My bathroom is filled with hair and makeup stuff and I play with it all the time. What the real lesson is, is that you can own your own sense of beauty. It doesn't have to be something you get from somewhere else.

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.

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.

Why am I beating my hair up? Because I want it to look like something that it isn't? These are questions that I've been pondering my whole life.

I felt like it was a courageous show [Black-ish] from the beginning. We are a black family - we're not a family that happens to be black. But the show is not even about us being black. The show is about us being a family. That is groundbreaking - on TV, the black characters either happen to be black or they're the "black character," where everything they say is about being black. I think that's the genius.

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 was shy, but it came out in a big personality. My turning point was when I let my hair go naturally and I got contact lenses. I am really blind, by the way. I have these big eyes that don’t work!