Does the World Need a Great American Biracial Novel?

Early on in Danzy Senna’s new novel, Colored Television, her biracial writer-professor protagonist, Jane, takes a meeting with Hampton Ford, a Black producer who is pivoting from network to prestige TV. Jane’s situation is less enviable. Up against a tenure deadline, she has a neurodivergent son, a daughter shunted from school to school, and a tuned-out abstract-painter husband at home—as well as a recently completed, 450-page second novel that has been unceremoniously rejected by her agent and her publisher. What’s more, home for the four of them is the latest in a succession of house-sitting gigs in unaffordable L.A. The family’s hopes for upward mobility have been pinned on Jane’s promotion to associate professor. No wonder, then, that she has resolved to seek her fortunes in the shadow of the nearby Hollywood sign.

Her husband, Lenny, calls her opus a “mulatto War and Peace,” and she has come to Hampton’s office desperate to somehow salvage the decade of work she’s put into it. She pitches him a biracial comedy that will defy the trope of the “tragic mulatto,” the stereotypical mixed-race character, common in 19th- and 20th-century literature, torn between white and Black worlds, unable to live happily in either. She goes on to explain to Hampton that mulattos, historically depicted as either “dangerously sexual” or “sad and mopey,” have in every case “been treated like a walking, talking predicament rather than an actual character.” Jane wants to create a show that makes audiences laugh, and in which biraciality is more than a woeful burden to overcome or bear with stoic resignation. “The Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies,” Hampton jokes after she describes her vision.

Colored Television tracks Jane’s attempts to collaborate with Hampton on a comedy about the Bunches, a fictional mulatto family that is a hotter, hipper, richer version of her real one. The novel oscillates between long passages of largely unproductive brainstorming in Hampton’s high-gloss office and scenes from Jane’s ever more shambolic personal life: Her son has an obsession with Godzilla, her daughter refuses to play with a Black American Girl doll, and she and Lenny have drunk their way through a stratospherically priced wine collection in the too-nice house they’re currently occupying, courtesy of a friend who is sojourning in Australia. They promise themselves they’ll replace the bottles, well aware that they can’t possibly, and that this transgression is a boozy diversion from their sputtering marriage and the receding prospect of a middle-class life.

And then, of course, there’s Jane’s novel, a swollen, spectacular thing. She describes it as “multitextual,” a chaotic collage of history and sociology, incorporating hundreds of years’ worth of mulatto experience, real and imagined. She has included a disquisition on Thomas Jefferson’s mathematical theory of race, and an extended treatment of the Melungeons of Appalachia, “who were believed to be the first tribe of triracial Americans to self-isolate and procreate, creating generations of future Benetton models.” She weathers moments of panic. “She had the feeling that the book was her last word on something and she had to get it right. There would be no second chances.” When she’d sent off the ill-fated manuscript to her unsuspecting agent, she’d allowed herself a moment of uncharacteristic bravado: She’d believed, if only fleetingly, that she had created “a manspreading major American novel. She was going to become the voice of her people.”

The contrast between Jane’s novel (bloated, grandiose) and Senna’s (well-oiled, precisely choreographed) could not be more apparent, yet these differences mask a shared preoccupation: Both novelists, fictional and real, have a Great American Biracial Novel in mind, one that will rescue the mulatto experience from lazy stereotyping. And both fall short not necessarily because they are unequal to the task, but because the task, as Colored Television sets out to demonstrate, is basically impossible, and anyway, beside the point.

Where, after all, is the obvious biracial archetype to either deepen or deconstruct? The tragic-mulatto figure is by now an outdated cliché from the pre-civil-rights era. Meanwhile, what might have been its replacement, the dream of a postracial hybrid hero that found its apotheosis in Barack Obama, has proved evanescent. The old racial incentive structures—the benefits and liabilities that accompany being of color—have twisted and collapsed under the weight of polarization, identity politics, and, yes, progress. Today, the world is our oyster (I am one of these mulattos) and we can rather freely identify as Black, biracial, raceless, or—for the lightest-skinned—white (though not “half white,” a category that does not exist within America’s convoluted racial calculus). Instead of attempting to untangle this web of racial alternatives, Senna has embarked on a satire of the identitarian cause itself.

She could hardly be better positioned for such a project. Senna’s career—this is her third novel since her much celebrated 1998 debut, Caucasia—has been singularly focused on the shifting social and psychological dynamics facing mulatto Americans whose skin, like hers, is light enough to pass for white. I’ll insist on this word, mulatto (Google it and you’ll see a warning sign accompanied by the words offensive and dated ), because Senna insists on it, not just in Colored Television but throughout her writing. A 1998 essay published in Salon was titled “Mulatto Millennium” and opened with the line “Strange to wake up and realize you’re in style.” Senna wryly diagnosed that America had been beset by “mulatto fever,” a worship of multiracial celebrities and stars, such as Lenny Kravitz, who basked in “half-caste glory.” She spun out a parodic vision of a mulatto pride march (buttons proclaiming MAKE MULATTOS, NOT WAR; a T-shirt announcing JUST HUMAN), rambling down an unspecified Main Street. “I trailed behind the parade for some miles,” Senna wrote, “not quite sure I wanted to join or stay at the heels of this group.”

