Tracee Ellis Ross Gives TED Talk Addressing Women's Fury

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Many Tracee Ellis Ross fans know her as beautiful, bold and dare I say it…even bubbly. The Black-ish star can also dress her behind off, but the one word many wouldn’t associate with the actress is angry. Ellis Ross is the last person we all can probably think of throwing drinks or snatching wigs on a random reality show. Her recent TED Talk comes at a tense time in our culture with the recent Bill Cosby verdict and the countless sexual assault and harassment accusations against power players in Hollywood that are ending careers, tarnishing legacies and most importantly holding men accountable for their problematic behavior. The talk opens with an anecdote in which a friend revealed to her that a complete stranger put his hands on her and physically moved her out of his way in crowded post office around the holidays. The sixty-year-old friend revealed to Ross she was furious to the point that she wanted to physically harm the man but didn’t. Ellis Ross used this story to share why it’s important for women to identify the fury that comes with their personal spaces and bodies being violated, as well as offering her thoughts on where that fury comes from and what both women and men need to do about it.

In true feminist form, Ellis Ross painted a picture for the men in the room to understand how their daily actions, no matter how well-intentioned, violate the power women have over their own bodies:

“There’s a culture of men helping themselves to women, and in this case, in a seemingly innocuous way, where a woman’s body is like a saltshaker: ‘Get out of the way so I can get to the fries.’”

“Men are so used to helping themselves, that it’s like … [shrugging] they can’t help themselves. And not because men are fundamentally less moral, but because this is a very big blind spot for most men.”

Ross went on to explain how the fury felt from these experiences, no matter how egregious or slight, trigger a fury from a sort of post-traumatic syndrome that women have from decades of messaging that implies that women’s bodies are public property. She added that if race is included in the equation, the power dynamic becomes intensified:

“When someone helps themselves to a woman, it not only triggers discomfort and distress, but the unspoken experiences of our mothers’ lives, sisters’ lives and generations of women before us. That’s lifetimes of women dealing with men who assume they know better for us than we know for ourselves, being the property of husbands, landowners, and having old, white men tell us the fate of our lady parts; lifetimes of having our bodies used for love and objects of desire, instead of bodies that we get to wield and use as we choose; lifetimes of knowing that whether we play by their rules or not, we still have to tolerate harassment, assault and even worse; lifetimes of our bodies being used as property that can be hit and hurt, manipulated and moved and like objects that are not deserving of respect; lifetimes of not being able to express the anger of our bodies. It’s no wonder we feel this fury. And if you add in the history of race ― which is a whole other talk ― it gets exponentially more complicated.”

Ellis Ross touched on the fact that when it comes to the fury experienced from these violations, women often are conditioned to suppress those feelings instead of acting on them:

“Women have been trained to think that we are overreacting or that we’re being too sensitive or unreasonable.”

“We try to make sense of nonsense, and we swallow the furious feelings. We try to put them into some hidden place in our minds, but they don’t go away.”

She suggests that the first step to dealing with this fury is acknowledging it’s there:

“Your fury is not something to be afraid of. It holds lifetimes of wisdom. Let it breathe and listen.”

Ellis Ross also added that men have some homework of their own and it starts with a chapter on having accountability:

“It is men’s responsibility to change men’s bad behavior.”

As the daughter of a mother who expressed her fury on a daily basis with a sharp tongue, wit and a glare that sent anyone the message that she didn’t play, acknowledging my anger has never been an issue for me, but I agree with Ellis Ross that our culture is experiencing a shift in which all women are feeling empowered to vocalize their right to safe spaces, ownership of their bodies and respect.

You can watch Tracee Ellis Ross’s eye-opening TED Talk below: