Danzy Senna Is Amused by Your Mixed Feelings

The sad music snuck up on us, stealing into the conversation just as we turned to the future of biracial identity. “We’re under deep suspicion at the moment,” Danzy Senna confided over lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where we’d settled down at a booth near the piano. Donald Trump had just accused Kamala Harris of fabricating her Black heritage; a few months earlier, Kendrick Lamar had called Drake, whose mother is white and Jewish, a “colonizer” in the chart-topping diss track “Not Like Us.” Senna is hardly one to cry over spilled melanin. A novelist who chronicles the lives of “mixed nuts” with screwball humor and ironic detachment, she would rather be caught dead than wail what she called, in a recent Times essay, the “racial specimen blues.” But our theme’s collision with the pianist’s schmaltzy noodling—Barbra Streisand? Céline Dion?—reduced us both to tears. “I’m really unable to speak,” Senna gasped, wiping her eyes between spasms of laughter. “It’s making me feel like a tragic mulatto.”

Senna loves the word “mulatto,” despite its checkered history. “Biracial,” she says, “sounds very technical and insect-like,” and could refer to any mixed heritage, whereas “mulatto” conjures the particularly American experience of those who identify as Black but appear to be brown, beige, écru, or even white. Senna herself is in the last category. She’s a slim, brown-haired woman with hazel eyes and elongated features, whose wry, restless curiosity lends her an aura of teen-age mischief. Dressed in a white blazer and a sleeveless beige top, with sunglasses dangling around her neck, she could have easily passed as a denizen of Hollywood; before we sat down, an elderly white man with a bamboo cane had stepped forth to call her “glamorous,” mistaking yours truly—a mulatto of a darker hue—for her “chauffeur.” It was a perfect illustration of how perceptions of mixed people shift between eras and contexts—even according to whom we stand beside. “ ‘Driving Miss Daisy,’ ” Senna teased me. “Have you ever felt blacker in your life?”

She’d last come to the Beverly Hills Hotel for an Oscars party, at the invitation of the actress Tessa Thompson. “I don’t hang out with movie stars, really,” she told me, but Thompson, who starred in the Netflix adaptation of Nella Larsen’s “Passing,” had optioned one of Senna’s novels. (Senna was already going to the main event for “American Fiction,” an adaptation of “Erasure,” a novel by her husband, Percival Everett.) When she belatedly asked about the dress code, Thompson sent pictures from previous years. “They were, like, A-list celebrities dressed in Balenciaga,” Senna told me. “And I was, like, ‘Fuck!’ ” She ended up mingling with Usher and Robert De Niro in “New York publicist black”—the only attendee who, when the Times writeup came out the next morning, wasn’t identified by name. Senna relishes being inconspicuous in a city where the word “writer” is usually preceded by “screen.” Although she’s working on projects for film and television, her heart is with her fiction, where “every character is some version of me.”

Senna’s latest novel, “Colored Television,” is about a writer whose main issue with her mixed identity is figuring out how to exploit it properly. Jane Gibson has spent nine years on a sprawling family saga that her husband, a Black visual artist, calls the “mulatto War and Peace.” When it’s rejected for publication, she fibs her way into television, pitching an influential showrunner on a biracial sitcom that she hopes might lift her family out of housing limbo. They’re house-sitting for a rich friend, but Jane’s dream is to buy an American Craftsman in Multicultural Mayberry—Senna’s alibi for Pasadena, a “love child of a town” where “the most charming aspects of America’s past had made love to its most hopeful, Obamaesque future.”

It’s the kind of mirage that Senna delights in puncturing. She published her first book at the turn of what she dubbed, in an essay, “The Mulatto Millennium,” a late-nineties mania for intermarriage as the road to post-racial utopia. “Butterscotch dream children,” as she wrote in her novel “New People” (2017), ran amok in advertisements, and demographic change inspired visions of “mud-colored” youths who’d “come to carry the nation—blood-soaked, guilty of everything of which it has been accused—into the future.” To Senna, such prophecies rang just as false as the old prejudices. Being fetishized has dangers of its own, and in “Colored Television” she considers its consequences in a country where “the binary is still more marketable than the muddy middle.” But there’s no need to cue the piano just yet. “The worst version of me would be writing about biracials in a respectful way,” Senna told me. “I get to make fun of us incessantly.”

