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Tracee Ellis Ross on 'Black-ish'

Her new ABC sitcom checks more than one box for the actress, who’s playing a character with whom she has something in common.

TRACEE Ellis Ross didn't grow up worrying about what having a black mother and a white father made her.

"It started for me on my college application process," said the actress, during an interview in July in Beverly Hills. "When they asked us to check a box, I checked both. Or sometimes I wouldn't check any box."

And now she's playing a TV character who might have done the same.

Starting tomorrow, the former "Girlfriends" star will be seen opposite Anthony Anderson in ABC's "Black-ish," in which she'll play Rainbow Johnson, a doctor, wife and mother of four children who their father worries might be losing their cultural identity.

Ross' character, based on and named for the wife of the show's creator, Kenya Barris, is biracial. (The real Rainbow is also a doctor, though in real life she and Barris have five kids.)

"It's really a fun thing to be able to explore through a television character. Especially on a show like this," said Ross, the daughter of singer Diana Ross and her first husband, Robert Ellis Silberstein.

"We've finally been able to get to a place where we can pull apart the monolithic idea of one race or another and actually move the dialogue into a class or cultural conversation, realizing that there are different layers, pieces to the experience," Ross said. "And that's part of why exploring a mixed character on a show like this is so interesting to me. Because we do actually get to have the conversation, without leaning on it."

When Anderson's character suggests that his wife isn't really black, "I get to say, 'Really? Why don't you tell my hair and my ass?' We don't have to have a whole thing about it. I just get to say it and then we move on," she said.

"That's part of what I love about this show, that we're actually dealing with a conversation that people are having all the time. But we don't have to deal with it in that old-school television way. . . . The jumping-off point might be the cultural identity, but the landing pad is really family dynamics and the connection between these people."

One thing that helps, Ross said, is "that we are not a family that happens to be black. We are a black family. But we are not talking about, and exploring, what it is to be black. Because often [on television] you are a family who happens to be black. So you're not really owning that. Or you're a family who's black, talking about black issues."

Would she have characterized "Girlfriends" as a show about people who happened to be black?

"No, we were a black show. I mean, we were a show about people who were black, but we were dealing with black issues," Ross said, adding, "Not that there was anything wrong with that."

She sees the humor in "Black-ish" as more universal and as possibly having international appeal.

"The race dialogue is a very American dialogue - of course it is, because this is an American issue. This is something that we've been dealing with in our country. Whereas cultural identity is something that everyone is exploring."

Even so, she said, there were things she encountered in "Black-ish" "that I don't really understand" and had to ask about.

Starting with the show's title.

"I understood my perspective of it," but then someone else will talk about it and she'll get insight she never had before, Ross said.

"And that's the kind of show I want to work on, that's constantly even challenging my thought. . . . That's interesting to me, and that's interesting television."

Phone: 215-854-5950

On Twitter: @elgray

Blog: ph.ly/EllenGray

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Tomorrow, Daily News readers and Ellen Gray weigh in on "Black-ish."