My mom didn’t adhere to any of those typical rules. She woke us up for school every morning, and was there at dinner or would call at bedtime. She never left for longer than a week. She recorded while we were sleeping.
Sometime in my second year at Brown [University], I took an acting class. And the lightbulb went off for me. I fell in love with it. I realized that everything I was afraid of about myself, all my fears, could be used in that world.
I have to take some time to dream some new dreams. I feel like there’s a treasure hunt in front of me. A treasure hunt that is speckled with and seeded by a deep-rooted wild freedom.
Here is my wish and my desire and my pledge as well: that we remember our true nature and our womanhood. That we own and know that we are more than our bodies and yet our bodies are these sacred, beautiful, rhythmic houses for us.
I’m extremely blessed to have the extraordinary mother that I have, and I don’t mean Diana Ross, I mean the mother. My mom paved a road that didn’t exist, as did Oprah.
Black-ish is really a show about an American family and these are some of the topics that come up – for all of us, in different ways – and we get to see how this family is walking through it.
After college, I shot a pilot for a show on Lifetime, which was basically House of Style for a TV lover. I think I got paid $1,500, and I was like, “Mom, I’m moving out! I made it!” I did two seasons of that, but I felt like a talking head and wanted to do more.
My mom would leave her job, and there would be throngs of people screaming and banging on our car. I come from a very private family, but I was born into a public family.
![Tracee Ellis Ross Quote - Sometime in my second year at Brown [University], I took an acting class. And the lightbulb went off for me. I fell in love with it. I realized that everything I was afraid of about myself, all my fears, could be used in that world.](https://minimalistquotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/sometime-in-my-second-year-at-brown-university-i-t-683x1024.jpg)
