Lena explores this terrain, too. “The hardest thing about being a black writer in this town is having to pitch your black story to white execs,” she says. “Also, most of the time when we go into rooms to pitch, there’s one token black executive that sometimes can be a friend and sometimes can be a foe. I wonder if they think it makes me more comfortable, if that makes me think that they’re a woke network or studio because they’ve got that one black exec. It feels patronizing. I’m not against a black exec. I want there to be more of them.”

For all that, Lena contends, “it was a symbolic moment when Moonlight literally took the Oscar out of La La Land’s hand. It is a symbolic moment when Issa Rae’s poster is bigger than Sarah Jessica Parker’s. Now the hands that used to pick cotton can pick the next box office. . . . See what I’m saying? There’s a shift that’s happening. There’s a transition of power. But we still aren’t in power.”

When I ask Lena if she thinks we’ll ever have our lesbian Moonlight, she is quick to tell me we’ve already had it. “Pariah,” she says, referring to Dee Rees’s stunningly rendered 2011 feature about a young black lesbian coming out. “I fuck with that movie really hard. I thought it was really beautiful.”

Waithe sits in L.A. traffic. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz. Waithe fixes her coif. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

It is a few days earlier, on a cold night in January, following a blizzard. Sundance is in full swing and I’m watching Lena work magic in one of the hottest and most pumping rooms in Utah—a venue called the Blackhouse.

Co-founded by Brickson Diamond, in 2006, the Blackhouse Foundation came into being after the few black folks who’d been attending Sundance grew tired of seeing so few reflections of themselves on the Park City streets and of seeing so few black films. So Diamond, a graduate of Harvard Business School, along with two friends, Carol Ann Shine and Ryan Tarpley, created a place where their peers could gather to educate, network, and figure out how to break the white ceiling of Hollywood. During this year’s festival, the Blackhouse hosted panels and parties from 10 in the morning until midnight, Friday through Monday. Its impact is evident. In 2007 there were seven black films at Sundance. Come 2018, the count was closer to 40. “If you build it,” Diamond says, “they will come.”

Tonight the Blackhouse is hot, the drinks are being poured, the people are excited to be here, and the D.J. is dropping beats that are hard not to move to. Outside, a long line awaits entry to the main event: a discussion examining cinematic diversity and inclusion. In attendance: Radha Blank (Empire, She’s Gotta Have It), Jada Pinkett Smith, Poppy Hanks (whose production company, Macro, specializes in works by people of color and is the force behind Dee Rees’s Oscar-nominated Mudbound)—and Lena Waithe.

As a Sundance neophyte, I try to stand out of the way of a futile attempt to clear the dance floor and set up chairs for the panel. I hesitate to inform the D.J. that, in the history of black folks, no one has ever left the floor when a Prince song was playing. And now, not even two years after his death, Prince’s music in the room is a heartbreaking and sobering reminder that, as black creatives, we don’t have a lot of time to get the work done.

The room is already filled with beautiful people. A woman who worked on the costumes for Black Panther is one of the few who are able to negotiate heels tonight. Everything she is wearing, I want. Next to her, my friend Chris Myers is discussing the Sundance debut of Monster, a film based on a book by his father, Walter Dean Myers. Cards are exchanged, selfies are taken, bodies are pulled into long embraces. The crowded room, filled with everyone from crew to cast to producers, feels like a family reunion.

“There’s no box you could put her in,” says Common, an executive producer of The Chi.

Nearly 100 years after the Harlem Renaissance—the African-American intellectual and artistic movement of the 1920s—I can feel in this pulsing room what it must have been like to sit among the likes of Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes—people who were dreaming themselves and their work beyond the moment in which they were living. Tonight feels as energized and ready as that vibrant corner of Harlem must have felt a century ago. This new Black guard is no longer fighting for a seat at the table; they’re convening their own. And yet, while some call this surging West Coast energy “the Hollywood Renaissance,” I am with Ava DuVernay. We need to see how far past this now it goes, before we can own it.