That morning, we’d gone to look at houses, agreeing to pose as a couple. Senna picked me up in a silver Mercedes S.U.V., which she hastened to tell me belongs to Everett. (She drives “a shitty old Volkswagen.”) Our first stop was an open house in Pasadena, a three-million-dollar colonial full of cream-colored furniture and bland art. “Does a basketball player live here?” Senna wondered, gawking at the altitude of a marble countertop. Her protagonists tend to lose themselves in the homes, lives, and even the identities of others; in “Colored Television,” Jane drains her host’s wine cellar and begins “passing” as a television writer, convincing her skeptical husband that it’s for novel research. The trope is familiar from classic narratives in which the mulatto is always living an imitation of life, an impostor on both sides of the racial divide. But Senna’s infatuation with domestic artifice is also personal. “Growing up with all these crazy artists in a chaotic house,” she told me, “I get really drawn into wanting to live a staged life.”

Senna’s mother, Fanny Howe, is a poet and novelist from an old family of Boston Brahmins, whose “Mayflower whiteness,” in Senna’s words, “left no room for ambiguity about me being Black.” One of her maternal forebears was a slave-ship captain; another was a civil-rights lawyer and professor at Harvard Law School. Her father, Carl Senna, overcame years at an abusive Alabama orphanage to become the youngest editor at the storied left-wing publisher Beacon Press. They were “an interracial couple out of a dream,” Senna writes in her memoir, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” (2009)—two young, radical writers whose on-trend nuptials were celebrated in a glowing profile of Howe in the Boston Sunday Globe. Then, they had “the ugliest divorce in Boston’s history.”

Growing up, Senna shuttled between her parents’ households, attending public school in the midst of Boston’s desegregation crisis. “It was a political choice not to pass as white,” she told me, recalling the hostility of white classmates who discovered her background. “There weren’t any blurry Robin DiAngelo traps to fall into, where I’d be, like, ‘Oh, you love me!’ ” She later matriculated at Stanford, where she co-founded a Black literary journal called enigma and briefly considered studying medicine. “I thought, I can’t be another writer in this family,” she said. “If I was a doctor, I could finally get out of the artistic ghetto.” But she failed organic chemistry and resorted to journalism, relocating to Brooklyn after graduation. (She profiled Tupac for Spin.) Senna lived in Fort Greene, where a generation of Black writers, such as Colson Whitehead and Greg Tate, were moving away from race nationalism and becoming what Trey Ellis called “cultural mulattos.”

Senna finished her first novel, “Caucasia,” (1998) during a two-year M.F.A. program at the University of California, Irvine. (She now teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California.) It’s narrated by a mixed girl named Birdie, who’s separated from her darker sister and forced to pass as white when her mother, a white radical, is targeted by the F.B.I. Senna turns the archetypal mixed identity crisis outward, as Birdie’s appearance makes her an emblem of the anxieties of others—the envy of color-struck classmates, her father’s alienation from the Black community, her mother’s Wasp shame. “My body would fill in the blanks, tell me who I should become, and I would let it speak for me,” she writes. The novel was a critical and commercial success, but Senna chafed at its reception. “It was, you know, ‘She’s not a tragic mulatto, yay!’ ” Senna recalled. “ ‘It’s healing and it’s moving!’ And I was, like, ‘I’m never gonna write another book like that again, so I hope y’all are ready for some tragic, fucked-up people!’ ”

Her second novel, “Symptomatic” (2004), was a Jordan Peele film avant la lettre, a darkly comic thriller about a biracial journalist stalked by a co-worker who, like her, is an “optical illusion,” and who insists that they can trust only each other in a monoracial world. Senna considers it a precursor to the fiction she’s written since. “I’m interested in people of color preying on each other,” she told me, the “weird entanglements” that form between those who share a contested identity. Yet the book’s blend of horror and humor flummoxed critics, who largely ignored it. It was such a blow that Senna took a break from novels. She taught, wrote stories, excavated her father’s roots for the memoir, and grew tired of Brooklyn, where she’d never quite felt at home. In 2006, she moved to Southern California, where, as she writes in her memoir, “new money, new malls” and “new races . . . crop up every day.”

