Never Invited to Their Cookouts—But They Always Show Up With a Plate to Ours

In 2015, Lee Daniels sat at The Hollywood Reporter roundtable and did something rare for a Black showrunner in a white-dominated industry: he flipped the script. Instead of politely nodding through the usual “diversity is important” platitudes, Daniels pushed the white showrunners in the room to reckon with their empty writers’ rooms and their fantasy-land excuses.

He said what we all knew: You don’t hire us. Not because you “can’t find any.” But because you don’t look for us, don’t trust us, don’t invest in us, and don’t want to change the center of gravity in rooms you believe you own.

And watching those white creators squirm as Daniels spoke was an early preview of a deeper truth:

We’re never invited to their cookouts—but somehow they always show up to ours, carrying a plate, scooping up the culture, and leaving with the leftovers.

The Pattern: Their Tables Stay White, Ours Stay Open

Hollywood’s most persistent lie is that they “can’t find Black talent.” Yet when a Black show pops, when Black audiences show up, when there’s money on the table—the same executives who couldn’t pronounce our names suddenly appear like raccoons at midnight.

They know where our cookout is when the profits start sizzling.

This pattern is old. Older than streaming.Older than prestige TV.Older than Daniels, Chappelle, or the 1990s Black comedy boom.

We’ve been here before. And the 1974 Blaxploitation classic Truck Turner is a perfect example.

Truck Turner (1974): White Hands, Black Faces, and Profit Over People

Truck Turner is often remembered for its grit, its swagger, and Isaac Hayes in full badass mode. But look behind the curtain.

White director.White writers.White producers.

A Black lead? Yes.A Black audience? Absolutely.Black ownership or Black creative sovereignty? Nowhere to be found.

The film was engineered one-way: white men making money by selling Black stereotypes back to Black communities.

It set a template that is still with us: Black audiences as revenue, not partners. Black stories as product, not legacy.

Hollywood has always known that the Black dollar is dependable—even when we’re excluded from the rooms where our own images get manufactured.

Co-Opted, Diluted, and Overseen: When White Showrunners Claim Black Worlds

Even our biggest cultural juggernauts fall prey to the old pattern:“Let them perform. Let us control.”

In Living Color

Created by the Wayans family—a seismic cultural force—yet the control and final decision-making lived in the hands of white executives who ultimately clipped the show’s wings.

Dave Chappelle

His show became one of the most iconic comedic revolutions ever broadcast. Yet the machinery around him was white-run, white-structured, and white-prioritized. The moment Chappelle realized the jokes were being weaponized against Black people—and that he had no real ownership—he walked.

BMF, Power, and Force

The pattern hasn’t changed. Today, some of the Blackest shows on premium television—shows about Detroit streets, Chicago crime worlds, and Black survival—are still overseen by white showrunners.

• BMF

• Power (final seasons)

• Force

• And a string of other “Black brands” owned at the top by white executives

You can have a Black cast. You can have a Black star. You can even have a Black figurehead attachment.

But the showrunner—the person who decides the tone, the politics, the emotional truth, the representation, the narrative consequences?

Too often that seat is held by someone outside the culture, outside the stakes, outside the lived experience.

The formula remains: Let Black culture generate the revenue. Let white leadership capture the control.

The Diversity Equation: One-Way Traffic

When Hollywood talks “diversity,” it’s almost always a one-way street.

Black folks are invited to act, dance, sing, joke, and perform. But the moment the conversation shifts to ownership, power, or structural authority, the doors quietly close.

Diversity without power is just decoration. Representation without control is just exploitation with a smile.

Lee Daniels was pointing to this in 2015. He forced a question those white showrunners couldn’t answer honestly:

If you love our culture so much…why don’t you trust us to lead it?

And on top of that, we have yet another blatant co-opting of the Black media consumer space. All white behind the camera, and every face on screen conveniently light-skinned or racially ambiguous. They want the Black dollar, just not the Black people. This film DEADLY DILF, is a case study in the cultural extraction business model. It’s clear they were so lazy—and so dismissive of the audience—that they simply grabbed a white-centered script and didn’t even attempt to infuse it with real Black cultural nuance.

Why This Matters: It Shapes What the World Believes About Us

When white showrunners helm Black stories, the outcomes are predictable:

• Stereotypes get reinforced.

• Complexity gets flattened.

• Trauma gets sensationalized.

• Joy gets misinterpreted.

• Our darkness gets dramatized without our light.

• Our humanity becomes a special effect instead of a truth.

• We get shit content we didn't ask for fed back to us.

And the result is a cultural loop where Black pain is profitable, but Black power is “unbelievable.” Black genius is niche, but Black dysfunction is “universal” and bingeable.

We Are the Cookout. And It’s Time We Closed the Fence.

We need more than diversity panels. More than symbolic gestures. More than Black faces in someone else’s machine.

We need Black ownership. Black showrunners. Black executive producers. Black gatekeepers. Black institutions. Black sovereignty in storytelling.

We need to stop letting people show up to our cookout empty-handed and leave with the recipe book.

Because the truth is simple:

They don’t invite us to theirs because they don’t need our food. They show up to ours because they can’t survive without it.

And now that we understand the pattern, we have a responsibility:

Protect the culture. Own the culture. Feed our people first.

Happy Thanksgiving and remember the pilgrims showed up without shit to offer either. We all know how that went.