A lot has changed for Jodie Turner-Smith since becoming a mom, and now she's opening up about one specific way having a child has changed her perspective. In a new interview with Elle UK, Jodie shared how having a biracial child healed her colorism — and how different her daughter's experience is going to be from her own.
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She always thought she'd have Black babies
"It's interesting because I had a lot of resistance to becoming a mother 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," she said.
But after falling in love with husband Joshua Jackson, who is white, plans changed.
It felt "insane" not to have kids with Joshua
"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,'" she admitted.
And since then, she's realized that their daughter, who turns 3 in April, will have a "completely different experience in the world" than she did.
Being a mom has helped her heal
"Now that I've got this little, tiny, light-skinned boss, I feel like it's the universe teaching me lessons," she said. "I've been given a daughter who looks this way to heal my own conversations around colorism."
Kids have a way of teaching us lessons and healing us — that's for sure.
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She opened up about her view of herself
She talked to Elle about how, to be desirable on screen, actresses needed to be light-skinned, which was never her.
"Anyone who has known me throughout my life would say, 'Oh, Jodie has very high self-esteem.' But it affected me, I just faked it till I made it," she admitted. "It wasn’t until adulthood that I began to come into myself. For a long time, people would even say to me, 'You’re so pretty … for a dark-skinned girl.'"
She also gushed about her love for her daughter
"I love this little girl so much. She’s so funny. It’s a big job to prepare children for the world. The best thing that we can do 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," she said. "I’m not acting like she’s not a nepo baby. But I worked damn hard to have a nepo baby!"
Whether she follows her parents' footsteps in the entertainment world or not, it's clear this is one lucky little girl.
