Justin Simien is apologizing to Tyler Perry for being one of the people who possibly inspired Perry’s recent “highbrow negro” comment.
Complex reports that Simien took to TikTok to apologize to Perry after hearing Perry’s comments about him on the Baby, This is Keke Palmer podcast. During the podcast, Perry told Palmer about how he reacted to Simien’s criticism of Perry’s body of work in his film Dear White People .
“I called that n***a and told him I was gonna beat his ass,” Perry said to Palmer, laughing. “When I think about somebody like him or somebody who has something to say, I’m like, ‘Great, you have your opinion.’ I live from this seat, tempered, measured, patient, prayerful and disciplined. So when I saw that, I was sad for him because I think he’s really, really talented.”
Simien’s TikTok includes the director saying that he feels he’s the one Perry was calling a “highbrow negro,” saying, “Whenever I would take my weird script to studios or financiers, they were like, ‘This isn’t like Tyler Perry, we don’t know how to sell this.’ And I took that to mean that Tyler and I were at odds and I was railing against what I perceived to be the status quo.”
“…I was an outsider then and I was falling for the ‘okey doke,'” he continued. “Once I was inside the ring I realized if you’re a person of color, if you’re a marginalized person making work about your own experience, the most sort of loud and egregious negative commentary that you’re probably going to get is going to come from your own community. I was going around the road and suddenly like Dear White People which itself was trying to rail against the system. Suddenly people were telling me to my face I was not Black enough, I wasn’t gay enough, my movie was not radical enough, and I was like, ‘Oh no, this is what I did to Ty. This is what I did to Tyler.'”
While Simien did say that Perry asked, “Am I gonna have to come over and beat your ass?,” Simien also said he was able to apologize to Perry for “tearing [him] down for a system that [he] actually did not create.” He also talekd about how Perry has become an icon in the industry, such as being the first Black man to own a major film studio.
“It takes a lot of stress and a lot of energy to maintain that level of defense against, you know, all of these people,” Simien continues. “And I just want Tyler Perry to know he does not have to do that with me, for whatever it’s worth–and it may not be worth much to him, but it is nothing but love from me to you, brother. And that’s all I have to really say about it.”
Simien might be apologizing to Perry, but many of Perry’s viewers are anything but sympathetic. Many viewers who watched Perry’s latest film, Tyler Perry’s Divorce in the Black , railed it on social media, and critics gave it a dismal zero percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
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