“I AIN’T NO CHRISTIAN”INSIDE MADEA’S HOUSE OF HUMANIST POSSIBILITY

Alma Faith Crawford4554 S. King Drive #3E

Chicago, IL 60653 773.703.7779 mobile

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In Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion, Anthony B.

Pinn describes the auction block as a central “ritual of

reference,” that establishes the subordinate status of

Africans in America.

Through the auction – whether public or private – the enslaved experienced a rupture that affected perceptions of the world and the African’s place in it:the enslaved African no longer makes history but is theraw material others use to shape history. This is morethan an historical dislocation or displacement; it is the very definition of the enslaved African as object, while on the other hand, it affirms the superior statusof whites.1

Essential to this ritual is the trauma and dread of

separation recounted by witnesses as surpassing all other

suffering.

An inter-related method of dehumanization is sexual

abuse. While such practices occur in virtually every

society, it can be argued that for African Americans, such

violation of black flesh whether in the family or outside

1 Anthony B. Pinn, Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) 47.

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the race may represent a continuity with ante-bellum

practices of eroticized exploitation. As Pinn states, “Sex

was a ritual through which white men, for instance,

maintained the established social order, but for black women

it was a terror to be escaped as best they could.” 2

Alice Walker describes it as an ongoing paradigm for

power relations between black men and black women; and black

adults and black children. Reflecting on the sexual

violence of the “Mister” character against his child-wife in

the novel The Color Purple, she argues that Mister is

inseparable from “Master.”

At the root of the denial of easily observable and heavily documented sexist brutality in the black community – the assertion that black men don’t act likeMister, and if they do, they’re justified by the pressure they’re under as black men in a white society – is our deep, painful refusal to accept the fact that we are not only the descendants of slaves, but we are also the descendants of slave owners. And just as we have had to struggle to rid ourselves of slavish behavior, we must ruthlessly eradicate any desire to bemistress or “master.”3

Recovering the Body for Pleasure

2 Anthony B. Pinn, African American Humanist Principles: Living and Thinking Like the Children of Nimrod (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004) 86.

3 Alice Walker, Living By the Word: Essays 1981) 80.

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The Color Purple’s story of Celie’s slow awakening to

sexual agency after a lifetime of exploitation offers an

encouraging example. Shug offers Celie an introduction to

her own body: the clitoris or “little button,” kisses,

intimate conversation, the waxing and waning of sexual

desire.4 While readers angered at the description of

violent masculinity saw only that, we who long for the

recovery of degraded bodies rejoice at the resonant power of

kissing and masturbation and romantic affirmation for

reconstitution of the flesh.

As a sexual dissident and practical theologian5, I

have learned that speaking the unspeakable in traumatized

communities can be facilitated by mediating texts. Soap

operas, bible study, discussions of celebrity gossip – along

with the mundane management of everyday life (shopping,

riding the bus, tending to family members) can be occasions

for inter-subjective and inter(con)textual interventions

into problematic belief systems.

4 Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Pocket Books, 1990)

5 I’m a bisexual homiletician.Alma Crawford

Informed by Alice Walker, Anthony B. Pinn, and black

queer theorist L.H. Stallings, this paper offers a humanist

“read”6 of the popular plays of Tyler Perry, especially

the cross-dressed religious skeptic grandmother character

“Madea.” I interpret them as (among other things)

indigenous humanist critiques of sexual exploitation and the

limitations of religious institutions as protectors of the

weak and vulnerable.

Belinda, a friend of a friend from the West Side of

Chicago introduced me to Perry in 2004 when she came to my

South Side home for a marathon hair-braiding session by

bringing along a bootleg video of the stage play Madea’s

Family Reunion to pass the time. Belinda and I were in our 40s

but very different. Her sons were grown and my daughter was

in preschool. She is barely literate, very much of the

streets, bold and cheerful and kind. At the time I was an

extremely “respectable” married lesbian mother, a doctoral

student and a minister. As we commiserated about hard

6 In black LGBT vernacular, to “read” is to signify, to claim one’s right to bold commentary.

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times, she chuckled that as women, at least we had the

option of selling pussy (an option I had not considered at

the time). Laughing together with the “live” audience

became a place of meeting and creative interaction. We

talked back at the characters including nosy neighbors, an

addict, a stuck-up professor, an upright church lady and a

sexist snobby rich dude. Each was ultimately accountable to

the bawdy and irreverent grandmother Madea or “Mother Dear.”

