“zoë kravitz is our august cover star”
“Kravitz knows how to treat herself — but it hasn’t always been this way. Growing up as a self-described “chubby, awkward brown girl around a bunch of blonde girls” led to struggles with bulimia and anorexia in her teens…
it wasn’t only her parents’ celebrity that hampered Kravitz’s ability to feel like she belonged while growing up. 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.
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.’””
I feel like I keep on reading essays about this, women of color who grew up in the 90s around mostly white people and are having to unlearn a lot of stuff about their racial identities.
Related: “I Thought I Was White: On Coming to Terms with Racial Realities”; “Friendship and Race and Knowing Your Place”
