In a candid conversation with Elle UK Black British actress, Jodie Turner-Smith is candidly opening up about how raising a biracial daughter is helping her to heal her own wounds with colorism .
“I had a lot of resistance to becoming a mother,” Turner-Smith said in her interview. “And, throughout my life, I always said if I were to have children, I wanted to have Black, Black babies so that I could affirm them as children with the love that I felt I needed to have been affirmed with by the outside world.”
Yet, the Queen & Slim actress fell in love with someone of a different race, 44-year-old actor, Joshua Jackson.
“We talked about having kids,” she told the high-fashion outlet. “To decide not to have a child with somebody you love, just because they’re white, was insane to me.”
Fast-forward to 2020 and the pair welcomed a beautiful baby girl to the world in April.
Yet, the 36-year-old did admit that her daughter’s birth gave her a “mini-pause” moment of reflection.
“But, at the same time, I did have this mini pause, where I was like, ‘She’s going to be walking through the world not only having an experience that I did not have, but looking like people that, in a way, I’d always felt a little bit tormented by.'”
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However, the Netflix Murder Mystery 2 actress came to the realization that the birth of her daughter served a larger purpose in her life.
“Now that I’ve got this little, tiny, light-skinned boss, I feel like it’s the universe teaching me lessons,” she said of her now two-year-old daughter. “I’ve been given a daughter who looks this way to heal my own conversations around colourism.”
She continued the conversation in a red carpet interview with ET, saying that her daughter “…is continually “pushing me, challenging me [and] making me sit with all the conversations that I’ve ever had. It’s like, that’s what it is, you know? And I love that. I love it so much.”
We cannot wait to see actual pictures of Turner-Smith’s baby girl. If you’d like to read the Elle UK interview in its entirety, click here.
