Time for a change of scenery. As her career gets hotter than ever, Taraji P. Henson revealed in a new cover story interview with Uptown magazine that she is taking the time to focus on her family.
The Empire star, 44, opened up about her son Marcel, 20, and the reason why the young man will soon be transferring colleges.
“My child has been racially profiled,” she said of her son, whom she welcomed in 1994 with her since-deceased high school sweetheart. “He was in Glendale, California and did exactly everything the cops told him to do, including letting them illegally search his car. It was bogus because they didn’t give him the ticket for what he was pulled over for.”
“Then he’s at University of Southern California, the school that I was going to transfer him to, when police stopped him for having his hands in his pockets,” Henson continued of her one child. “So guess where he’s going? Howard University. I’m not paying $50K so I can’t sleep at night wondering is this the night my son is getting racially profiled on campus.”
Henson has a strong bond with her son, whom she has been raising alone ever since Marcel’s father was murdered in the mid-2000s. “My career’s good, but I think about my family. It’s just the two of us,” she told the New York Post‘s Page Six this past June.
As her son continues his education at Howard, a historically black college in Washington, D.C., and works on a potential career as a writer, Henson is having a major moment with her celebrated role of Cookie Lyon on Fox’s Empire opposite Terrence Howard and rising stars Trai Byers, Jussie Smollett, and Bryshere Y. Gray.
“This journey is not over,” she told Uptown of her career. “I’ve come a long way from ‘Aye, that’s that girl from Baby Boy’ to now people know how to pronounce my name. But I’m just scratching the surface. For whatever reason, God gave me this life, and I’m not gon’ f–k it up.”
