Photo by Karwai Tang/WireImage
“Specifically with the African American community, I kind of felt like me and Jaden were shunned a little bit, like, ‘We’re not gonna take pride in them because they’re too different.’”
On Tuesday’s episode of Red Table Talk, Jada Pinkett Smith, her mother Adrienne Banfield Norris, and Willow Smith spoke about the effects of mom-shaming. After listing ways in which the actress suffered her “fair share” of mom-shaming, including the backlash she received after Willow cut her hair off at 11 to homeschooling her children, she realized that the negative reactions she received affected her daughter on a larger scale in comparison to her.
“Specifically with the African American community, I kind of felt like me and Jaden were shunned a little bit, like, ‘We’re not gonna take pride in them because they’re too different,” said the youngest of the Smith family. Also adding that “Even some of our family members, I would feel they thought, ‘You’re too different.”
Although Pinkett Smith got “shamed a lot for Willow,” she candidly mentions that when it came to Jaden Smith, the backlash was “hardcore.”
In 2016, Jaden wore a skirt for Louis Vuitton’s 2016 womenswear campaign. The rapper also launched a gender-neutral clothing line that same year telling Variety that it was made for “the girl that wants to be a tomboy or the boy that wants to wear a skirt, and people try to condemn.”
The mother of two also noted that people within the Black community “create stereotypes around ourselves,” which in return contributes to the shaming. Pinkett Smith says that as a community it’s something that they “have to learn to let go of.”
Additionally, her response to those who believe that the Baltimore native did her children a disservice with her parenting style says that she understands where that fear is coming from but, “I also understood from having been on the streets and having had been not your ‘conventional Black girl’ in the streets of Baltimore, I knew that self-confidence is what helped me survive.”
Tell us: Do you agree or disagree that the Black community creates stereotypes within the community?
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