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Published Letters: 2
This was the best article that I have ever read regarding this election. As an educated black male, I found these same tendencies while searching for a job for the last year and a half. Eventually I found someone that needed my skill set and experience, and my "likeness to them" did not matter as much as my ability to articulate the issues, and suggest viable, insightful, and useful resolutions to job related problems.
Tyler Perry movies to African Americans are like the Saturday Evening Post covers of the Great Depression. They are in part, how we see ourselves, and in part how we want to be. No, they aren't great, but they portray us in a way that is rarely seen.
They portray us as multidimensional. They also provide work for Black actors that are not the roles that you see on "The Wire." Sure it was great to see so many Black people working on "The Wire," but as someone who remembers Robert Townsend's plea in "Hollywood Shuffle" for Black actors to be offered roles other than, pimps, drug dealers, prostitutes, rape victims or slaves, Tyler Perry's full are a nice change of pace.
The "Cosby Show" of the eighties showed that wealthy Black families can exist. Tyler Perry movies illustrate in some ways how they exist along side their working class kinsmen. And although I grew up in New York City, and my neighbors growing up were more like the cast of "Homicide: Life on the Street," (some working, some not, some criminal, some not), I recognize that his reality is more idealized version of the African American experience than my own.
