Jodie-Turner Smith opened up about raising a biracial daughter, describing the process as an “internal struggle” that has helped her “heal” her painful experiences wrestling with colorism.
In a recent interview with Elle UK for their May cover, the “Murder Mystery 2” star touched on motherhood, her experience growing up as a dark-skinned person, and the challenge of raising a biracial child.
“It’s interesting because I had a lot of resistance to becoming a mother,” the 33-year-old actress told Elle. “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.”
Falling in love with a white man, the actress said, changed all that. “To decide not to have a child with somebody you love, just because they’re White, was insane to me,” Smith 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,” she added.
“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.”
Smith also touched upon how growing up with a dark-skinned affected her self-esteem and psyche. “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. 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.”
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