, Robert. Jesus is so good. All that time I was giving up the ass for me. Now I only give up the ass for Jesus.

>> Praise Jesus in the name of Jesus.

>> I had the sweater put on him because he just looks so cold up there. I just wanted to warm him up because I love Jesus. Do you love Jesus, Robert?

>> Oh yes, I love me some Jesus.

>> Mhm. You love women more than you love Jesus, don't you? It's hard to say. If women are what you desire, Robert, then Jesus and I will deliver. Then Jesus will provide them. But you must give yourself to Jesus first, Robert, and to me.

>> YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL ABOUT THE [ __ ] PHONE. Jesus Christ.

>> Well, at least I have Jesus. Let us pray. Jesus, holy Jesus, help us with this scene. Oh, wait. Jesus is trying to tell me something. Hold on.

>> Praise Jesus.

>> Yes, Jesus. Jesus says the scene would have more impact if you grabbed more dukes and kissed her deep on the lips. Hold on. Jesus said that. Jesus said that we need to kiss passionately so the audience can feel our love.

>> PRAISE JESUS IS REWRITE.

>> BUT JESUS wants us to be actors first and heterosexuals second. And when I go on stage, Jesus wants me to become her inside and out.

>> Well, at least I have Jesus.

>> Me and Jesus want them out of here, Robert.

>> Well, at least I have Jesus.

>> Jesus and I were so pleased.

>> Robert, Jesus never said it would happen overnight. Hello,

>> Grandad. Why are we watching a Winston Jerome play?

>> Ah, shut up, boy. Stop hating. Heat. Heat. Heat. Hey, Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. SOMEONE YOU FINE. FINE.