Lena Waithe on Police Violence and “Queen & Slim”

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2019

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Lena Waithe is the screenwriter and creator of the Showtime series “The Chi,” about the South Side of Chicago, but she tells Jelani Cobb, “Getting your own TV show is like getting beaten to death by your own dream.” Her first script for a feature film is “Queen & Slim,” directed by Melina Matsoukas. It’s about a man and woman who are on a not-great first date, during which they unintentionally kill a police officer at a traffic stop that escalates. “I just wanted to write something about us. But unfortunately, if I’m writing about us, how can I ignore the fact that we’re being hunted?” The film arrives in the aftermath two notorious police killings of black people in their homes—Botham Jean in Dallas and Atatiana Jefferson in Fort Worth—only the latest in a long line of similar murders. “I do not want that kind of publicity for my film,” Waithe says. “I am like every other black person. . . . Every time these stories hit our phones, a piece of us dies, because we know that we could be next.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC
0:06.8	Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.4	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In 2017, Lena Waith made TV history.
0:16.1	She was the first black woman to win an Emmy for comedy screenwriting. That was for her work on Netflix's
0:22.5	Master of None. And the episode she wrote was based on her own experience coming out to her mother.
0:28.8	Wade's debut as a film screenwriter is with the new movie Queen and Slim. And while it's not
0:34.2	drawn directly from her own life, the film turns on an experience that's all too common for people of color,
0:41.1	a bad run-in with a police officer.
0:44.1	Jelani Cobb, a staff writer at The New Yorker,
0:46.2	recently sat down to talk with Lena Waithe.
0:48.7	And fair warning, they do mention a couple of key plot points
0:52.3	in the course of their conversation.
0:54.9	You know, you won the Emmy in 2017, and, you know, you've been ubiquitous since then.
1:01.1	You know, you have the film that's just about to come out, Queen and Slim, you have the shy, you have 20s, you have the film you were telling me that you just, you know, wrote seemingly like, I mean, it sounds like you wrote it like in the middle of running to pick up your dry cleaning.
1:18.2	It's like, oh, let me just knock out this script here while I'm waiting for them to get my laundry.
1:24.1	But in your Showtime series, The Shy, one of your characters, Emmett, who was played by Jacob
1:29.8	Latimore, is really into sneakers.
1:32.3	Yeah.
1:32.9	And I know you're a major sneakerhead yourself.
1:35.6	So do you write a part of yourself into each of your characters?
1:40.3	I can't not, you know.
1:43.9	Yes, I'm the vessel, but because I am, some of me is going to get in there.
	...

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