Lena Waithe dons a black shirt and a backwards baseball cap as she sits in the audience of an empty old theater. At the time best known for being the first Black woman to win an Emmy for writing, Waithe introduces short films funded by AT&T in the YouTube behind-the-scenes video for the film Spilt Milk (Blake Calhoun, 2010):“I don’t love representation just for the sake of representation. Yeah, we can have a bunch of TV shows with Black people in it but if none of them have substance, if the artists aren’t doing it with care, then it’s actually... it’s fast food.” 1 The film Waithe is executive producing includes a crew of mostly Black women, anchored by director Cierra Glaudé. AT&T’s sponsorship of Waithe confers corporate legitimacy on representation “for us by us” as valuable in the networked era. As Hollywood works to correct decades of marginalizing communities by their race, gender, sexuality, and other intersections, how do we evaluate better representation? Kristen Warner’s theory of “plastic representation” provides a useful framework, connecting the art of storytelling to its production and distribution. Warner argues for a shift in focus away from visible diversity, from “positive” and “negative” representation where “the degree of diversity [becomes] synonymous with the quantity of difference rather than with the dimensionality of those performances.” 2 Meaningful representation emerges in writing, directing, and producing by filmmakers of color. As Warner writes,“actual progress would involve crafting a more weighted diversity, one generated by adding dimension and specificity to