Brittney Cooper
speaker
90 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Brittney Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So in the early 2000s, I became the first person in my family to graduate from college and to go on to pursue a PhD. Now when you go to med school, you become a doctor. And when you go to law school, you become a lawyer. But when you go to grad school in the humanities, you become a critic.
Imagine studying for six years for the express privilege of telling everybody who's ever written or said anything what is wrong with what they have said. Imagine further explaining this to your family at Thanksgiving. So one of the ways that I would cope with this unfortunate turn of events is that I would go to the movies, typically a matinee on a Wednesday.
And my favorite filmmaker at the time was Tyler Perry. When I went to see Diary of a Mad Black Woman, I thought to myself, here is a man who understands black women who have been done wrong. When Kimberly Elise's character slaps the shit out of the husband that has been abusing her, I'm in the theater hooting and hollering with all the ladies in there.
But at the same time, I'm also becoming a feminist. And you know, I'm down for smashing the patriarchy and everything. But nobody tells you that the first casualty of a feminist analysis is movies. You hate them because you see the patriarchy absolutely everywhere. You become a feminist and suddenly you can't like anything anymore. You're a professional unliker of everything.
Or as they say in the hood, I'm getting a PhD, playa hatin' degree. It occurs to me though, that I like these movies, so I'ma keep going, but I'm just not gonna tell my feminist friends how much I like the movies. Because every time I talk to them, they're using language like tropes and representations and how problematic the films are.
But what I'm thinking to myself is, but in Daddy's Little Girls, Gabrielle Union's character snags fine-ass Idris Elba, and I don't know a straight black girl that don't want Idris. And I'm also thinking, this feels a little bit like home. You know, Tyler Perry built his career making these Madea stage plays. And there was like an underground economy of VHS dubs that you could get of these plays.
So I remember watching one of these plays with my auntie and her laughing hysterically. And I'm sitting there going like, the play look a little low budget. But Madea is a gun-toting, a pistol-toting granny. And my granny was a pistol-toting granny. So it kind of worked for me.
But I was also starting to see what my friends were saying, because I went to see The Family That Prays, and the female character in that movie is so villainized that by the time her husband knocks the shit out of her, the women in the theater are hooting and hollering again, but this time, I'm not hollering with them. Because you know, I'm a feminist now. and that's domestic violence.
So I'm starting to think maybe me and Tyler might have to break up. Fast forward, I finished my PhD. I get a job as a professor at a big state school in the deep south. Tyler and I have broken up, but his star has continued to ascend. And I'm trying to figure out how to wear this big old title as both a PhD and a critic, even though I come from people that don't really have fancy titles.
So I call up my girls, who are mostly first-generation PhDs themselves, and we form a crew and a blog called the Crunk Feminists Collective. So around this time, Tyler puts out a show called The Haves and The Have Nots. And like a good feminist, I tune in to hate watch the show. And as suspected, as expected, he gives me something to hate.
So the next day, I go to the Crunk Feminist Collective blog and I pin a post called Tyler Perry Hates Black Women. Now let me say, that some high-profile feminists would be coming through and reading the blog, but I didn't really think any famous, famous people were reading the blog. So imagine my surprise the next day when I get an email subject line. Tyler Perry wants to talk to you.
I think it's a joke, right? But I open the email, I call the number back, and it's not a joke. His assistant gets on the phone and she says, oh. He wants to talk to you. So we set up a time to talk, like the next day. And the day in between, I spend my time calling all my homegirls going, what we gonna do? And the consensus among the feminist cabal is finishing.
They're like, we have been waiting our whole careers for this and you have been chosen. So you gotta do that shit. And I'm like, but it's Tyler Perry though. So the next day, I've now moved to New Jersey. I'm a professor at a state school in New Jersey. I'm sitting in my one bedroom apartment with peeling paint.
The person that lives across the hall from me is a grad student because it turns out the professor money doesn't go as far as you think it does when you don't come from generational wealth. And I'm waiting on a famous millionaire filmmaker to call my phone. And I also have an intense need to pee, but I'm afraid to make a run for it. So, right on time, the phone rings.
Miss Cooper, this is Tyler Perry. Hi, Mr. Perry. Nope, call me Tyler. Okay, call me Brittany. Brittany, you wrote some things about me that I wanna talk about. Well, Tyler, let me begin by saying that I've seen all of your films and I really respect, nope. You said that I hate black women and I don't understand how you came to that conclusion. Deep breath. He really want to do this. All right.
Let's begin with the haves and have nots. Why in the first three minutes of that show do we have a maid, a sex worker, and a rich black bitch? These are tropes of black womanhood. And he stops me. He says, tropes? Let me explain something to you. You're talking to a man with a 12th grade education. So I don't know anything about tropes.
But when I was growing up, the person that lived next door to me was a maid and her daughter was a sex worker and they were like the nicest people ever. And so then I realized like, oh wow, yeah, he's Tyler Perry and he's rich and I'm not rich, but I have a PhD and he has a 12th grade education. And so all of a sudden, maybe the playing field is not so disparate as I thought,
And I also think to myself, like, my mother was a single mother with a 12th grade education. And my uncle, who Tyler Perry is starting to sound like on the phone, also had a 12th grade education. So I realized, like, these are the people that raised me and let me switch my tack up a little bit. So I say, Tyler, you know, you and I have a lot in common. We're both from Louisiana.
We were both raised in the church, right? We both had pistol-toting grannies. We both had an abusive parent. And he said, oh wow, I didn't know that about you, but I just knew you were sharp. And now that I do know this about you, I don't understand why you don't understand what I'm trying to do in my movies. And so I say to him, okay, here's really my question.
why are all the educated black girls in your movie such bitches to everybody? And he says, well, because there was a whole branch of my family growing up. They all went to college and they all treated everybody like trash. And I realized, damn, like, That's exactly the thing that I feared, that having all of this education might make me unrecognizable to the people that raised me.
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