Actress Jodie Turner-Smith is opening up about motherhood and how her biracial daughter helped “heal” her feelings about colorism.
Turner-Smith shares her toddler daughter with actor Joshua Jackson. The Hollywood couple have been going strong since meeting at Usher’s birthday party in 2018, People reported.
They tied the knot a year later and went on to welcome their daughter Janie in April 2020.
As their little girl approaches her 3rd birthday, the British film star is speaking on how “different” her daughter’s life will be compared to how it was for her Black mother and white father.“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 told Elle UK.
The Queen & Slim star has been open about how quickly she fell for Jackson after having a one-night stand on the night they met. But she didn’t always expect to start a family with a Caucasian man.
Turner-Smith admitted she had initial hopes of welcoming a child with a Black man.
“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 explained.
But after falling in love with Jackson, Turner-Smith’s views on interracial relationships and biracial children completely changed.
“To decide not to have a child with somebody you love, just because they’re white, was insane to me,” she said.
“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.'”
Now that Turner-Smith is raising a biracial daughter that she brought into the world, the White Noise star had a change of heart.
“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.”