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| Yara Shahidi & the cast of Grown-ish |
By Mwabi Kaira
Fans of the Johnson family on ABC’s hit show Black-ish now have Grown-ish to fall in love with. The oldest of the Johnson clan, Zoey played by Yara Shahidi, is off to college and a spin off is born just like Denise Huxtable of the Cosby Show. Denise went to Hillman, a fictional HBCU school in A Different World and Zoey goes the Higher Learning route (shout out to Malik, Deja and Fudge) and goes to California University of Liberal Arts where she is in the minority.
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| Yara Shahidi |
Grown-ish follows Zoey as she navigates her new surroundings. She quickly finds her crew; Nomi the Jewish-American bisexual, Jazlyn and Skylar the track star twins from the hood played by singers Chloe and Halle who are signed to Beyonce and also sing the show’s theme song, Aaron the woke bae, Luca the dread loc’ed free spirit, and Vivek the first generation Indian trying to be the next Drake but doubles as a drug dealer pushing pills on campus because his engineering degree will take too long to get and he needs money now. Millennials through and through.
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| Chloe & Halle |
Much like Black-ish, Grown-ish tackles issues head on with laughter infused here and there. The twins are carrying their race on their shoulders just like the black superstar female athletes that came before them and they don’t want to disappoint their neighborhood by being failures. Nomi can’t come out to her parents because she doesn’t want to be their bisexual Jewish daughter. Vivek has deep issues with his father that none of his friends can understand; he calls his father a bum because he has been a cab driver all these years and lacks the ambition his son feels he should have. Vivek is that immigrant who is born and grows up in America and wants everything American forgetting the sacrifices made by his parents for him to have this life.
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| Trevor Jackson & Yara Shahidi |
Grown-ish airs on Wednesday nights at 8 PM on Freeform.
