Daughter of musician Lenny Kravitz and actress Lisa Bonet, actress and model Zoe Kravitz sat down with Nylon magazine for her August 2015 cover story and opened up about some of the internal racial dilemmas she experienced growing up biracial.
Kravitz admitted that she was very insecure growing up in a predominantly white school. She described herself as the "chubby, awkward brown girl surrounded by a bunch of blonde girls." She stated, "I identified with white culture, and I wanted to fit in. 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." Not understanding her identity lead to a lot of depression for Kravitz as a youngster and she admits that it didn't help that her dad had super model girlfriends and her mom was "the most beautiful woman in the world."
She stated that growing up, she didn't realize how famous her parents were until she was a teenager and became more familiar with their work. She recalls, "When 'Fly Away' and 'American Woman' came out, I remember asking my cousin, 'Is my dad really famous? There would be this reaction to him. My mom was more low-key." Kravitz remembered an afternoon when her mother pulled out some old VHS tapes with episodes of The Cosby Show, on which she had starred as Denise, a member of one of America's favorite fictional families, the Huxtables. "I was conscious of the height of her fame," she says. "Later, I came to understand culturally what she meant."
And when Zoe Kravitz started a career of her own, she began to realize what her blackness meant as well, and her views of black culture shifted beyond just hip-hop. She stated, "Black culture is so much deeper than that, 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."
Now Kravitz is careful which roles she portrays, avoiding roles that typecast when it comes to race. She agreed to star in the new movie Dope because the movie reinforced values she believed in. She stated, "It hit all the points that I believe in ... I know those people. I got the sense of humor." Check out Zoe Kravitz in the movie clip below.
