During the latest episode of Jada Pinkett Smith‘s Red Table Talk, which dealt with candid conversations about race, her mother talked about how she felt when her daughter once dated a white man named John.
“It’s really difficult for me because we have white people in our family,” Adrienne Banfield-Jones said.“I repeated what mommy told me, was that you have to learn to get along with white people, but don’t ever bring them home.”
She said it was the reason she took issue with Pinkett Smith’s white boyfriend ages ago, confessing that she never gave herself the “opportunity to even like John.” It was that same line of thinking that led her to give her nephew Jason grief over marrying a white woman.
“Just like I said, we have people in our family [who are white] and I’ve given them a hard time,” she said. “Jason is married to a white woman. She will tell you we gave her a hard time because we didn’t welcome her with open arms and she really had to prove herself. I feel bad about that.”
However, that same line of questioning was not given to a white man that other female relative married. In that instance, he was welcomed because, as Banfield-Jones said, “he acted more Black.”
Jada responded to this by saying: “Historically you would think that bringing a white man into the family would be more of an issue than a white woman. This runs deeper than we even are conscious of.”
