Lenny Kravitz Goes Gray on “Black and White”

 

 

 

 

Black and White America, Lenny Kravitz’s ninth studio album, is technically a very fine album. But if you’re not willing to overlook the fact that Lenny Kravitz sidesteps talking about race in America — which the title of his album suggests he will — then you might understandably dismiss the album as artistically dishonest and pandering to the pop culture machine.

“People used to yell obscenities and spit at them,” revealed the 47-year-old Grammy-award-winner about his parent’s interracial marriage during the tumultuous 1960s. He continues, “and this was in New York City, not in the South.”

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Lenny Kravitz was born in New York City in 1964, to Sy Kravitz, a Jewish television producer with NBC, and the pioneering black actress, Roxie Roker, best known for her role on 70s the television sitcom, The Jeffersons.

In a recent article in USA Today Kravitz discusses his new album saying, “I was channel-surfing in the Bahamas one night and came across this documentary. I don’t remember what it was called, but it had all these people talking about President Obama. I know that there’s racism, but to hear people voice it in such a hateful way — I had to write a rebuttal.”

(Spoiler alert: Lenny Kravitz doesn’t rebut racism in his new album, Black and White America.)

It’s risky business when artists tack provocative titles onto their work and fail to follow-up on said title as if being provocative itself justifies the work. (Not to mention it insults the audience,eh hem). The initial shock value quickly turns to chagrin.

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There Goes the Neighborhood: Why Clybourne Park Doesn’t Do Right by Its Inspiration

“There’s no way to escape the fact that I’m a racist,” Bruce Norris told New York magazine this February, two months before his play Clybourne Park won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. During his childhood, his family fled Houston in part because of school busing; until he was about 14, Norris said, his main exposure to African Americans was his family’s maid.

This revelation shouldn’t make audiences think less of Norris’ play, which was a massive hit at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in 2010 and has returned there this summer for a string of sellouts. (It runs through Aug. 14.) It’s a smart and witty work, a humorous consideration of white flight and gentrification that upends stereotypes of numerous groups.

In plumbing the racial anxieties that arise when neighborhoods experience profound demographic change, Norris borrows his characters and setting from one of the American theater canon’s greatest treatments of the topic, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. But in riffing on Raisin—and in exploring the ways in which both white and black people talk about race, as well as working through his own anxieties about racism—Norris sidesteps the very real issues of the African-American experience raised in Hansberry’s play.

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