Pop star Lenny Kravitz, 47, spoke about the inspiration behind his new album Black and White America on a late night PBS talk show Tavis Smiley, reports Starpulse.
The singer-songwriter said the title track of his ninth studio album Black and White America was inspired by documentary footage he had seen depicting American racists threatening to kill Barack Obama if he won the U.S. presidency.
The Are You Gonna Go My Way singer watched a TV documentary shortly after President Obama announced his intention to run for the White House. The racist reactions, Kravitz – son of a black actress and a white TV news producer – said it brought up mixed emotions about his own mixed-race upbringing.
“[They said], ‘If the black man wins, we’re gonna riot, we’re gonna make sure he gets killed and this is a travesty… We all know this (racism) exists but to hear it like this, to hear it so strong in this day and age, it kind of shocked me for a second."
"That’s what inspired the song,” Kravitz told Smiley, “and then I started going into my whole past with my parents and what they went through. They got married in 1963 and they were in New York City… and they had hard times – walking down the street, comments, people spitting, yelling."
The rocker said the fact that his black mother played half of an inter-racial couple on the hit ‘70s TV show The Jeffersons was also groundbreaking: “That was 1975 and that was the inter-racial kiss on primetime television… and I remember the mail that she used to get back then. It was really bad, really bad."