Later, Senna drove us by her own home in South Pasadena, a dark gray Craftsman with a yellow door and a porch laden with succulents. She and Everett enjoy the suburban life that Jane covets, and “Colored Television” echoes their marriage, particularly the ironic class contrast between Everett, a rugged avant-gardist from a long line of doctors, and Senna, a daughter of bohemians who is fascinated by bourgeois striving. Her family is lousy with writers—not only her mother, father, and husband but her sister, her aunt, and, most recently, her nephew—though they try to keep their work to themselves. “There’s a misconception that we’re living in a literary salon,” Senna told me. “We’re actually living in a house with two teen-age boys who are completely the focus of our attention.” She and Everett also have two dogs, a black Rottiedoodle and a white Labradoodle, whose names they frequently change. Right now, they’re considering W. E. B. Du Bois and Walter White—the N.A.A.C.P. secretary who went undercover as a white man to investigate lynchings, and whose life story Senna is adapting for television.

The family had recently returned from a rental in Martha’s Vineyard, a perfect place to observe the beige and bougie. Senna’s post-New York writing has focussed almost entirely on class and clique in the Black community, drawing inspiration from the “bitchy social class novels of the Harlem Renaissance”—Nella Larsen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, George Schuyler—as well as the work of British social satirists such as Evelyn Waugh. It’s an approach that’s often put her outside the mainstream of African American literature. “The immediate literary cred you get for excavating Black history and Black trauma is given much more gravity than writing about the present,” she said. “I’m shooting myself in the foot every time I write a book.”

Humor, to her, is crucial to establishing the reality of the mulatto experience in America. “There’s a feeling that we don’t exist in the culture,” she told me. “But we have to exist in order for there to be jokes.” Senna’s tend to be dark, cutting, and just a bit slapstick, indebted to American humorists like Mel Brooks and, especially in “Colored Television,” the original literary assassin of Hollywood, Nathanael West. Perhaps her most accomplished satire is “New People” (2017), about a picture-perfect couple of Brooklyn mulattos who become the subject of a documentary. “Together, they look like the end of the story,” Senna writes. Yet their brownstone dreams mask a deeper dissatisfaction. Her protagonist begins lusting after a poet and losing herself in research about Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple, the ultimate rainbow utopia gone awry.

California might be a similar place. “A land of perpetual amnesia,” Senna writes in her memoir, it attracted her in part because of its remove from her parents’ backgrounds—the Gulf South, with its buried traumas, and pedigree-obsessed Boston, where everyone has “grandfather on the brain.” By contrast, the Golden State’s mythos rhymed with the mulatto’s, promising to drown America’s fraught history in technicolor. Senna spent five years on a novel partly inspired by the actress Carol Channing, who revealed her Black ancestry late in life, but abandoned it to focus on screenwriting. The flattery of producers was intoxicating—Senna recalled shushing her children at dinner to take phone calls (“Shut up! Our ship is coming in!”)—but too often led nowhere, especially after the end of the post-George Floyd rush on Black narratives. Senna began to envision a novel about a writer tossed by the boom-and-bust cycles of racial representation, selling a fantasy of the life she wants to lead.

Our final house was the one that inspired Jane’s borrowed digs in Senna’s novel—a minimalist gem, with a view of the Pacific Ocean, called 4166 Sea View Lane. Senna and Everett subleased the place in the mid-twenty-tens, when, like Jane and her husband, they were nomads, unable to afford a dream house of their own. “We kept getting the houses of people who were divorcing,” she recalled. “It was like we were vultures! We were friends with unhappy couples who were richer than us, and we’d be, like, ‘Are they divorcing yet?’ ” Here, the carrion in question was the Cuban American artist Jorge Pardo, who’d designed and built the house as a commission for Los Angeles MoCA. A low-slung redwood box, it’s a home that literally looks inward, with glass walls that surround an airy courtyard within. In the novel, Senna describes it as “staring into its own navel,” renouncing the spectacular vistas that surround it—a metaphor for the narcissistic task of self-commodification.

Jane pitches her biracial sitcom to a Black showrunner named Hampton Ford, a brooding, cynical operator who looks at the omnipresence of interracial families and sees a potential windfall. He himself is married to a mixed woman, and has a red-headed child. But he also has mixed feelings about mixed people, whom he can’t help but see as harbingers of his own disappearance. In one of the novel’s funniest passages, he calls Jane in a panic after attending a kid’s birthday party at the Kardashian-Jenners’ in Calabasas. “Is there a single kid at this party who is not a goddamn biracial?” he fumes. “I’d take a white kid at this point, a fucking Korean kid. But it’s all biracial.” He begins diagnosing them with racial dysmorphia, predicting that one of the Kardashian tots will eventually “wash the Africa out” with plastic surgery. “Look at her mother’s face,” he raves. “Look at her aunts’ faces. Look what they did to Armenia.”

