The new season of the Facebook Watch series Red Table Talk with actress Jada Pinkett-Smith and her family is in full swing, and so far the tea they’re spilling has been piping hot. We’ve learned a lot about the struggles Pinkett-Smith and husband Will Smith have gone through in their marriage and how they’ve managed to overcome.
In the latest episode of ESSENCE’s Yes, Girl! podcast, Jada and her mom Adrienne Banfield-Norris stopped by to chat with hosts and ESSENCE Editors Cori Murray and Charli Penn and opened up about the journey they took to become as open and as self aware as they are now. The pair shared that though many of the revelations they’ve shared may seem new to the public, they weren’t always facts the Hollywood family felt comfortable telling the world.
“I know it seems super personal and super new, but it’s not for us. This is stuff we’ve been living with. We’ve been in a seven year transformation, so these are old truths that we’re willing to share. We probably wouldn’t share our new truths, gotta wait a little longer and let the new truths marinate, but you know, these truths that we are sharing that everybody sees as so personal and so revealing, we’ve actually been living with for seven years,” says Pinkett-Smith.
Banfield-Norris added that it wasn’t an easy road for Will and Jada to get to the point where they were ready to share what their family had been gone through.
“It was a lot of work, and it took them some time to get to a level of acceptance with it all.”
Banfield-Norris also revealed that coming from a generation where you kept things to yourself, she wasn’t always comfortable with the idea of Will and Jada laying it all out on the table, but seeing their courage to share over the years has allowed her to free herself from the fear of judgment.
“I come from a world of judgement. There’s a lot of judgment out there in the world, and negativity. I think I was really, really concerned about that,” reveals Banfield-Norris. “It was difficult for me to let that go. But that’s what the Red Table has done for me. It’s given me a freedom and kind of released me from all of that concern about what other people think of me. Because that’s how I lived my life for many, many years, just been overly concerned about what other people think of me. And what other people think of me, number one, is none of my business, so that was a lesson that I really had to learn, absorb and put into practice.”
Watching Jada and Adrienne living their truth in a judgment-free zone is a lesson in self love for all of us. Listen to the entire interview above.