Parenting & Family Quote by Diana Ross

Diana Ross compresses an entire civic indictment into one shrugging, devastating “It was, like, impossible.” The power is in the list: single, divorced, three kids, show business, Black. Each clause is a door quietly closing, and the cumulative rhythm mimics the way discrimination actually operates in New York real estate: not as one dramatic rejection, but as a stack of “concerns,” “policies,” and “standards” that somehow always land on the same people. She’s not pleading for sympathy; she’s documenting a rigged maze.

The throwaway casualness - “Years ago,” “like” - matters. Ross speaks in the vernacular of someone recounting a memory, but the subtext is institutional: this wasn’t about taste or timing, it was about access. Even as a celebrity with money and visibility, she frames herself as structurally outmatched. That’s the cultural gut-punch: if Diana Ross couldn’t buy her way into the supposed meritocracy of Manhattan housing, what chance did a non-famous Black mother have?

Context sharpens the sting. Postwar New York was notorious for steering, redlining’s afterlives, and co-op boards that used “character” as a velvet rope. Ross’s specific bundle of identities also exposes how racism piggybacks on sexism and respectability politics: divorced becomes “unstable,” children become “undesirable,” entertainment becomes “unserious,” Black becomes “risky.” Her sentence is an anatomy of how prestige doesn’t erase prejudice; it just changes the script.