If insensitive pronouncements and disingenuous statements could earn a “Peak Audacity Award,” this week’s winner would be Tyler Perry. The popular playwright, actor and filmmaker—best known for his outrageous pistol-packing matriarch alter ego, Madea—sparked instant outrage with his assertions during a recent podcast that successful single Black women could find mates more easily if they lowered their standards and basically just settled for broke men.
In his conversation during the “Keep It Positive” podcast with host Crystal Renee Hayslett, Perry stated that “In our society right now, Black women are making a lot more money, for the most part, than Black men. If you can find love, if that man works at whatever job and is a good man, and is good to you, and honors you and does what he can…..that is okay. As long as he’s secure in himself to know that ‘yeah, she makes most of the money, all I can pay is the light bill.’ As long as she’s comfortable enough to say ‘I’m gonna cover the mortgage and all the other stuff.’ That is fine……..There are some good men who can’t meet you at your net worth.”
The backlash was as swift as it was severe: from every major social media outlet, Black women complained that Perry’s wealth and prominence have been built over the last 30 years—-at least in part—-on regurgitating tired tropes of them needing to eschew the idea of financial comfort to be ‘ride or die’ companions for average-earning men (“Madea’s Family Reunion,” “Daddy’s Little Girls,” “Diary of a Mad Black Woman”). One dissenter responded, “Yeah, look at his character after you check out his bank account. The nerve of ….a billionaire giving advice to women about not focusing on men’s money. Haven’t Black women carried enough Black men on our backs for the last umpteen decades?”
Others who disagreed with this message, including Yours Truly, wonder why a man who already benefits from a patriarchal system isn’t using his clout to urge Black male counterparts to get their financial weight up rather than putting the onus on Black women to ‘marry down.’ If patriarchy affords them a privilege that doubly-disadvantaged Black women do not possess, due to the pervasiveness of both sexism and racism, why the nonchalance around their lack of resources? According to the Pew Research Center, Black wives are more likely than their non-Black female peers to be the breadwinners of their marriages, with nearly one-in-four (26%) out-earning their husbands. Yet despite the societal and financial headwinds we endure, 26 percent of us have Bachelor Degrees or higher (US Census Bureau) and Black women-owned businesses grew 50% from 2014 to 2019, representing the highest growth rate of any female demographic (USA Facts).
Aside from the truths revealed in the hard numbers, it’s also about optics. Though his delivery wasn’t as strident, Perry’s points still mimicked those spoken by incels who follow ‘manosphere’-centered content creators that demand women see them as ‘high value,’ despite their bare minimum exertions, and worthy of leadership perks and Old Testament-era ‘submission’…..all while wanting to only pay half. Black women are the only group expected to always help build grown men’s resources and sacrifice her health, dreams and even her dignity….all while existing, as writer Zora Neale Hurston once penned, like “the mules of the Earth.”
If Tyler Perry is so concerned about finding companionship for the women he profits from most, then he should create sizable scholarships and employment training to ensure the financial uplift of African-American men. It would remove their compulsion to compete against their female counterparts and—-gasp!—-force underperformers to level up and accept accountability for both one another and changing the status quo. What doesn’t solve the income-driven dating dilemma is ridiculing Black women for requiring more (“Go ahead, keep your ‘list’ baby!”), acting as if we don’t also struggle in this economy and characterizing a potential partner who’s content to pay a single bill or for an occasional evening out as “a good man.” Like another one of Perry’s film titles states, a woman can do “Bad All By [Her]self.”
Accepting mediocrity shouldn’t be anyone’s idea of a happy ending…even if a billionaire bachelor is writing the tale.
4 Comments
Tyler perry was too comfortable saying black women should expect and settle for less, and with this mentality, their happiness can’t happen
September 25, 2023 at 4:14 amBlack women should never settle
September 24, 2023 at 6:52 pmHi Curtis, I made a comment about racism and/or counter racism on this young lady’s blog. Please read it. It makes for some interesting conversations.
Here is the link: https://motherofcolor.com/mr-perry-no-thanks-the-misguided-musings-of-a-delusional-black-man/
Here is what I wrote on the blog: Mrs. Jackson, I am no fan of Mr. Perry and his movies. I find his films to be demeaning and in filled with anti-black male misandry. My previous post was about addressing how anti-Black Male misandry impacts education, employment, economics, entertainment, labour, law, politics, religion, sex and counter-war across several different contexts and how it falls in alignment with historical and contemporary racist practices of the modern era. This conceptual post explores the convergence of race and masculinity by providing an argument for therapists, educators and activists to become aware of debilitative perspectives that keep many Black males oppressed all around the world. I know you married to a black male and you have a male son also. They face the #BlackMisandry everyday single day, and so do I. Even if they don’t know what they are experiencing and what to call it. I am also a black male. I don’t say black man, because in this local and global system of racism (white supremacy) . I am not considered a man, but a boy. No matter if I am 93 years old like Mr. Neely Fuller Junior.
“If you don’t understand White Supremacy (Racism) – what it is, and how it works – everything else that you understand will only confuse you.”
©1971 Neely Fuller Junior
September 23, 2023 at 6:17 pmMrs. Jackson, I am no fan of Mr. Perry and his movies. I find his films to be demeaning and rifled with anti-black male misandry. My previous post is about addresses how anti-Black misandry impacts education across several different contexts and how it falls in alignment with historical and contemporary racist practices. This conceptual post explores the convergence of race and masculinity by providing an argument for educators and activists to become aware of debilitative perspectives that keep many Black males oppressed all around the world. I know you married to a black male and you have a male son also. They face the #BlackMisandry everyday single day, and so do I. Even if they don’t know what they are experiencing and what to call it. I am also a black male. I don’t say black man, because in this local and global system of racism (white supremacy) . I am not considered a man, but a boy. No matter if I am 93 years old like Mr. Neely Fuller Junior.
“If you don’t understand White Supremacy (Racism) – what it is, and how it works – everything else that you understand will only confuse you.”
©1971 Neely Fuller Junior
September 21, 2023 at 8:18 pm