“I am tired of white folks telling my stories,” actress, writer, and producer Lena Waithe said in Vanity Fair’s April 2018 cover story. “We gotta tell our shit. Can’t no one tell a black story, particularly a queer story, the way I can, because I see the God in us.” The multi-hyphenate, stressing the importance of representation, added that she wants to create complex, iconic black characters in the same way Zora Neal Hurston and James Baldwin did. “James Baldwin saw the God in us. Zora saw the God in us,” Waithe observed. “When I’m looking for myself, I find myself in the pages of Baldwin.”
Waithe has already made an incredible mark on Hollywood. Last fall she became the first black woman to win an Emmy for comedy writing. She and Aziz Ansari won for penning the “Master of None” episode “Thanksgiving,” which sees her character, Denise, coming out to her family over the course of two decades. Waithe created the Showtime drama “The Chi,” which just wrapped its first season and has been renewed for a second, and has a women-driven comedy called “Twenties” in the works at TBS.
There’s no doubt Waithe is a trailblazer, but she is aware that plenty of black women writers paved the way for her career, including Mara Brock Akil (“Being Mary Jane,” “Black Lightning”), Susan Fales-Hill (“A Different World”), and Yvette Lee Bowser (“Living Single,” “Black-ish”). “They didn’t get their shine. They were constantly banging on the doors,” Waithe told VF. “I rolled up and all I had to do was tip it and walk through.”
Even so, Waithe is paying it forward and then some. Alongside Sight Unseen Pictures, she’s developing and funding indie projects from and about underrepresented voices. She’s vowed to read every script on the Black List site that has paid for an evaluation and scored an 8 or higher. She’s also a mentor for emerging writers.
“I have a ton of mentees,” Waithe revealed. “They’re all people of color. Some of them are poor. And I’m just trying to help them learn how to be great writers; and for those that have become really good writers, I help them get representation; and those that have representation, I want to help get them jobs. That to me is a form of activism.”
While Waithe is frustrated by Hollywood’s treatment of people of color (“The hardest thing about being a black writer in this town is having to pitch your black story to white execs”), she is encouraged by the extraordinary success of “Black Panther.” “You see history books — A.D. or B.C.? I feel like the world felt one way before B.P. and will feel forever changed A.B.P.” she gushed. “These execs are all looking around and saying to themselves, ‘Shit, we want a “Black Panther”; we want a movie where motherfuckers come out in droves and see it multiple times and buy out movie theaters.’”
Before “Master of None” Waithe wrote for series like “Bones” and “Hello Cupid.” Her producing credits include dance comedy “Step Sisters” and indie “Dear White People.” You can see Waithe next in Steven Spielberg’s much-anticipated sci-fi epic “Ready Player One,” in theaters March 29.
