Source: PATRICK T. FALLON / Getty
British actress Jodie Turner-Smith believes raising her biracial daughter has healed and influenced her feelings around colorism. Turner-Smith opened up about raising her toddler while speaking with Elle UK.
The dark-skinned beauty shared her “resistance” to becoming a mom before falling in love and marrying her husband, actor Joshua Jackson. The Queen & Slim actress recalled wanting “to have Black babies” so she could affirm the child’s experiences.
Now having a child with Jackson, who is white, the actress said raising their daughter has changed her perspective.
“She is going to have a completely different experience in the world than I did, because I have given birth to a mixed-race girl,” Turner-Smith said about her daughter, Janie, who turns 3-years-old in April.
“To decide not to have a child with somebody you love, just because they’re white, was insane to me. 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,'” the actress admitted.
“Now that I’ve got this little, tiny, light-skinned boss, I feel like it’s the universe teaching me lessons. I’ve been given a daughter who looks this way to heal my own conversations around colorism.”
Jodie Turner-Smith spoke on raising a daughter with “privilege”:
“The best thing that we can do [for children] is let them touch the earth and be grounded and real – as real as one can be when you have the level of privilege that obviously my child has,” Turner-Smith told Elle UK.
“I’m not acting like she’s not a nepo baby. But I worked damn hard to have a nepo baby!”
Turner-Smith and Jackson are rumored to have met at Usher’s birthday party in 2018. They made their red carpet debut in November 2019, then tied the knot the following month and welcomed their daughter in April 2020.
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