Tracee Ellis Ross Quotes

I'm every woman. It takes a village to make me who I am.

We really have to be willing to find out who we are instead of rebelling for the equal rights that we've been denied, that we do deserve.

Make a choice: continue living your life feeling muddled in this abyss of self-misunderstanding, or you find your identity independent of it. You push for colour-blind casting; you draw your own box. You introduce yourself as who you are, not what colour your parents happen to be.

The black community is my community - the LGBT community, too, and the female community. That is my community. That's me; it's who I am.

Drag allows people to celebrate their individuality, together.

Like all women, my path to womanhood is unique. No two paths are the same. Each of us travel with different privileges, challenges, and perspectives - some limiting, others illuminating.

I want us to all look at ourselves and look at our stories. It doesn't matter where you come from or what journeys you've taken. Your stories matter, and they're powerful.

I hope that every film I make has something to offer in the area of making people feel either vindicated or different in terms of who they are.

One of the greatest gifts of Black feminism to ourselves has been to make it a little easier simply to be Black and female.

Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad's message made a whole lot of people feel whole again, human being again. Some of them came out and found a new meaning to their manhood and their womanhood.

I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.

All human beings are the same. In the United States, people come from all over the world, all races, all backgrounds. And they're all doing what they want, many scoring huge successes. When I saw that, I became more open. It freed my soul.

My perspective comes in part from being a New York black lady, in part from being an engineer. I know I'm smart and have opinions worth being heard.

Nowadays, if somebody in America is feeling alone and wants to find a coming out story, they just search 'coming out,' and they'll find millions of first-person examples of people telling their story.

I watched a million coming-out videos, and that was kind of how I accepted it myself.

I'm trying to make a case for those people who don't have a sense of belonging that they should have, that there is something really worthwhile in having a sense of belonging, and recasting and looking at our modern history.

You know, the interesting thing about having traveled around the country as much as I have, and I think it's sort of inadvertently what made me come out or at least begin doing things within the community and thinking more about that, was that I get to travel quite a bit.

There's so much bullying with young people and them feeling like they can't come out, and they don't know what to do. And it's something that you have to work through. And, you know, for me, it was - I came out, and then I went back in for a minute. And then I came out, and I was like, 'You know what? This is who I am.'

Ours is a country built more on people than on territory.

It's important for youth, black youths particularly, to be able to fill in the blanks of themselves so they can know completely who they are, but also all the country to understand what this means: what the civil rights movement does to us as people. It is part of the journey that we must be on in order to become fully evolved human beings.

I'm Puerto Rican, but I represent everybody.

I grew up looking for myself onscreen and never could find myself. And I believe that I am supposed to be Toula to show people that it's O.K. to be different.

That is America. That is America. Those bonds of affection; that common creed. We don't fear the future; we shape it. We embrace it, as one people, stronger together than we are on our own.

Throughout my career in public service, the residents I have had the privilege of fighting for have embraced who I am, especially my Palestinian roots. This is what I want to bring to the United States Congress: an unapologetic display of the fabric of the people in this country.

I love being a mixed-race woman in 2017. I feel part of something big. There's this understanding that we're all in it together.