In April 2020, Jodie Turner-Smith and husband Joshua Jackson, who is white, welcomed their daughter. In a recent interview, the actress opened up about how her daughter, Janie, 2, has helped her to heal from colorism she has faced as a dark-skinned woman.

In a conversation with Elle UK, the 36-year-old said, her daughter “is going to have a completely different experience in the world than I did, because I have given birth to a mixed-race girl. 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 thatI could affirm them as children with the love that I felt I needed to have been affirmed with by the outside world.”

Turner-Smith continued, “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. 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.”

Be sure to check out Jodie Turner-Smith in Murder Mystery 2, which hits Netflix on March 31.