Monday’s episode of Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk was all about forgiveness, and both the actress and her daughter Willow Smith needed to clear the air about a few things.
Pinkett Smith spent most of the episode exploring her relationship with her late father, who spent most of her life absent and struggling with drug abuse, and how she would eventually learn to forgive him. When Jada later asked Willow who she had learned to forgive, the singer admitted she previously had a hard time forgiving her own parents, especially Will.
“I definitely had to forgive you and daddy for that whole ‘Whip My Hair’ thing. It was mostly daddy because he was so harsh at certain times,” the 18-year-old revealed. “It was a couple of years, honestly. Trying to regain trust for not feeling like I was being listened to or like no one cared how I felt.”
Willow continued: “And I had to forgive myself because I felt guilty because everyone is trying to make me better, trying to make my dream. But I didn’t really understand what my dream entailed."
She doesn’t go into specifics on how Will made her feel unheard during the “Whip My Hair” era. The song came out when Smith was only 10, and she’s talked before about her battle with fame and self harm following the song’s success.
“It was after that whole ‘Whip My Hair’ thing and I had just stopped doing singing lessons and I was kind of just in this gray area of, ‘Who am I? Do I have a purpose? Is there anything I can do besides this?'” Willow previously said of her 10-year-old self. “And after all of that kinda settled down and it was like a kind of lull, I was just listening to a lot of dark music. It was just so crazy and I was plunged into this black hole, and I was cutting myself.”
Red Table Talk airs every Monday on Facebook Watch.
