Ellen was born in 1955 to an African American father and white mother. Concerned that having a black child might ruin her mother's life, Ellen's parents sent her to be raised by her paternal grandparents in a small, farm town in Washington state. Unaware of her mixed background, Ellen grew up both sensitive to the inequalities between blacks and whites and curious about the privileges of the white experience. At fourteen, after discovering that she was half white, Ellen moved to live with her mother in a predominantly white East Bay neighborhood.

She is now happily married to a Korean man and they have a young daughter. As a mother of a multi-racial child, she wants to empower her daughter to say, "I'm Korean, I'm German, I'm Black", and to enjoy the best that each of those cultures has to offer.

Ellen has said that the color blind approach to race is wrong: "How do we learn to love a black person or a Korean person without fear? That's what will move us toward a new humanity."