Later, when I taught at a white seminary in Berkeley, my one

working class black student would come by my house every few

weeks to eat smothered chicken and watch Madea. The plays

brought us into a restorative cultural space; they were like

a letter from home.

Although I will use queer theory in this paper, it is

not my intention to join the homophobic speculation about

Tyler Perry’s identity. (Type “Tyler Perry Gay Rumors” into

Google to measure the level of ill-willed speculation.) He

is a Southern black man, and as E. Patrick Johnson has

documented, it would be very unusual for him to publically

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identify himself as “gay.”7 In addition, his childhood

experience of sexual abuse by three men and a woman led him

to deep ambivalence about same-sex desire. In his October,

2010 interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Perry described the

erections resulting from being sexually used by adults as

his body betraying his will to resist8. In the black

community, predatory adult men’s targeting abuse of males

who "seem" gay leaves poisonous residue.9 I will not impose

upon Tyler Perry’s sexual subjectivity by (un)naming him.

Nonetheless, as a sexual dissident, reading from my own

perspective, I will highlight themes that destabilize the

heteropatriarchy that underlies so much of our suffering.

The Chitlin Circuit as “Space of the Familiar”

This humanist task of recovery and restoration of black

7 E. Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008) 109-179

8 Winfrey , 2010.

9 Victor Anderson, Creative Exchange: A Constructive Theology of African American Religious Experience (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008)151-153.

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bodies for agency, pleasure and joy may require suspension

of normative aesthetic judgments while identifying living,

popular texts for their discursive possibilities.

The Tyler Perry plays providing the “fixed” texts for

this exploration are I Can Do Bad All By Myself (2000), and Madea’s

Family Reunion (2002) (See endnotes for plot summaries).10

10 (Wikipedia 2011) The plot of I Can Do Bad All By Myself is summarized as follows: Vianne, a young woman who has a share of pain, moves in with her 68 year-old grandmother, Madea, in order to escape her verbally abusive and cheating husband, Anthony. Soon after her departure, she files for divorce.

When Madea becomes sick, (although she is not as sick as she seems) the family comes to her rescue; her daughter, Cora; her next-door-neighbor Mr. Brown; also her granddaughter, Maylee, who also comes to visit her daughter Keisha that Madea has been taking care of since she was eight years old. However, Maylee casually strolls in and announces that she isengaged to Vianne's evil ex-husband, Anthony.

After a nearly violent argument at the dinner table, Vianne realizes that she has to let Anthony go. Even though they are divorced, he still has her in his heart. No sooner than she lets him go, she realizes that her hurt has consumed most of her life and she needs to change her ways.

Bobby, a handy man and boarder who works for Madea, immediately makes itknown that he is interested in Vianne. Much to their reluctance, they start to spend time together and they realize, even though she was once a rich foolish housewife and he, a lowly handy man and ex-convict, that when "it's right, it's right". Although grandma Madea has a few things to say about their relationship, she eventually encourages it. And Bobbyrealizes that he is in love with Vianne and he wants her hand in marriage.

Meanwhile, Maylee finds out that her daughter Keisha got pregnant by a boy named Kelly and she's holding their child. But Keisha is only 14 years old. But through prayer, they both come to an understanding and

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These enormously popular productions tour on the so-called

“chitlin circuit” referring to places of live performance

completely dependent upon African American audiences. While

in decades past, these racially homogeneous gatherings

forgive one another. In a shocking twist of events, Maylee breaks all ties with Anthony and sends him packing. Afterwards, Maylee and Keisha move into their own house and they raise the baby.

