Black Women in Entertainment
Lena Waithe On The New Golden Age Of Black Cinema
From Black Panther to Ava Duvernay’s A Wrinkle In Time, cinema’s Harlem renaissance is upon us.
The 2017 Emmy Awards was a night of firsts. Atlanta‘s Donald Glover became the first black man to win Best Comedy Director. Sterling K Brown bagged Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for his performance in This Is Us – the first black actor in 19 years to do so.
Ava DuVernay picked up four Emmys for 13th, her documentary about the disproportionate number of black Americans incarcerated in the US.
And Lena Waithe became the first black woman to win Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series for her memorable ‘Thanksgiving’ episode of Aziz Ansari’s Master of None. In her speech, which moved audience members to tears, she thanked ‘everybody out there who showed so much love for this episode. Thank you for embracing a little Indian boy from South Carolina and a little queer black girl from the South Side of Chicago. We appreciate it more than you could ever know.’
A few weeks before Lena’s Emmy win, we spoke to her about ‘Thanksgiving’, which she wrote and starred in. Largely based on her own life, it’s both a coming-of-age and a coming-out story. It’s full of hilarity (her character, Denise, dates someone whose social media handle is NipplesAndToes23) and heartbreak (her mother’s response to her sexuality is both…
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