Tracee Ellis Ross Fought Back at Doing 'Lady Chores' on 'Black-ish'

Tracee Ellis Ross is explaining why you won’t see Rainbow Johnson doing “lady chores” all the time on black-ish.

During a new interview, the 47-year-old actress said that from the beginning, she didn’t want her character to carry a laundry basket or cook in every scene of her hit ABC sitcom.

“What I did speak up about from the beginning was, ‘Why am I carrying laundry?’ ‘Why am I the person in the kitchen cooking right now, when this has nothing to do with the scene?’” Tracee explained on the L.A. Times’ Can’t Stop Watching podcast. “Even sometimes when it does have something to do with the scene. I started coining them as ‘lady chores.’ ‘Why am I doing the lady chores?’ ‘Can’t Anthony [Anderson] do the lady chore?’”

Tracee went on to say that she wants to change the perception on TV that only women do chores around the house.

“I don’t believe they’re ‘lady chores.’ I believe they’re house chores. And I don’t believe that we should assume,” Tracee explained. “I believe every relationship is a negotiation between two people about what each of them feel comfortable doing, and I think the more that we portray that on television, the more that that becomes the reality out in the world, or matches the reality that the world actually is.”

black-ish was nominated for four awards at the 2020 Emmy Awards, including Best Actress in a Comedy Series for Tracee.