Although Charlize Theron is raising two Black girls, the South African native has worries—like every other mother—on how to raise them to be culturally aware.
While promoting her latest film, Long Shot, out Friday, the actress said on the British talk show, The Graham Norton Show, that she tries to be careful not to push her own cultural heritage onto her girls, 7-year-old Jackson and 3-year-old August.
“I am raising two beautiful proud Black African girls and I want them to find themselves and not necessarily push my ancestry on them,” she shared during Friday’s episode, adding that she has “taught them two very sweet Afrikaans songs about politeness.”
Theron was born and raised in South Africa during Apartheid, which ended when she was 15 years old. She’s previously opened up about what it meant to be a white person, living in South Africa during that time.
“I’m very much a white African who lived and thrived under tremendously dark circumstances and that really marks you as a person. Whether that’s your ideology or not, you’re living in it,” she shared with Black Panther star Michael B. Jordan during Variety’s Actors on Actors roundtable last fall.
“When you’re young you don’t know anything different. And then you grow up…to see the rest of the world, you know something is wrong, but you don’t necessarily understand the broad strokes of it,” she confessed. “I didn’t realize how much anger I had inside of me, and guilt, for just living my life circumstantially in a place that I didn’t necessarily choose.”
Long Shot, also starring O’Shea Jackson Jr., is out on Friday.