Wikipedia writers offer the following synopsis of Madea’s Family Reunion: Just as the southern matriarch, Madea buries her older sister, Irene. (There is no mention of Helen and Charles Jr. at all during the play). Her granddaughter Lisa is getting married to a very successful rich man name Ronnie at the house, but Lisa's fiance is secretly beating her, andLisa's ex-boyfriend and first love, A.J., and Madea's mechanic, is goingto do something about it. While Lisa is trying to cover up her bruises, her sister Tina is getting into more trouble, neglecting her baby, trying to seduce her cousin Jackie's husband Kevin, and has been stealing money from her mother, Cora, to use it to get high on drugs. Madea's granddaughter, Jackie and her ex-con unemployed husband are living with Madea, and later Jackie finds out she is pregnant and might have a miscarriage and tries to go tell Kevin the news only to find Tina(Jackie's cousin) trying to seduce him. Even though Jackie was upset with Kevin, she tries to persuade him to get a job for her, him,and their unborn child. Madea's know-it-all niece, Vickie is being romantically chased by the Reverend. Meanwhile, Tina and Lisa reveal something to Cora that happened to them in the past,(they were sexually abused by their father when they were kids) which is going to take days of praying for Cora to get over. Madea must endure the craziness of her neighbor, Leroy Brown and the dysfunctional relatives staying under one roof for the weekend. Lisa reveals to her family that Ronnie has been hitting her, behind everyone's backs, during the family reunion. Later, during the wedding, Lisa decides to marry A.J. as he is her first lover.The Simmons family has a funeral, a wedding and a family reunion all in the same weekend, and it is up to Madea, the no-nonsense matriarch to keep things in order.

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reflected the coercion of legal and de facto segregation and

exclusion, today they are ritualized retreats from the white

gaze, from the aesthetic and ideological policing of black

elites, and occasions for the pleasure black bodies in an

audience watching black bodies onstage depicting the daily

rituals of working-class black life.

Shortly before the production of Perry’s first

successful play, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. describes the

genre’s traditional themes of family loyalty and the

availability of divine intervention through faith to resolve

challenges of life. Always featuring impassioned musical

numbers, Gates describes a gospel-tinged performance that so

connected with the theatre-goers that the Holy Dance broke

out.11

Such productions reinforce the suspension of critical

spectatorship that often occurs when we are confronted with

black hegemonic patriarchal messages, whether religious or

secular. We witness a rush to defend rapist and batterer

11 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Chitlin Circuit,” The New Yorker, February3, 1997, p. 49.

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Mike Tyson. R. Kelly, each of whose underage sexual

partners was someone’s granddaughter, was celebrated

recently in a back-to-school parade. Many maintain that

Bishop Eddie Long was "set up" by a group of low-income

black young adults. “The prayers of the righteous

prevaileth much (sic)," intoned O.J.’s mother after his

acquittal, and even my eleven year old daughter still hopes

to marry Chris Brown.

Alienation from our experiences, risks and rights

deepens. Our lived truths are rendered virtually

unspeakable. Troubling the genre’s conventions, Tyler

Perry’s plays offer a powerful counter-narrative and

counter-commentary actively challenging hegemonic black

Christianity. Black audiences find themselves

affectionately and respectfully inclined toward Madea a

character who is a man-dressed-as-a-woman, who fears neither

death nor hell; who mocks the prayers of the saints; and

boldly asks the terrifying questions that allow stories of

incest, addiction and domestic violence to surface and be

addressed. From a humanist perspective, these plays meet Alma Crawford

Pinn’s criterion of

… the creation of identity or complex subjectivity (realization of full humanity), understood in terms of the individual and community. In this sense, religiousexperience entails a human response to a crisis of identity (or, objectification), and it is the crisis ofidentity or “being” that constitutes the dilemma of ultimacy and meaning. The religious is a certain “ordering” or “style” of experienced as opposed to a unique form of experience; it is a paradigm shift or perspective.

Genre Trouble: Perry’s Inter(con)textual Crazy Quilt

In the August, 2011 issue of Ebony, Perry states the

paradox of having gotten Jesus from his mother; while

believing, nonetheless that speaking the truth while she

lived would be an act of cruelty. Folklore is born of such

dilemmas, using often hyperbolic tales and characters as

surrogates for that which must be communicated but may not

be said directly.

