. Her work unapologetically centers on Black characters. The pace of her work has been steady, yet every film she’s made has been a struggle, one that hard statistics reinforce. From 2007 to 2018, only 6% of films were made by Black directors.
Recently, I called her up in Los Angeles, to talk about her current success and to reflect on the work it took to get her there. Prince-Bythewood started working in TV right after she graduated from UCLA film school in 1991, writing for series likeThese were supportive writers’ rooms full of Black creatives, but her next three jobs writing for TV dramas were very different experiences, and she often found she was the only Black person in the room. On one show, she had pitched a very personal story about a white family trying to adopt a Black child.
That intensely personal story drew from her own biography. Prince-Bythewood was adopted at the age of six weeks by a Chicago couple, a mom who is Salvadoran and father who is Irish. Shortly afterward, they moved to Pacific Grove, California, a socioeconomically mixed coastal town with few African Americans. She says, “It was tough. I felt like I was on an island trying to hide myself,” hyperaware that she was not reflected in her family or environment. “I was always reminded of my otherness.
It was the kind of place where in a junior high school art class, three white boys drew and displayed pictures of Black people with nooses around their necks. An embarrassed teacher scrambled to remove them, but failed to address the effect on Prince-Bythewood directly. Her well-intentioned parents advised her to ignore the negativity and bullying. “They saw me as their daughter, not their Black daughter,” Prince-Bythewood says, “So they thought the whole world should feel that way.