Devale Ellis
speaker
540 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Devale Ellis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah.
No, I received that. And first of all, I thank y'all for giving me this platform to speak on it. But I do think that it's unfair for us to make it seem as if Kadeen and I were the first people to live like this.
The truth of the matter is that we're just the first people to pick our phone up.
Like, I am just a reflection of my dad.
I'm a reflection of my uncles and my grandfather. So I can't sit here and make it seem like, listen, follow me.
No, that's not... And every day I wake up thinking like, yo, DeVal, don't fuck this up.
Well, I'm deliberate with that. When I was in college, 19 years old, my sophomore... Professor, Professor Trasciati asked us to write a mission statement. The mission statement I came up with, each day I work to build a legacy not to be defined by my greatness, but by the masses I inspire to be greater than myself. I grew up idolizing Michael Jackson.
And it wasn't because he could dance and he could sing. I idolized him because he had masses of people who followed him. When he talked about healing the world, when he talked about it doesn't matter if you're black and white. I watched masses of people be like, yeah, if Michael Jackson can do this, I can. And I just felt like, you know what, we have a greater responsibility.
And in fact, a fiduciary responsibility as people to pay it forward. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's not enough to just say, I'm going to do this for me and my family. No, we should share so that masses after us can say, you know what? I want to live like that. I mean, that's what Jesus lived on. All of these religious people. Jesus wasn't out here saying, look, I'm the son of God.
I'm perfect. Jesus was amongst the rapists, the sinners, the disciples. He turned water into wine. He sat down with the worldliest of the worldliest and just showed them a different way. He didn't judge them. He didn't say, I'm perfect, be like me. He just said, hey, let's... Let's build. Right. And I'm not saying that I'm Jesus, because I know how the internet can be.
That's exactly what be happening.
And you can't. And you that group right there.
It just came out today, Meet Me Next Christmas.
Yes, let's talk about it.
Zach was a young man dealing with recidivism when we first met him. Didn't have anything to his name. He was making money. He was trying to give Danny money so that he could stay there once in a while. He wasn't the best boyfriend. He gave Karen an STD. He was, you know, not pretty... Not advanced when it comes to being an adult.
He was behind the totem pole, and we learned a lot about his character. But I enjoy playing the role of Zach because Zach is so many young men. Maybe you're not dealing with recidivism or dealing with being in and out of prison, but I remember my early 20s being lost and not knowing who I was or who I was going to be. So we get a chance to watch Zach go through a coming-of-age story.
He meets a black woman who is powerful and strong, who's able to give him empathy and have the strength to go, you know, deal with him through his trials and tribulations, which I understand for a lot of black women. Black women say, man, why we got to deal with struggle love all the time?
You know, but when I watch sisters and I watch the team, the one thing I say about struggle love is that struggle love is black love. You know, most of us don't come from parents who've had money. Most of us come from a place where we have to get it from the ground up. So when I look as a team and I look at sisters, I say, this is our story. Everything isn't happy.
Everything isn't rainbows and sunshine. It's work.
Absolutely.
Showing 421–440 of 540 · page 22 of 27
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