The actress, 42, and Tamera launched to stardom on the sitcom in 1994 when they were just 16-years-old, but,  despite their popularity, Tia told Entertainment Tonight recently that the duo was still not afforded the same opportunities as their white counterparts.

“So my sister and I wanted to be on the cover of this very popular [teenage] magazine at the time,” Tia recalled. “We were told that we couldn’t be on the cover of the magazine because we were Black and we would not sell.”

She continued, “I will never forget that. I will never forget where I was. And I wish I would have spoken up. I wish I would have said something then. I wish I would have had the courage to speak out and say that wasn’t right.”

Tia added that she was insecure at the time because of the lack of representation in the industry, saying, “I never saw girls like me. I never saw girls that, you know, were embracing their curls or I never saw curly hair being portrayed as beautiful.”

Now, she is focusing on making sure that her daughter Cairo, 2, and her son Cree, 9, do not grow up with the same insecurities and is grateful that representation is getting better in television and movies.

“To this day, I’m always telling my beautiful brown-skinned girl that she is beautiful,” she said. “And the same thing even with my son. I tell him how handsome he is. I tell him he is smart because I know what it feels like for someone to devalue your worth, and I don’t want my children to ever, ever, ever, feel that and not have the strength, or the foundation, to not believe it. To believe that they are worthy.”

Tia previously opened up about her time on “Sister, Sister” in 2017, confessing that she took diet pills to cope with “the pressure of being on television and wanting to look sexy and beautiful.”