Exploring folklore as theological source material,

Dwight Hopkins describes four archetypal characters: the

trickster type, the conjurer, the outlaw and the Christian

witness, interpreting these as compatible with the teleology

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of black Christianity. Humanists must read folklore with an

earthier hermeneutic. Drawing on the work of humanist

folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, L.H. Stallings understands

the same tradition as countering “respectable” norms. She

proclaims that“…what can’t be whispered of in uplifting

Black culture can be shouted about to the tin roof of outlaw

culture.”12

Stallings’ readings actively seek out “vulgarity,

profanity and the uncensored.” While the particulars of

these old anthropomorphic stories and characters may be

obscure to some contemporary urban blacks, Stallings argues

that they live on as tropes and archetypes that can inform

humanist hermeneutics, particularly since our celebration of

multiple meanings frees us to take partial truths seriously.

The folk character Hopkins describes as “Christian

witness,” is Cora, a woman with compassion, wit, dignity and

a cluelessness about sex that leaves her and others at risk.

As a bride-to-be unwraps shower gifts “pertaining to the

12 L. H. Stallings, Mutha is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth andQueerness in Black Female Culture. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007) 34.

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wedding night,” the gift from Cora is a Bible. Later, Cora

is confronted by adult daughters who tell her that years

before, when she was at church “praising her God”, her

husband and their father was at home raping them. Focused

upon the suffering of Jesus, she missed the agony of her own

children. As Madea commented about the teen bomb builders

in Columbine, “What kind of parent don’t know what’s going on in

they house?”

Madea calls her fourteen year old great-granddaughter

to come into the house for dinner – and hollers that that

man walking by better not be R. Kelly. A gifted mimic,

Perry’s Madea imitates Oprah Winfrey’s reading of Sofia’s “a

girlchild ain’t safe in a family of men,” speech, the scene

in Good Times where Penny, played by Janet Jackson as a child

actor, is purposely burned by her abusive mother and Angela

Bassett’s Tina Turner living under Ike’s violent domination.

The desirable but abusive wealthy marital prospect is

inevitably exposed as far less worthwhile than the blue

collar brother who is ardent and devoted rather than cool

(and just happens to look like Idris Elba or Shamar Moore orAlma Crawford

Boris Kodjoe).

In Madea’s house, she is the highest authority which

means that truths are constantly sought and revealed.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6T1DKRz5ZY&feature=related)

She laughs at her sister who prays for her on the phone.

She tells the preacher she will attend church “when y’all

get a smoking section.” When some of the family members get

to singing sanctified shout songs, Madea interrupts the

ecstasy and brings them back to earth with a joke. Madea

confronts addicts and family denial of addiction,

nonetheless, she has a row of marijuana growing among her

collard greens and she is usually rolling or smoking some

weed. A widow, Madea’s husband dies at nine in the morning

and is buried by eleven. She collects the insurance check

before five and is at the casino by ten. There have been

times, she sighs, when she didn’t know where her “next

husband was coming from.”

Madea’s irreverent badness does not offer a reverse

salvation. What her character achieves in plays like I Can

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do Bad All By Myself and Madea’s Family Reunion is a kind of

epistemological shape-shifting. Audience members who

themselves almost inevitably are connected to the scourges

of sexual violence and addictive diseases have to

acknowledge in the play that which they may be hiding from

themselves. The fact that the play is intelligible to

audience members lets individual members know that they are

not unique in carrying such burdens. And in particular,

this is a rare opportunity to experience a “female”

character’s open disdain for religion. As feminist humanist

Sikivu Hutchinson points out, there are formidable obstacles

preventing black women from voicing their disappointment or

even rejection of revealed religion:

…because of the legacy that ascribes rationalism, intellectualism, and secular or scientific inquiry to masculinity, men have greater cultural license to reject organized religion. However, women in traditional religious communities don’t have the cultural and authorial privilege to express skepticism,much less publicly voice their opposition to organized religion. In African American communities where devoutness is the default position, the presumption of female religiosity reinforced by cultural representation is a binding influence makes public

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skepticism taboo. 13.This contextualizes the extraordinary nature of this clip of

Madea “preaching” in the play Diary of a Mad Black Woman:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT7QN75veIA&feature=related

In addition, Madea shares black humanism’s critique of the

Enlightenment, which we can infer from this confrontation

with "medical science" in the film Madea Goes to Jail (2009)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHsBK722Yqw.

