Jodie Turner-Smith on how becoming a mother helped heal her colourism trauma
Actor and fashion icon Jodie Turner-Smith has shared some honest thoughts on how becoming a mother has helped heal the colourism trauma she's experienced in her life.
"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," she told ELLE UK of the nearly two-year-old daughter she shares with Joshua Jackson. "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."
Elaborating on this, Turner-Smith said she decided not to let this internal conflict stop her from having children. "Then I fell in love with my husband and we talked about having kids. 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'."
As for how motherhood has transformed these feelings that she'd harboured for so long, Turner-Smith 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 colourism."
Further speaking about how colourism – the prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone – has impacted her, Turner-Smith said: "For a longtime in entertainment any sort of dark-skinned figures were held up as unattractive."
"[Never seeing] anybody who looks like you held up as beautiful. That definitely affected my psyche," she went on.
"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 recalled. "When I started modelling I went around to agencies, and they would belike, 'We already have one Black girl and she’s mixed-race.' That’s why I love Naomi Campbell, Iman and Bethann Hardison, how vocal they were about pushing this idea that the fashion industry was too white."
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