tracee ellis ross blackish black-ish directing
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TV

Tracee Ellis Ross Is Directing Her First Episode of black-ish

The episode will be titled "Fifty-Three Percent."
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Vivian Kane
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Published: Feb 2, 2018 04:13 pm

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Already serving as one of the show’s stars and executive producers, Tracee Ellis Ross announced that she’ll be directing an episode of black-ish later this season.

This isn’t her first time directing (according to IMDB, she directed an episode of Girlfriends, on which she also starred.) But her return to the job puts her in the middle of a hopefully never-ending movement in which more and more of women of color are taking the leap to directing episodes of their own shows. Women like Gina Rodriguez, Kerry Washington, and Yara Shahidi (in the black-insh spin-off grown-ish, no less) have all recently moved to the director’s chair on their shows.

To make this even more exciting, the title of Ross’ episode–as we can see on the script in her announcement picture–is “Fifty-Three Percent.” That sure sounds like a reference to the percentage of white women who voted for Donald Trump.

In the post-election episode “Lemons,” Dre’s coworker Lucy stood in for these women as a Trump voter who feels justified in her decision because after Obama, she says, “It’s eight years later, my dad’s still out of work, my hometown is about to go under and Hillary comes out saying she’s basically going to keep everything the same.”

That episode was brilliant, nuanced political art, both heartbreaking and hilarious. And we are very into the idea of Ross and this show diving deeper into the racism, identity politics, and shallow, performative allyship so prevalent among white women that they felt fine voting this man into office:

We can’t wait to see what Ross does behind the camera!

(via Tracee Ellis Ross / Twitter, image: Shutterstock)

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Image of Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.
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