In 2008, after eight seasons in her breakout role as the star of “Girlfriends,” what Tracee Ellis Ross really wanted was to do it all over again. Fourteen years later, she has — and with more freedom than ever.
As the 2022 Emmy campaigns ramp up, Ross reflected on the legacy of “Black-ish,” the ABC sitcom that she starred in as Dr. Rainbow Johnson from September 2014 until April. Like “Girlfriends,” the show ran for eight seasons, but “Black-ish” got the privilege of a proper goodbye.
Viewers never got closure on the stories of Joan Carol Clayton (Ross) and her friends, who were then some of the few Black female characters on primetime television as the CW canceled “Girlfriends” before a finale was even shot. The experience left Ross unsure about her next steps.
“When I was on ‘Girlfriends,’ Christina Applegate and Julia Louis-Dreyfus were the two sitcom actresses that had two long-running shows,” she says. “I was like, ‘I want to be the Black woman who joins the ranks of Christina Applegate and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.’”
Dan Doperalski for Variety
“As a Black woman, there’s not a lot of those examples,” Ross continues. “I couldn’t point to Phylicia Rashad [as someone with a] second show.” Though the ’80s saw Rashad become one of the most prominent Black actors on TV for her work in “The Cosby Show,” there still wasn’t a lot of room for series featuring Black stories, or centering on Black women, until the 2000s.
Ross became the kind of example her younger self was looking for — or one of them, anyway. “I know that I am a light-skinned woman, and I don’t represent the breadth and the beauty and the power of all of us,” she says. “We are not a monolith. But I have taken [my career] with great responsibility. I think of ‘Girlfriends’ and ‘Black-ish’ and the many times that I have fought and said, ‘No. As a Black woman, I will not.’”
Ross says her work on those shows has been nothing less than the “honor” of her life.
“It literally makes my lungs expand,” she says, and is almost instantly moved to tears as she considers the combined 16 years of her life archived within them. Still, she is frank that both experiences were imperfect. Even now that she’s left those roles behind, she speaks with immediacy about the instances in which she confronted writers and producers about their portrayals of Black women: “You’re not gonna get me to do that,” “You can’t give me a good enough explanation [as to] why this makes sense,” “My inner compass says this is not right.”
“I often shift my idea of what is appropriate for a scene or an episode if I look at the larger landscape [of television] and have issues with perpetuating images that don’t work for me,” Ross says. “Because one of my missions in life is expanding our real estate as Black women. Less important to me is how others see us, but how we see ourselves. And how we get reflected back to each other.”
Ross has spoken publicly about striking what she calls “lady chores” from “Black-ish” scripts. Beginning with the pilot episode, she noticed that Bow was often written with a laundry basket in her arms as she entered a room or chopping vegetables as her husband, Andre (Anthony Anderson), comes home from work. Vehemently opposed to the trope of the sitcom wife who exists to
serve her husband and children, Ross demanded these moments be reworked. Eventually, these conversations expanded into sitcom structure itself.
“‘Why am I saying this? Is it just so that Bow can set up a joke for Dre? What is Bow’s point of view?’ I’m not trying to make myself the center of the story,” Ross says. “I just want the audience to know that I am a person off-screen, and when I enter the scene, I’m coming with the point of view of the full life of Bow Johnson — not just to set up the world of Dre. I was known [for saying]: ‘You better have an answer for why.’”
The fierceness of Ross’ self-advocacy on set was only matched by her protection of the young actors who played her children.
“I took my role as Mama T, as I was called, very seriously,” Ross says. “Early on, I had many conversations with their parents where I was like, ‘Look. My concern is your child’s well-being. I don’t care about the show.’ I said it. ‘I don’t care if you become famous. I have no investment in you getting an award. I care that you are in a safe environment where you can blossom as a human being.’”
Ross is especially close with Marsai Martin, who played Diane. Martin is now 17 years old with a rapidly rising career — in 2019, she became the youngest person ever to produce a studio film — but when she started on “Black-ish,” she was just 8. “I got to see those tender years of her growth,” Ross says. “Marsai and I had a couple of situations where I noticed she and I both had the same issues with a script. I said, ‘It’s really your character. But I am here. We can have the meeting together, and you can do all the talking. But if you lose your ability to express what you’re trying to express, put your hand on my hand, and I will take over.’”
Tracee Ellis Ross made sure she was not a steretypical sitcom wife on “Black-ish.”
ABC
In 2016, Ross became the first Black woman nominated for the lead comedy actress Emmy since Rashad 30 years before her. Though she’s been nominated four more times since — and Issa Rae has gotten it twice — she holds onto that statistic as a reminder that awards do not often reflect the value that actors from marginalized backgrounds bring to television. Confidently, she says, “Everywhere I look, Black women are the leads of their lives.”
Instead of coveting trophies, Ross has decided to “dream new dreams,” advice given to her by her manager after her 2017 Golden Globe win. “I realized I had had the same dreams for so long that they were no longer choices.”
Now, she dreams of producing — animation, documentary, podcasts and more — and her work as a producer is informed by the ethos she’s developed as an actor. For example, she resents and resists being pitted against other Black artists: “When we were getting shuffled around when ‘Empire’ was on, when we, somehow, were in the same time slot as ‘This Is Us,’ it started to dawn on me. There’s no other Black shows. Why are they programming all of us against each other?”
Even as she sets her sights elsewhere, there are parts of awards season that make Ross smile.
“I’ll be honest, my favorite part of awards is getting dressed. I love pretty clothes,” she laughs, before adding that the highlight of any win is the chance to publicly thank her collaborators and “say something important.” And Ross relishes that campaigning for awards gives her the chance to keep thinking through what “Black-ish” has meant to her. “It’s like having a birthday and being able to look back, but it’s one of the big ones. The Emmys will be like a 50th birthday,” she says, noting that she turns 50 herself in October and feels “amazing” about it.
Ross hopes that the legacy of “Black-ish” serves as “a promise” to the industry.“ In terms of the viability of seeing an American family that is a Black family — that doesn’t happen to be Black, but that is Black,” she says. “People saw themselves in us.”