Take out your notepads, because this week’s episode of Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk was highly educational!
The Girls Trip star invited Kristin Davis on her Facebook Watch show, where they had an enlightening chat about interracial adoption with Jada’s mom, Adrienne Banfield-Jones.
For those who don’t know, Kristin is a mom to two adopted black children: 7-year-old daughter Gemma and a son whose name she has not publicly disclosed.
Right away, the Sex and the City star acknowledged the discussion was a “hot button” issue for many — including Jada’s mom, who admitted she had “certain feelings about this whole interracial adoption.”
But Kristin said she has to be public about it because knows it’s her duty as a mother to black children to “build as many bridges as possible” to the black community.
Related: Jada Originally Did NOT Want To Do Jordyn Woods Interview!
She explained:
“We don’t want to make it so they don’t fit into the black community and they don’t fit into the white community.”
While speaking about the adoption process, Davis explained the choice to adopt children of a different race in the first place.
She said she was “thrown off” by a page where the parent-to-be has to check off which ethnicities they’d feel comfortable adopting:
“If the right children is going to come to me, why would I say no to this or no to that. It seemed strange to me, it seemed racist to be saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ That’s what it seemed to me at the time.”
To that, Adrienne made an interesting point:
“I feel like people are so anxious and so desperate wanting a child, they’ll say anything and they don’t really understand everything that would be involved.”
That wasn’t the case for Davis, however. The actress explained she took a “lot of courses” to prepare for becoming a mom to two black children, one of which was an extensive course about hair care.
She revealed:
“What I learned is it’s a big thing and it has a whole long cultural history to it and you absolutely have to learn because it’s a bonding situation. You can’t just send her off somewhere, you need to — just like you would your own child you gave birth to — know what’s best for their skin and their hair. And if you don’t, you will be judged harshly.”
The star also explained how adopting two black children makes her constantly think about her own white privilege.
While Davis confessed she’ll never “fully understand” what her children go through on a daily basis, she says being a witness to the discrimination and systemic racism they’ve suffered from has been eye opening.
Tearing up, she noted:
“It’s horrifying, it’s hard to put into words. There’s been so many things over the years. Gemma’s 7 now. The first couple things that happened, when she was a baby and I was holding her in my arms, people would say to me, ‘Won’t she be a great basketball player.’ I would have to be like, ‘This is a baby, how could you say that without just being mortified?'”
Ugh. Some people.
She continued:
“That was when it began and I would hold my baby and try to be polite, but I’d just be like, this is really deep and bad and how dare they limit my child and how dare they make that assumption. That was the beginning of how I still feel. Our country is built on this, it’s institutionalized.”
Toward the end of their chat, Davis won over Jada’s approval as a mother to black children.
Related: How Jada ‘Redefined’ Her Relationship With Will Smith!
After the guest noted she never wants to “be under the crazy white privilege assumption everything’s going to be fine,” Will Smith’s wife commended her guest’s eagerness to learn more, adding:
“I just want to say to you, I at one point had a very difficult time thinking of white families adopting black children and I’ve gotten an education over the years … even sitting here with you today and getting even more of an education… For me, one of the things I had to discover about myself and some of my bias toward it, was that my attitude toward it was perpetrating the very thing that I fight against, which is racism. The idea of thinking black children only deserve black love.”
By the end of the talk, all three women agreed: true love is colorblind!
Ch-ch-check out the episode (below) for the full discussion.
https://www.facebook.com/redtabletalk/videos/1430912810380278/
[Image via Facebook]
