Perry unloaded on his fiercest critic at a Beverly Hills press conference for the West Coast premiere of his new film Madea’s Big Happy Family.
“I’m so sick of hearing about damn Spike Lee,” Perry said during the press conference. “Spike can go straight to hell! You can print that. I am sick of him talking about me, I am sick of him saying, ‘This is a coon. This is a buffoon.’ I am sick of him talking about black people going to see movies. This is what he said, ‘You vote by what you see,’ as if black people don’t know what they want to see.”
The Atlanta-based movie mogul is referring to a 2009 interview with Black Enterprise‘s Ed Gordon in which Lee alluded to Perry’s work on film and television, in particular, as coonery buffoonery.
“I am sick of him. He talked about Whoopi, he talked about Oprah, he talked about me, he talked about Clint Eastwood. Spike needs to shut the hell up!” Perry reportedly said.
Lee, a famous basketball junkie, told Gordon then that when he watched “the games on TNT, I see these two ads for these two shows [House of Payne, Meet the Browns], and I am scratching my head. We got a black president, and we going back to Mantan Moreland and Sleep ‘n’ Eat?” Lee said. “A lot of this is on us. You vote with your pocketbook, your wallet. You vote with your time, sitting in front of the idiot box. And the man has a huge audience, and he’s … Tyler’s very smart in what he’s done.”
Perry also took a historical perspective to show that strong black men have been pitted against one another for decades.
“Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois went through the exact same thing. Langston Hughes said that Zora Neale Hurston, the woman who wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, was a new version of the ‘darkie’ because she spoke in a southern dialect and a Southern tone.
And you can add Martin Luther King Jr. versus Malcolm X and W.E.B. DuBois versus Marcus Garvey. And I’m sick of it from us. We don’t have to worry about anybody else trying to destroy us and take shots because we do it to ourselves,” said Perry.
Perry’s latest film, Madea’s Big Happy Family, opens Friday in theaters. –terry shropshire
