John Legend Says His Multiracial Family Is A 'Blessing' For His Kids

John Legend says he and Chrissy Teigen’s multiracial family is a ‘blessing’

John Legend and Chrissy Teigen’s little brood is one of our favorite celebrity families to follow online, but beyond just being funny and cute on the ‘gram, the Legend-Teigen household shows the world the beauty of raising your kids in a multiracial family. Legend talked to People about his mixed-race family and why it’s certainly a “blessing” and a benefit for his kids to grow up around so much diversity.

“Chrissy’s dad is white, her mother is Thai, both my parents are black and from Ohio and we’ve definitely got an interesting cultural mix for my kids to kind of experience from all their grandparents and aunts and uncles but I feel like it’s gone so well,” Legend told People.

Legend told IHeartRadio in 2018 that despite learning from a 23andMe test that he’s two-thirds West African and one-third western and northern European, he said that his parents “think of themselves as black, so you think of yourself as black, no matter what other mix is in there, and America kind of tells you you’re black as well by the way America treats you and by the way America looks at you.” He then explained that Teigen’s “proud of her heritage” too, explaining that “her mother was born and raised in a village in Thailand. Her father, his family came from northern Europe. Germany and Norway,” but that Teigen’s parents met in Thailand.

Legend called his family’s diverse mix of cultures “a blessing” and that he’s always learning.

“I feel like we learn from each other,” he added. “We have different experiences. We laugh at each other. The food has been better because we’re able to merge our taste and our different upbringings and what we grew up eating. We learn from each other and we love the things that are different about each other. That’s been actually fun for us.”

Though Legend admits that media and popular representations of multiracial people has a long way to go (Luna loves princesses — which Legend reminds us “the majority of them are white or have very light skin and long hair and straighter hair than she has”), but as far as his family is concerned, he knows that his children can only benefit from growing up in a family where all their relatives bring a different cultural perspective and life experience to the table.

“They’ll benefit from the fact they have black grandparents, and a Thai grandparent and a white grandparent,” Legend said. “It’ll be interesting for them because they’ll have a lot of different experiences they can draw from and learn from. We’re growing towards a society that respects and values it and doesn’t look down on it all.”

“I feel like [my family is] accepting of each other, they love each other and we all learn from each other,” Legend concluded.