Perry and Vernacular Comedy

Dick Gregory has referred to the ribald Redd Foxx

comedy albums as what one played at a party “after the

Christians went.”14 Of the contemporaneous and equally blue

comedienne LaWanda Page’s signifyin(g) routine, “Mutha is

Half a Word,” Stallings writes

… Page’s performance of the vernacular, “muthafucka,” relies on the messiness of desire to discredit and disprove the so-called truths of womanhood, motherhood,feminism, and gender roles. … the bold disturbance ofgender by Page’s “mutha is half a word,” is both

13 Sikivu Hutchinson, Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars, (Los Angeles: Infidel Press, 2011) 34.

14 Dick Gregory Mo’ Funny: Black Comedy in America, 1993

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censored and uncensored because of the way it omits the“vulgarity” while at the same time mocking self-imposedsilence and invisibilities. Page does not speak the entire word, but she pointedly refuses to remain quiet about the sex act implied with the word. Since performance is a public action that denies the domesticprivatized destiny of “woman,” it incorporates considerations of class.15 Madea may not use profanity in the plays, but is

constantly referring to having cursed somebody out.

Stalling argues that,

“When African American female communities can throw offthe shackles of language that seek to control and fix them in limited positions they can move beyond oppressive situations. The performative ability to manipulate visual illusions, use the uncensored mode and the sacred/lewd trickster trait provides a systematic folk rejection of present canons of gender and sexuality. Blue material acts as a cultural root tocontinuously evolve the communities rather than demean them.16

Tyler further complicates these traditions of troubling

sexual, linguistic and religious normativity. Madea’s

vernacular speech is characterized by her mockery of the

phonemes of Standard English in a way that is evocative of

Rastas, who deliberately distort English to break its power.

Madea greets new people with “Hellerrr” mocking the hard Rs

15 (Stallings 2007) 114.

16 (Stallings 2007) 149.Alma Crawford

of “proper” English; she refers to eating “dinter,” and when

passing as respectable says “Praise the Lort.” She is

sexually active – her granddaughter confronts her about

having recently seen a man crawl out of her window. She

takes pleasure in knowing that others (Kevin the ex-convict

and his wife) are sexually active and satisfied.

Madea’s wearing of an old-fashioned calico house

dress, unfashionable house shoes and a big old gray wig,

recalls comedy master Jackie “Moms” Mabley, whose choice of

old-fashioned and “maternal” clothes can be interpreted as a

refusal to perform for the pleasure of the male gaze.17

There is a deferral, an opting out of the conventions of

female “beauty” that signals that they have stripped the

power of evaluation and classification away from men. This,

ironically, is used as an opening for these otherwise

“maternal” women to speak directly and even explicitly about

their own sexual subjectivity, actively evaluating the

attractiveness and sexual performance of men.

Shameless about her big, tall body, Madea briefly

17 (Stallings 2007) 145.Alma Crawford

stands "naked” in front of a window facing her backyard,

offering body image recognition to her female audience.

Even the most conventionally “beautiful” black woman may

sometimes feel like she looks like Madea. Ass too big, feet

too wide, a light-skinned bi-racial friend recently told me

how painful it was to be the darkest one in the family. We

are often defined as grotesque; as unfeminine, as the

opposite of lovely.

Perry’s storytelling finds drama in situations others

overlook. On her wedding day, the pious Cora’s daughter

wears dark glasses to hide the black eye she has received

from her fiancé, an internet millionaire. A man-chasing

young woman discovers that her neglected fourteen year old

daughter is pregnant. Cora’s wedding ring and wallet go

missing, but she cannot bring herself to blame her crack-

addicted daughter.

As fellow southerner Alice Walker writes in response to

The Color Purple’s critics:

Of course if I had written of Celie’s rape from the point of view of the rapist or that of the voyeur, very

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few people – other than feminists – would have been offended. We have been brainwashed to identify with the person who receives pleasure, no matter how perverted; we are used to seeing rape from the rapist’spoint of view. I could have written that Celie enjoyedher abuse and done it in such pretty, distancing language that many readers would have accepted it as normal. But to do this would have been to betray Celie: not only her experience of rape, but the integrity of her life, her life itself.

