Tracee Ellis Ross Quotes

I was able to do To Sleep with Anger, a very powerful film about African Americans, their spirituality, and the things that happened within a small community and a family.

I just feel in a lot of ways black people are so much looser and cooler. Just as a culture, it's so much more real.

Why, on my mother's birthday, am I thinking about 'Father Knows Best?' At our house, mother knew best at least as often as father did, but then the title of the old sitcom, a homogenized portrait of American family life, was meant to be slightly sardonic.

Everybody's family has problems.

I always give the example, if you turn on the radio today, black radio, Lenny Kravitz is not black. Bob Marley wasn't black: in the beginning, only white college stations played Bob Marley.

I think that my films are basically family stories, beyond the fact that they are global and have political and social commentary.

I've tried to be inclusive in my '2B' series. Over the course of three books, I wrote African-American characters, a paraplegic character, gay and lesbian characters, a bisexual, Jewish heroine, a multiracial hero, Korean and Chinese-American characters, and a multiracial supporting character.

I'm a comedian who happens to be Muslim; my comedy stems on all forms of my identity.

My marriage started to go badly wrong after I had my second son.

I want to deal with somebody who comes from another country to the United States and has a family that comes. I don't care if it's a black family from Jamaica or a Hispanic family from Mexico. These issues need to be dealt with, but they need to be dealt with in the entertaining way.

Mr. Cosby wanted to do a show not about an upper-middle-class black family, but an upper-middle-class family that happened to be black. Though it sounds like semantics, they're very different approaches.

I remember back in the day when Chuck D called hip-hop the 'black people's CNN.' Well now, hip-hop is more like Fox News. It's biased, and highly suspect.

There is a distinctive African American culture that has roots in Africa and evolved on American soil.

I do know in the 1960s comics, Martian Manhunter took on the form of a black man - that could have been influenced by the political climate back then.

'America's Dad' is what we called Bill Cosby. And we called him that because, well, what a revolutionary way to put it. Through him, we were thumbing our noses at the long, dreary history for black men in America by elevating this one to a paternal Olympus. In the 1980s, he made the black American family seem 'just like us.'

The Huxtables laughed and bonded and debated and lip-synced. They were glamorous and simple and extraordinarily human. And affluent. And educated. And so many different kinds of black. You'd think that all of that would make them the Howard University of African-American family life. But white people wanted to matriculate, too.

For me, whenever I would see a lot of 'black films,' I didn't feel represented in it. I didn't feel connected to the characters or the situations or the humor.

Shows like 'All in the Family' and now 'Mom' - there's a tradition of tackling real issues.

I viewed black musicals before 'Jelly' as a form of cultural strip mining. The exterior remained, but all the culture that signified where the people had come from and their connection to the earth was absent.

I don't think I have tried to give any message through 'Mulk.' But I have put certain things on the table which are usually discussed in the living rooms, not in our cinema.

I would say 'The Big Narstie Show' is the United Colours of Benetton; it's for everyone. But I would definitely say that it has a black appeal, because that's what I am.

I've been seesawing between not doing too much racial stuff - because I'd rather be known as the funny comedian than the funny Chinese comedian - but at the same time embracing my voice and who I am and what makes me unique, you know, which is the racial background.

I view myself as a multicultural woman who happens to be black.

Those early Cyborg comics were very politically charged, and he was very aware of being a black superhero.