Kenya Barris, the creator of ABC’s black-ish, has never shied away from confronting pertinent issues within the Black community and his latest partnership with My Black Is Beautiful is continuing his work of transparency.
On Tuesday, black-ish‘s “Bow Knows” episode (Jan 16) will delve into the conversation Black parents have with their children about implicit bias, racism and hate they may face in the world. Andre “Dre” Johnson (Anthony Anderson) explains this to his co-workers when given a new marketing campaign and his wife, Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross) finds an online group of women that she leans on for advice and support.
“‘The talk’ for me growing up was my 100 percent was going to be viewed as 50 percent, so I had to give 150 percent to keep up,” said Barris. “With Procter & Gamble being such a multi-national, huge corporation it was heartwarming to me that they wanted to reach out to this group and say, ‘Look, we see you.'”
“I personally feel like we’re in a time where not talking about things has made us more separated as a society than ever before. What we need to start doing is realizing that there are a lot of conversations that we need to have.”
ABC’s black-ish stars Anderson, Ross, Laurence Fishburne as Pops, Yara Shahidi as Zoey Johnson, Marcus Scribner as Andre Johnson Jr., Miles Brown as Jack Johnson, Marsai Martin as Diane Johnson, Jenifer Lewis as Ruby, Peter Mackenzie as Mr. Stevens and Deon Cole as Charlie Telphy.
ABC’s black-ish airs every Tuesday at 9 p.m. EST.