On the patriarchal side, Spike Lee’s happy ending in Crooklyn

involves a ten year old girl giving up her childhood to take

on the cooking, cleaning and household management

responsibilities that had belonged to her recently deceased

mother. Lee’s phallocentric tale leaves Troy where Celie

begins.

Black Drag Traditions

“T” is an expression and a concept in black LGBT

vernacular, particularly among drag communities (both drag

kings and queens). My T is not my truth in the most

accessible, factual sense; my T is my complicated,

confusing, obscure truth, that I can barely admit to myself.

We struggle with both visibility and invisibility. We

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carefully observe others and employ mimicry as a strategy

for survival and entertainment. We know, because of our own

varied passings that all is not as it seems. We often are

gifted with “clocking” the T that others miss. Always

unstable and undecideable, T is never fully hidden, and

never fully revealed.

The “true” gender of Madea, in my view, is

undecideable. As Stallings reminds us:

Since medical and cultural research continue to expose that there are more than two genders and many sexualities, the most glaring cause of concern within acts of resisting stereotypes surfaces when we do not acknowledge the complexities of having numerous genders and sexualities. Someone’s invalidated gender may be someone else’s stereotype. One person’s indefinable sexuality could be another’s promiscuous sexuality. As black cultural studies continue to address gender and sexuality, we must re-consider who gets to say what is and is not a valid form of resistance to the stereotypes and why18.Madea’s nonstop mockery (of light people, dark people,

babies, dogs, gay people, rich people, ugly people,

attractive people, Christians, Muslims and Buddhists, etc.)

is very much the domain of the drag monologue. Famed

Chicago drag artist Flame Monroe boldly occupies the stage

18 (Stallings 2007)Alma Crawford

as a stunningly beautiful woman with a stigmatized identity.

She shocks the audience by evaporating their social distance

from her. With the casual tone of Jerry Seinfeld inquiring

about airplane food, Monroe asks her audience, “Raise your

hand if y’all eat ass.”

Madea’s recollection of a night of drunken sex with the

sanctified, effeminate Mr. Brown forces one (or at least me)

to speculate about what kind of sex they would have. Even

without the ”knowledge” that “Madea” has male genitalia, the

codes and culture of drag offer up the likelihood that

between the two, Madea is clearly more masculine; and more

of a Top. The sexual pairing of them makes them seem more

queer and not less.19

In the film versjon of Madea’s Family Reunion, two

respectable old church ladies played by Cicily Tyson and

Maya Angelou wax nostalgic about the glorious, Spirit-filled

19 Brown’s constant provocation of Madea resembles a form of BDSM flirtation called “bratting,” in which the submissive seeks the Dominant’s attention by borderline disobedience. The submissive is seeking the reassurance of the Dom(me)’s re-establishment of the disciplinary and emotional connection of the power exchange involved in ownership.

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marriages they had known long, long ago. “You will never

have what we had,” they repeat with nostalgic piety.

Just as Perry trusts his audience to assemble scraps

from Good Times and What’s Love Got to Do With It to surface the

deadly dangers in the heteropatriarchal home, I believe he

trusted us to recall and integrate what we know about Maya

Angelou and Cicily Tyson. In Mad At Miles, Pearl Cleage

writes about the beatings Tyson endured at the hands of

Miles Davis, arguing that his artistry cannot be

compartmentalized or idealized if it means a dismissal of

the significance of the bruised and bloodied face of the

award-winning actress.20 Similarly, people who read the many

volumes of Angelou’s autobiography – or even just I Know Why

the Caged Bird Sings know that she was raped as a child and her

own gun-toting Mother Dear and her uncles refused to accept

her abuse as a rite du passage. Her assailant's dead, bloody

body was found by authorities mere days after her bloodied

panties were discovered by her Mother Dear.21 She survived

20 Pearl Cleage, Mad At Miles: A Black Woman’s Guide to Truth (The Cleage Group, 1990)

21 Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York: Ballentine Books,

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at least two violent marriages as well.

Angelou and Tyson as “nostalgic black women” enacted a

drag identity obscuring/revealing their T – by highlighting

the gaps and the dissonances. Perry forces a re-examination

of whether that romantic black past ever existed. While the

respectable Christian Mama (also played by Tyson), is

available for prayer and counsel in the film Diary of a Mad

Black Woman, the abandoned, abused ex-wife counts on Madea’s

2009) 70-83.

