Why Tracee Ellis Ross Stopped Waiting to Be Chosen

Tracee Ellis Ross spent 173 episodes over eight years playing Joan Clayton on Girlfriends — a character whose defining struggle was not being chosen. What Ross didn't realize at the time was how deeply that narrative had settled into her own cells. "When I came out of that show," she tells Keke Palmer, "I didn't realize how much my cells had taken on that sense of story." The public conversation she later started about being "the chooser" rather than waiting to be chosen was, she now understands, an unconscious act of reclamation. "It was a way for me to reclaim that I am the chooser — that I am worthy of choosing the right partner, and that I don't have to sit around being a prize to wait to be chosen."

The Weight of Being Watched

Ross grew up acutely aware that she was being observed — not just as a child of Diana Ross and Bob Ellis Silberstein, but as a Black girl who felt she had to overcompensate for assumptions others might hold. "I gotta be happy because you think I'm angry. I gotta be jazzed because you think I'm dumb. I gotta be smart because you think I'm dumb." This hypervigilance extended into her social life as a teenager, where she would avoid situations — like getting into a car with someone — because she imagined the headline: "Diana Ross's daughter has been pulled over."