Jodie Turner-Smith Says Raising a Biracial Daughter Has Helped Her "Heal" Her Own “Conversations Around Colorism”

Jodie Turner-Smith is opening up about the realities of raising a biracial daughter while getting candid about why she was originally hesitant to become a mom. 

When talking to Elle UK for its May cover story, the actress touched on how life has changed since welcoming her first child, Janie, with husband Joshua Jackson back in 2020 — and discussed how her daughter will have a “completely different experience” than either of her parents did growing up because of her biracial identity.

“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 said of her nearly 3-year-old daughter, adding that it’s not something she originally thought she would ever do. “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,”

The actress then explained that it was her relationship with Jackson that caused her to re-evaluate her views. “To decide not to have a child with somebody you love, just because they're white, was insane to me,” she shared. “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.”

Turner-Smith continued, “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.”

The update comes nearly three years after Turner-Smith and Jackson announced their first and only child’s arrival in April 2020 after first meeting in 2018 and getting married during a secret ceremony a year later in December 2019.