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
Because the thing that I loved about Tyler Perry's movies is that he rides hard for working class black girls, the girls that work behind the counter at Waffle House, the church ladies, right? The grannies that press $20 into your hand when you come home from school. Those are the kind of folks that raised me. And I wanted to be recognizable to them.
So I'm thinking about all this and Tyler breaks in. Brittany, something urgent just came up. Can I call you back? I'll call you back in 20 minutes. And I'm like, okay. So we get off the phone, I run to Pete and then I'm sitting in my house going, damn, like he not gonna call me back because I was blowing this conversation and maybe being a little bit of a jerk.
But like he said, 20 minutes later, the phone rings. Tyler, this is Brittany. Where were we? So with my 20 minutes of hindsight and hastily gained wisdom, I say, here's the thing I'm really trying to say, Tyler. Is it possible for you to uplift working class black girls in your films without throwing the educated sisters under the bus because educated girls love your movies too?
And he says, you know what? That's profound. Can I uplift one group without demonizing another group? I'ma think about that. And so then I said to him, now, if you wanna keep talking about this, I'm a professional critic and I'm happy to offer these. Nope, he says, I'm never calling your ass again. And we both screamed because it was like the realest moment in this conversation.
But he said, I always like to talk to my critics. I learn a lot from them. And I said, fair enough. And we hung up. And I was left thinking that The thing that connects Tyler Perry and me is that we're both working class Southern folks who in our respective fields have quote unquote made it. And we want to do the kind of work that always honors the places where we come from.
And I realized that his work called up for me the fear that maybe I would be losing touch with the folks that meant the most to me. But what I also thought was that I'm used to men dismissing me. because I have loud opinions and I'm brash and unapologetic and I'm a feminist.
But when this millionaire filmmaker read the little old blog of a not even thousandaire professor and heard me say that the way he represented girls like me in his movies essentially hurt my feelings, he didn't ignore me or act like he hadn't seen it or heard it.
He picked up the phone and called me and then he listened and called back and listened again until he could find something useful to make his art better. I had been so swift and sure to proclaim that Tyler Perry hates black women and I was left to consider maybe listening is what love looks like after all. Thank you.
Yeah. How did you experience yesterday, Tracer? Cause I don't know how I experienced it.
Awesome. You know, I just detached fully. I watched Netflix. I had planned for it to be a rest day, by which I mean that I'm procrastinating from writing projects. And then some friends were like, we're going to write. And I was like, sure, I will write today. Any other day when I need to write, I won't do it. But I was like, yes, today I will, you know, I will work on this book.
Anything to just... not be tempted to like engage the media ecosystem in any way. It just felt like it would be assaultive. And so, you know, I have taken up crafting over the last year. And so at some point I was working on like a complicated crochet project that had me engrossed for a while.
And I just let the like New York times notifications come through to tell me like, okay, we've officially left one regime and entered another, but that was about all that I could take. And, You know, I'm a person who, because I struggle with anxiety, don't always see myself as being cool under pressure. But I think I actually am fairly cool under pressure. So I don't freak out in the moment.
And then I woke up this morning and I was like, what in the fuck? Okay. And it really wasn't actually that boisterous. I woke up in tears, which is a really hard thing to admit now. As a certain kind of Black woman in the world, because there is still the belief that we're supposed to be strong all the time.
And that if you feel sad or have emotions about this, it is because you were naive, like, in thinking that it could be different or that the country was different. And why are you shocked and surprised? And it's like, but my tears weren't tears of shock or surprise. They were just...
deep, terrified grief over both the sadness of all that we lost and the terror of, the triggering terror of these months of anticipating a bad thing coming. And then living through that bad thing. And then you tried to prevent it. You fought with everything you could to prevent it. And then the bad thing ended up on your doorstep anyway. And now you have to contend with it in a real way.
And I just feel... devastated by that. And that devastation is compounded by the fact that today is a two-year anniversary of my coming back home to my place in New Jersey after burying my mother. And I remember, so my world tilted on its axis two years ago, January. And I remember the feeling of defeat because again, it's that same thing where you
You know, my mother had an unexpected set of complications from a surgery that just went badly. And the thing about being, all us like hyper-achieving women, you know, people call us to do shit because we solve problems for a living, right? We can see around corners, right? Tracer's like one of these writers that can see around corners. She can see things coming.
You know, this is like one of the things that makes you a type A personality. you anticipate and you make a plan and then you rally the troops and you get them all together. And I watched black women do that for 107 days. And I was like, okay, I don't believe in anything, but a bunch of black and army of sisters being like, we're going, we're going to be okay.
And then when you show up and it's not okay, the level of like, The devastation and the sense of failure and like, how did I miss this? How did I not see it coming? It's like I woke up and the weight of all of that stuff that I had managed to sort of push at a distance yesterday just showed up this morning. And I rarely struggle to get out of bed.
Staying in the bed all day is not really my thing. But today I was like, I could just stay here under these sheets and in this cocoon and maybe things will be OK. And maybe I could just have like a cozy float through the next regime. So that's that's where I am.
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