Black love is tough love. It’s being about each other. It’s to ride on each other and to make light of each other. It’s never vindictive, or mean. It’s like, I’m here to keep you grounded. Black love is complicated. Black love is hard. Black love is many things. It’s compromising. It’s communication. Black love is healing all wounds. –A Summary of Black Love by Lena

The historical evolution–the ‘Golden Age’–of Black cinema and Black love on the screen began to flourish in the 90s, delivering a plethora of instant-cult classic Black films with range and depth about love, friendships, and culture. Emmy® Award-winning writer, creator, producer, actor, and founder of Hillman Grad Lena Waithe chats with us about the history of Black love in film and her unbiased approach to bringing stories and characters to life on the screen.

Although Lena writes about romantic love a lot and has picturized it throughout her projects, she finds romantic love to be less significant within the Black community. Rather, she recognizes the chosen family as the kind of love that is vital and often, more unconditional than the love that we receive from those we’re kin to.

“Know that when somebody wins an argument, both parties lose.”

On The Chi, love is about not making the same mistake twice, and throughout, the gems and the takeaways are abundant. “How do you make sure that your partner can communicate to you when you trigger their wounds and why they’re triggered?” Characters like Rob (Iman Shumpert) who initially read for the role of Christian, Keisha’s nerdy boo, is a chill-ass, weed-smoking ass nigga who is more understanding than God. But, Lena has found that the people watching really f*ck with Rob’s energy and his approach. “Know that when somebody wins an argument, both parties lose,” says Lena who reminds us to not toss around offensive language that makes us feel validated in our opinion or wins an argument.

Lena’s creative process is heavy on intention. “It’s not triggering your purpose when you do it unintentionally. It’s my job, literally, every day, when I sit down to write characters, I can’t judge people.” Under the disguise of judgment, characters are likely to agree with each other, lowering the scale of life-or-death stakes and ultimately, the drama that we all love to see. “The characters should not be on the same page,” and every now and then, Lena has to defend characters’ actions that may not even align with her personal beliefs in real life. For that reason, she has to step inside the character’s shoes to make sure that they are justified in their argument, maintaining an authentic balance.

For the creator, it was love at first sight and at a young age. Lena writes about love because she has always been surrounded by it and is not afraid of it being complicated. “I came to realize that love has always been complicated. But in the right space, it’s supposed to be unconditional. When it is conditional, that’s when you want to be mindful.” Even characters like Ronnie in The Chi are a window into Lena’s childhood where she witnessed substance abuse and folks going away to do time. Still, it was always love.

“Even when we’re tough on each other, we’re mad at each other, there’s always a love there.”

Moving into her grandmother’s home on the Southside of Chicago after her mom and dad were divorced, along with her sister, was one of Lena’s most beautiful experiences, “I got to say [that] I grew up in the house that my mother was raised in.” Her mother was a first-generation Chicagoan because her grandmother was from Arkansas and left for the Windy City at seventeen years old. There, Lena’s grandmother raised Lena’s mother, aunt, and uncle. Her mother lives in Chicago to this day.

To bring love home, Lena references “Thanksgiving,” an episode on Master of None, Lena’s Emmy Award-winning screenplay, where Denise (Lena Waithe) comes out to her mother Catherine (Angela Bassett). The creator gives her TV mother space “to sit in that and be like, ‘No, I’m not a villain. I’m just a fifty-seven-year-old Black woman who doesn’t make any sense of this. What’s going on?’” It’s a conflict between a mother and a daughter who don’t understand each other, born of different times and experiences, trying to get it together. “Even when we’re tough on each other, we’re mad at each other, there’s always a love there.”

In the future, Lena wants to see characters that choose themselves. “That’s what I do. I pay attention to the conversation,” on social media, Lena says, who’s always tapped into the real, casual back and forth. And self-love most definitely made the era-of-doing-me list in 2023. “To be like, I don’t need nobody to be up in here with me. I don’t need somebody to validate me or a relationship to make me whole,” is something the writer hasn’t seen, but hints that someone in Season 6 of The Chi is some “self-partnered” type shit.