Hampton’s ugly imaginings speak to an anxiety that Donald Trump sought to exploit at the National Association of Black Journalists, where he framed Kamala Harris as an impostor who “happened to turn Black” when she was “always of Indian heritage.” (Senna wrote about the incident in her Times editorial, arguing that mixed people were still “a Rorschach test” for the country’s racial neuroses.) Given Harris’s lifelong participation in Black institutions, the crowd didn’t exactly begin chanting, “Mulattoes will not replace us!” Yet one need only compare her understated approach to her identity with the Obama campaign’s messianic promise of racial reconciliation to see that the mulatto millennium might be drawing to a close.

“It’s changed maybe three times over my lifetime,” Senna said, of the way biracial people are classified. “ ‘Black’ was what I was, definitively, as a child. And then in the nineties there was this multiracial movement. Everybody was into having their own box to check.” Now, she says, we’re in a visual regime where “if you appear white, you’re white,” and “passing,” once a verb and a decision, has become “white passing,” a judgment imposed from without. “I don’t think Rachel Dolezal did us any favors,” Senna said, joking that the string of white women found to have feigned Black heritage were “actually passing as me.” A more justifiable factor is the perception that mixed people have disproportionately reaped the benefits of the Black-freedom struggle, benefitting from diversity initiatives even as we are less likely to suffer skin-based discrimination. W. E. B. Du Bois defined a Black person as someone who had to ride Jim Crow in Georgia; today, he might say someone liable to being murdered by the police.

The schism has been exacerbated by mixed apostles of post-racialism like the “ex-black” writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, a fellow at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. Senna seems to allude to Williams in her novel. (“Once you declared that you didn’t believe in race, it seemed, you had to declare this rather banal idea everywhere you went—so it became a way of believing in race even as you pretended not to believe in race.”) The two were seated beside each other at a recent dinner, where Senna says that Williams accused her of adhering to the racial logic of slavery for identifying as Black. She calls this “historical amnesia,” a conflation of the one-drop rule with the chosen solidarity that emerged in the era of Black power. Given the rise of such thinking, she’s unsurprised that mixed people have become more defensive. “You know in Martha’s Vineyard, of all the high-yellow places, they were selling ‘Not Like Us’ T-shirts?” she told me. One of her sons wants to make tongue-in-cheek merch of his own, printed with the words “Your lightskin friends are afraid.”

“There’s no social protest novel I’m going to write about this,” Senna said; the alienation of a privileged segment is hardly the biggest problem in Black America. But she does see the shift as related to a broader fracturing of Blackness, reflected, for instance, by the movement to divide the descendants of African and West Indian immigrants from “American Descendants of Slaves.” (Some adherents believe that Kamala Harris isn’t Black because her father is Jamaican.) Another question is whom exactly it serves to let the beige blanch. One of Senna’s most interesting fans is an ex-white supremacist with Black ancestry who read “Caucasia” in prison, where he’d been incarcerated for conspiring to blow up Black and Jewish landmarks, including the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Senna was part of the man’s journey toward embracing his buried roots. He learned a lesson that informs all of her fiction. “Being someone who is raised to think of themselves as Black but appears to be white is a quintessentially Black experience,” Senna said. “Only in Black America does that story exist. And it’s existed from the beginning.”

As we trundled over mountain roads in Everett’s Mercedes, an earthquake struck Los Angeles, registering 4.4 on the Richter scale. But Senna and I were too busy with other decimals to clock the disturbance. “Have you done 23andMe?” she asked, referring to the genetic-testing service. We’d been discussing race as an elusive, shape-shifting construct, produced not by crude biology but by the subtle interplay of history, biography, culture, appearance, and choice. And yet, Senna likes to say, “What mulatto has ever resisted the allure of spitting in a vial?” I logged into 23andMe and adduced my share of DNA from so-called “Sub-Saharan Africa.” It was twenty-seven per cent—identical to Senna’s. “No way!” she gasped, briefly releasing the wheel to give me a high five. “We’re, like, so soul brothers.” She was and wasn’t joking, and it felt, just then, like the same difference. ♦