Actress Lisa Bonet’s and singer Lenny Kravitz’s 29 year old daughter, Zoe’ Kravitz, recently did an interview with Nylon Magazine, where she admitted that she did not know what it meant to be Black. She was confused as all get out about her heritage, so she instead identified with being White.
Now let’s keep in mind that, to her credit, both of her parents are biracial – Lisa is White and Black; and Lenny’s mother was the late African American actress, Roxie Roker (“Helen” from The Jefferson’s TV show) and his father was White- so Zoe’ is also of mixed heritage.
Peep what Zoe’ explained about why she could not connect with being Black though…
Via Nylon Magazine: As one of few black kids in her predominately white school, she remembers saying things like, “I’m just as white as y’all,” to her classmates. “I identified with white culture, and I wanted to fit in,” she says. “I didn’t identify with black culture, like, I didn’t like Tyler Perry movies, and I wasn’t into hip-hop music. I liked Neil Young.” But as time went on, her views shifted. “Black culture is so much deeper than that,” she says, “but unfortunately that is what’s fed through the media. That’s what people see. That’s what I saw. But then I got older and listened to A Tribe Called Quest and watched films with Sidney Poitier, and heard Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. I had to un-brainwash myself. It’s my mission, especially as an actress.”
Via Instagram
A big tenet of this undertaking involves choosing roles that don’t focus on her race. “I don’t want to play everyone’s best friend,” she explains. “I don’t want to play the role of a girl struggling in the ghetto. It’s not that that story isn’t important, but I saw patterns and was like, ‘I don’t relate to these people.’” Kravitz’s agent knows not to pass her scripts where her race is a key factor. But there has been one exception: the Sundance darling Dope. “It hit all the points that I believe in,” she says of the hilarious film about a crew of geeky punk- and ’90s-hip-hop-loving teens growing up in Inglewood, California. “I know those people,” she says. “I got the sense of humor.”
While Kravitz has had admirable success in this regard, there have been a few roles she’s lost because of her race, she says. “In the last Batman movie [The Dark Knight Rises], they told me that I couldn’t get an audition for a small role they were casting because they weren’t ‘going urban,’” she says. “It was like, ‘What does that have to do with anything?’ I have to play the role like, ‘Yo, what’s up, Batman? What’s going on wit chu?’”
I definitely commend Zoe’ for now attempting to get to know her whole self, but I can’t help but wonder what she was (or wasn’t) being taught as a child. I have nothing but love for Lenny and Lisa and I can tell that they love their daughter more than life itself, but in my humble opinion it just seems like Zoe’ needed a tad few more history lessons about her grandparents, her parents, and everyone else in her family who is Black, because she actually had the perception that being Black in America is summarized by watching Tyler Perry movies and bumpin’ Cardi B. and The Migos songs all day…while doing the ‘Milly Rock’ dance.
I respect her honesty, but here’s what this doctor is ordering: A Netflix rental of the entire Roots series, with a heavy dose of Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye and Gill Scott-Heron albums on the side.
