Jodie Turner-Smith has recently explained how it feels like to raise a biracial daughter.
In a new interview with Elle UK magazine, Jodie, who shares a daughter with actor husband Joshua Jackson, said, “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,” continued the British model.
Recalling how she fell in love with Joshua, Jodie explained, “I fell in love with my husband and we talked about having kids. 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’.”
Talking about motherhood, Jodie disclosed, “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 colourism,” stated the 36-year-old.
The actress pointed out the best thing as parents “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”.
“I’m not acting like she’s not a nepo baby. But I worked damn hard to have a nepo baby!” she added.