Fiend Movement

Tyler calls out Spike by EURnews

Tyler Perry says that Spike Lee can go straight to hell and speaks about his work being labeled as “coonery” and “buffoonery”  

“I’m so sick of hearing about damn Spike Lee.  Spike can go straight to hell!  I am sick of him talking about me.  I am sick of him saying, ‘This is a coon, this is a buffoon.’ I am sick of him talking about black people going to see movies. This is what he said: ‘You vote by what you see’ — as if black people don’t know what they want to see.

“I am sick of him. He talked about Whoopi, he talked about Oprah, he talked about me, he talked about Clint Eastwood. Spike needs to shut the hell up!”

“I don’t even understand it.  There [are] so many people who walk around, and this is where the whole Spike Lee [issue] comes from — the negativity, ‘This is Stepin Fetchit,’ ‘This is coonery,’ ‘This is buffoonery’ — and they try to get people to get on this bandwagon with them, to get this mob mentality to come against what I’m doing.”

Perry later goes on to comment

“What they don’t understand is this, and this is what I want to make perfectly clear to everybody, especially black people: I’ve never seen Jewish people attack Seinfeld and say, ‘This is a stereotype.’ I’ve never seen Italian people attack The Sopranos, I’ve never seen Jewish people complaining about Mrs. Doubtfire orDustin Hoffman and what they were doing in Tootsie I never saw it. It’s always black people, and this is something that I cannot undo.” 

While those are not completely true, I understand his sentiments. Although I agree with Spike that a lot of Perry’s work is coonery and buffoonery, the fact that Black people are flocking to his movies in droves is a bigger statement about the mental state of the Black community than the intentions of the director.