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ready access to guns and hot grits (which as Al Green

famously learned, is a more effective weapon than boiling

water because the grits stick to skin and burn more).

Conclusion: Countering Gendered Hate and Classist Contempt

Black male gatekeepers often express a gendered rage at

those who bypass their authority as they reach success –

particularly when their achievements are acknowledged by the

white world. The Reverend Jesse Jackson wanted to “cut

[Barack Obama’s] nuts off.” Attempting to explain Spike

Lee’s superior position vis a vis his conflict with Tyler

Perry, Cornel West reminds his audience that Lee is a

“Morehouse Man,” possessing gender and class-based authority

to "encourage" Perry to “move beyond Madea (!)”. Lee, in

famously dismissing Perry’s TV series as “coonery and

buffoonery,” adds by way of explanation that it features

“effeminate men.” (Pre-emptively defending himself against

any gay contagion from having seen House of Payne, Lee

explains that he was only watching TBS because he was

waiting for the basketball game.)22

22 (Lee 2009)Alma Crawford

As the owner of his own studios, the leading employer

of black actors, and one with a steady income of grassroots

black money who does not have to make his work accessible to

whites and needs neither their acknowledgement nor

accolades, Tyler Perry highlights his opponent’s relative BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Victor. Creative Exchange: A Constructive Theology of African American Religious Experience. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008.

Cleage, Pearl. Mad at Miles: A Black Woman's Guide to Truth. The Cleage Group, 1990.

Gates, Henry Louis. "The Chitlin Circuit." The New Yorker, February3, 1997: 44-49.

Mo' Funny: Black Comedy in America. Directed by Yvonne Smith. Performed by Dick Gregory. 1993.

Hutchinson, Sikivu. Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and the Values Wars. Los Angeles: Infidel Books, 2011.

Johnson, E. Patrick. Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, An Oral History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Johnson, Roy. "An Intimate Conversation with Tyler Perry, the 350Million Dollar Man on Anger, Business and Babies." Ebony, August 1, 2011.

Lee, Spike. Spike Lee on Tyler Perry's Movies Shows. December 29, 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ciwhh3fB6vE (accessed August 10, 2011).

Pinn, Anthony B. African American Humanist Principles: Living and Thinking Like the Children of Nimrod. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

—. Embodiment and the New Shape of Black Theological Thought. New York: New York University Press, 2010.

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weakness and dependency. Perry may wear a dress, but if you

line him up beside these competing Head Negroes, he is The

Man and they are the "bitches."

Perrys work demonstrates that the normalizing pressures

of real and aspiring power-brokers – religious and/or —. Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion. Minneapolis: Fortress

Press, 2003.

—. Varieties of African American Religious Experience. 1998: Fortress Press, Minneapolis.

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

Stallings, L.H. Mutha' is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth and Queerness in Black Female Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007.

Walker, Alice. In Search of our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Francisco: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983.

—. Living By the Word: Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1981.

—. The Color Purple. New York: Pocket Books, 1990.

West, Cornel. Dr. Cornel West on Spike Lee vs. Tyler Perry. November 2, 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBSnNKwEu6w (accessed August 1, 2011).

Wikipedia. Wikipedia. July 16, 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Can_Do_Bad_All_By_Myself_(play) (accessed July 19, 2011).

Winfrey, Oprah. "www.oprah.com." n.d. http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Tyler-Perry-Speaks-Out-About-Being-Molested-and-the-Aftermath/print/1.

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secular -- have their own vulnerabilities. On multiple

fronts, he and his audience help to amplify counter-

discourses. For a few hours at a time in darkened theatres,

fresh possibilities are envisioned and sometimes, realized.

His accomplishments are worthy of acknowledgement and

respect.

Similarly, African American humanism may be a stealth

discourse, a bold counter-narrative hidden in plain sight.

Like the knowledge of sexual abuse that is ubiquitous but

hidden, black religious non-theism is everywhere but often

isolated, disconnected and unacknowledged. It need not

prove its “authenticity.” Welcome or not, it is an

available disruptor of business as usual; freely offering

time and space for determined, joyful, possibility.

ENDNOTES

Alma Crawford