Ellen Pompeo is an American actress and producer. Pompeo married Chris Ivey in November 2007 after years of dating. Chris is a music producer and he and Ellen met in a grocery store in Los Angeles before she was “Meredith Grey”. They welcomed their first child Stella in Sept of 2009. In Sept of 2014 the couple had their second child named Sienna with help from a surrogate mother.
Pompeo recently was quoted in People Magazine “my daughters are black so it’s very important to me that they see a lot of images of beautiful, powerful, strong black women. Every time there is a black woman on a magazine cover, whether it is Kerry Washington or whoever it is, I make sure that magazine is in my house and on my table. For me that’s super important. Every time Venus and Serena Williams play tennis, I make sure my daughters watch them.”
I am not sure if Pompeo always refers to her daughters as black or if she did only in this interview. It will be very interesting to see how her multiracial daughters choose to identify as they get older and multiracial advocacy continues to grow. I know from being multiracial my identification has changed over the years because I had never heard of people identifying as multiracial, and on most forms there was a check for only black , white, or other. I always checked black and white even if it said check one. I knew I was both. Now that I identity as multiracial I have never been so proud of both of my races. I am sure Pompeo’s multiracial daughters look up to their white mom as one of their biggest role models. I know I look up at Pompeo and love her as Meredith Gray on Grey’s Anatomy. After hours of watching Grey’s Anatomy on Netflix I feel for certain I could perform some surgeries.
Makensie McDaniel
Project Race Teen President