Tonight I Stopped Hating Tyler Perry

For years I’ve despised the seemingly 10 movies per year agenda of Tyler Perry. I’ve discussed the errors in his writing and I’ve so often wondered why such accomplished actors continue to find themselves in his plot-less films.

Tonight, as I watch the 2019 BET Awards – I have a new perspective on Mr. Perry.

When he was five years old he would venture to the projects with his mother on Friday nights. Perry would play with his toys, while his mother would play cards with her girlfriends. They would discuss the men in their lives; their pains, disappoints and such. Whenever the women would get too sad, one of them would come in and make a joke. All of the women would laugh. 

“I didn’t realize then that I was in a masterclass for my life,” Perry says to the BET audience.

Perry recalled how his father would beat his mother and do terrible things to her in the family’s home. Young Tyler Perry would come into the room, imitate one of those women and make his mother laugh.

I now get Perry’s incessant need for the ‘black woman struggles’ narrative in his films. It’s what he knows. It’s what he and his mother survived. He uses his experience to share both tragedy and triumph. I was too busy critiquing Perry’s scripts that I didn’t fully research his personal story.

While I don’t always celebrate his style of writing, I appreciate his walk in his purpose. He tells his truth. He gives black women work. He makes every attempt to evoke laughter in the midst of some of the most brutal realities of black women’s lives.

Tyler Perry owns all of his productions. He has not become so rich that he has distanced himself from the black women and the black culture that made him.

Perry received the 2019 BET Icon Award this evening and he is most deserving of such.