‘I Refuse to Hate’: Tyler Perry Delivers Powerful Acceptance Speech for Oscars Humanitarian Award

Director and producer Tyler Perry was honored with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Academy Awards Sunday night, and delivered a moving acceptance speech about how his mother inspired him, and urged the audience to “refuse to hate” their fellow humans.

Viola Davis began with a Maya Angelou quote about empathy to present the award to Perry, whom she called her “great friend, filmmaker, and philanthropist,” talked about how Perry had bought groceries for 1,000 of his neighbors, paid tuition for students, supported women’s shelters, and “paid for the funerals of the Black men whose names were on the placards at marches” last summer.

“The most generous person when I grew up was my mother,” said Perry in a prerecorded video, sharing how she had raised him to help others any way he could, and how he had applied those lessons during this past pandemic year.

Perry came to the stage as Davis presented him the award, thanking her and the Academy.

“When I set out to help someone, I’m not trying to do anything other than meet somebody at their humanity,” he said, recalling the lessons his mother had taught him:

My mother taught me to refuse hate. She taught me to refuse blanket judgment. And in this time, with all of the internet and social media and algorithms and everything that wants us to think a certain way, the 24-hour news cycle, it is my hope that all of us would teach our kids, and I want to remember: just refuse hate. Don’t hate anybody.

I refuse to hate someone because they are Mexican or because they are Black or White. Or LBGTQ. I refuse to hate someone because they are a police officer. I refuse to hate someone because they are Asian. I would hope we would refuse hate.

And I want to take this Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and dedicate it to anyone who wants to stand in the middle. No matter what’s around the wall, stand in the middle. Because that’s where healing, that’s where conversation happens, that’s where change happens. It happens in the middle. So anyone who wants to meet me in the middle to refuse hate, to refuse blanket judgment, and to lift someone’s feet off the ground, this one is for you, too.

Watch the video above, via ABC.