Beauty in Black Is a Racist Show, and Tyler Perry Being Black Doesn't Change That
I don’t like this argument when other people make it. The claim that a book or a film degrades the race, that it hands ammunition to the other side, that it should have been made differently for the good of the group, has an ugly record. It was used against Richard Wright for writing Bigger Thomas, and against Zora Neale Hurston for not writing him, by critics equally sure of themselves. Ishmael Reed spent decades insisting that The Color Purple was a libel on Black men. I thought he was wrong then. I still do.
So I went into three seasons of Beauty in Black looking for a reason not to say what I’m about to say.
It’s a racist show. Not carelessly racist. Not racist the way any melodrama flattens people. Racist in what it asserts, across sixty-odd hours of screen time, about how Black Americans behave when the cameras are supposedly off.
The test isn’t whether the characters are bad
Every serious drama has monsters. The Sopranos were monsters; the Roys were monsters. That’s never been the objection, and anyone who makes it is asking for propaganda.
The real test is different. Does the world of the show contain an alternative? Is there anybody in it whose decency is presented as ordinary rather than as naivety, weakness, or a setup for the next humiliation?
Try to find one in the Bellarie universe. The family fortune is a hair-care empire sitting on top of a trafficking ring. Kimmie starts as a dancer at a club, gets passed around by men who own pieces of her, marries the dying patriarch from his hospital bed, and inherits the whole apparatus. Mallory schemes. Olivia schemes. Roy and Charles scheme against their father, each other, and everyone below them. Jules runs people the way a man runs equipment.
Tony Soprano had Dr. Melfi, and Artie Bucco, and a whole world outside the crew that the show kept cutting back to. The Bellarie world has no outside. There’s nowhere in it to stand.
The only physics in this world is the pecking order
Here’s the rule the show never breaks: every character abuses whoever sits one rung below them, and no one ever declines the opportunity. The senior dancer abuses the new one. The doorman abuses the dancer. The assistant gets what Mallory got from Roy, and passes it down again. Power differentials in this show are never left unused, not once, not by anybody, no matter how small the advantage or how petty the occasion.
That isn’t characterization. Characterization would mean somebody, somewhere, has a different relationship to their own leverage. What we get instead is a general law, and a general law about a cast that is entirely Black is a claim about Black people.
The slur works the same way. It’s in nearly every exchange, and it isn’t doing anything. It doesn’t mark class, or intimacy, or menace; nobody uses it differently from anybody else; it carries no information. It’s wallpaper. When a writer takes a word with that much freight and spends it as filler, he isn’t rendering a vernacular. He’s signaling authenticity at the audience, and the signal is that this is simply how these people talk, always, about everything.
Nobody in this show ever listens
Perry writes and directs all of it himself, at a pace no writers’ room could match, and the studio treats that as the selling point. You can see the cost in every scene. Two people state their positions at each other for six or seven minutes and the scene ends precisely where it started. No one is moved by anything said to them. No one concedes a point, or hears a point, or discovers mid-sentence that they were wrong.
A working scene has somebody who wants something, and the scene is the attempt. These are announcements colliding.
It’s a craft failure first, but it feeds the larger problem, because if characters can’t be reached by argument then the only things that move them are money, sex, and violence. Strip persuasion out of a world and you’ve built one where nothing but appetite operates. Which is, more or less, the thing the show is being accused of here.
There’s no auteur exemption
The defense arrives on schedule: Perry is Black, the cast is Black, the crew is Black, and he put a working studio in Atlanta employing hundreds of people the industry had no use for. All of that is true, and none of it answers the charge.
Whether a text traffics in a degrading depiction is not a fact about the author’s biography. It’s a fact about what’s on the screen. A Black director can make a minstrel show; the question was settled long before streaming, and it was settled by Black critics, not by anyone looking for a cudgel. Spike Lee said it about Perry’s work back in 2009, in language nobody has forgotten. Perry’s reply was that Lee should come meet his audience. That’s a defense of the demand, not of the goods.
And the audience is the point. Season one held a spot in Netflix’s global top ten for seven weeks and hit number one across twenty-eight countries. For a viewer in Manila or Warsaw or Lagos, this may be the only sustained portrait of Black American wealth they see all year: a family whose money comes from selling women, whose members cannot be in a room together without extortion, and who are never once contrasted with anyone who lives another way.
What I still refuse to ask for
I don’t want positive images. I don’t want a committee vetting portrayals, and I have no patience for the tradition that treats every Black character as a delegate. The sex worker, the trafficker, the poisonous matriarch, the son who wants his father dead, all of it is legitimate material, and a writer who avoids it out of duty to the group produces nothing worth watching.
Perry also owes no one an explanation for being commercial. Popularity is not an indictment, and the sneering at his audience from people who’ve never sold a ticket is its own kind of contempt.
So the complaint isn’t that the show has monsters. It’s that it has nothing else, and that it never once suggests the arrangement is strange.
He can make whatever he wants. He made this.