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*Les Dixon, Orange NJ:
"Well, I tried to stay quiet but, I couldn't hold my tongue any longer. I would like to voice the opinion of the silent educated majority of Black Americans who think that this whole Madea onslaught is a disgrace!
I think Tyler Perry is a coon and all the actors who perform in these trifling movies are sambos. Everybody boycotted 'Soul Plane' so why does Madea gets a pass? A Black man dressed as a big fat mammy Black woman in 2006! Oh how funny! Shame on Tyler Perry and Martin Lawrence for keeping the mammy stereotype alive!
This 'ghetto theater' issue has long been bubbling in the Black community. We have this unwritten rule not to criticize other Black folk who are making money, even if it is detrimental to Black America. Oh yeah, except rappers; we feel it's OK to criticize them freely. Well, we criticize drug dealers and Tyler Perry is an artistic drug dealer poisoning the black community.
Amiri Baraka and August Wilson did not break barriers and win awards on Broadway to be lumped in with Shelley Garrett and Tyler Perry's chitlin' circuit minstrel shows! The same goes for authors of all these ghetto books like 'Fly Girl' and 'B-More Careful.' These authors say that they self publish because they could not get a book deal. No, you could not get a deal because you can't write and you need to take a community college English 101 class before you attempt to write a book!
The losers in all of this are the kids and other Black folk who think that reading E. Lynn Harris or Zane is the artistic equivalent of reading a book by Zadie Smith or Octavia E. Butler.
We wonder why Black America, especially the youth, are getting more and more ignorant. Tyler Perry and Madea are a part of the problem."
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