This vignette has proved an apt metaphor for Senna’s trajectory. Born in 1970 to a white mother and a Black Mexican father, both of them caught up in the Black Power movement in racially polarized Boston, she was raised Black—“No checking ‘Other.’ No halvsies. No in-between”—though often mistaken for Jewish (her mother was, in fact, of Boston blue-blood descent). She grew into a skeptical ambivalence about performative “mixedness.” Riffing in the Salon essay, Senna described being a spy among white people and a participant-observer in “Mulatto Nation (just M.N. for those in the know),” and feeling alternately curious and nauseated in both roles. Often repelled by her discoveries, she honed a mostly keen and acerbic—rather than sad and mopey—take on biracialism.

Her fiction asks where this mulatto parade is going, and why people like her should join it, or choose not to, in post-civil-rights-movement America. In Caucasia, drawing on her youthful experience in the turbulent mid-’70s, Senna presents a protagonist, Birdie, who molds her identity to the dictates of a moment in which racial categorization was more firmly binary, more Black and white. New People, published in 2017, jumps forward two decades, giving us biracial Brooklyn in 1996, imagined through the lens of an untethered “quadroon” (also offensive and dated, per Google) named Maria who can’t decide whether to marry her “beige” and benevolent fiancé or to seek out someone more melanated.

Both books play out within the guardrails of the tragic-mulatto stereotype even as they press persistently against its limits. Those biracial dramas turn, as they have always turned, on the Decision. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan argued that people who suffer from hysteria, that outmoded diagnosis with a fraught history, are unconsciously plagued by the question “Am I a man or a woman?” In this sense, the tragic mulatto is akin to a hysteric, except stymied by the interminable puzzle “Am I Black or white?” The fact that a decision is demanded by a society organized around, and deeply neurotic about, racial categorization shapes their fate.

From the September 2021 issue: Danzy Senna on the problem with anti-racist self-help

Caucasia and New People are both saturated, deliberately and deftly, with this racial hysteria. The adolescent Birdie must pick the comparative ease of feigned whiteness or the shared heritage of Blackness. Maria must decide whether to become one of the glittering “new people” of the novel’s title, an in-style mulatto, or embrace old-fashioned Blackness, with all its weight and earned pride.

Colored Television, set roughly in the present, appears lightly autobiographical, focusing on a mixed-race novelist dedicated to chronicling mulatto life, and hitched to a Black artist who refuses to make legibly Black art. (Senna is married to the iconoclastic Black novelist and painter Percival Everett.) Yet as this new novel clicks neatly into place, completing her oeuvre’s historical arc, Senna faces a new challenge. She slips in a different metaphor clearly meant as a commentary on the current state of the mulatto project. “Race is like this smoothie here,” Hampton says to Jane, holding up a cup of green sludge he’s drinking as they bat around ideas. “This has probably got five different fruits and vegetables in it, six different supplements. But I couldn’t tell you what. Because the more ingredients you add to it, the more it tastes like nothing.” He puts the straw to his mouth, then remarks, “I hate smoothies.” A constructive collaboration on what seems destined to be indecipherable racial pulp is evidently not in store.

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“I can make it more biracial,” a nervous Jane promises the irascible Hampton as their meetings proceed and her frantic revisions fail to pass muster. Jane’s problem, which is ultimately Senna’s problem—and America’s problem, if it is a problem—is that she doesn’t know what “more biracial” would even mean, what mulatto essence our racially vampiric entertainment industry is trying to extract from her. Hampton implores Jane to produce a “biracial juggernaut,” reminding her that his boss hired him “to diversify the fucking content.” The higher-ups are trying to corner the mixed-race market—a fast-growing demographic in America—but neither he nor Jane has the faintest idea how to do this. She’s kept her platonic rendezvous with Hampton a secret from her high-art husband, and the reader is left suspecting that Jane hides the show from Lenny not just because he views television writing as a philistine perversion, but because she would have to explain what her biracial comedy is actually trying to say.

Her inability to distill a message from her show is a testament not so much to Jane’s insufficient writerly chops as to the challenge of wringing out a univocal meaning from biracial America. In a brief but telling moment, Jane sketches out a potential episode for the series during a late-night session with Hampton and his assistants, all of them hopped up on Adderall. She proposes that the married mulatto leads take DNA tests, and, this being a comedy, the results surprise. The wife, Sally, discovers that she is “more American Indian than Black,” and the husband, Kyle, learns that “both his Black sides were half Irish.” Soon enough, the characters are playing into new stereotypes—Sally starts gambling at casinos, while Kyle develops a drinking problem. Hampton savages the idea, but the aborted episode contains an apt lesson: If these two take DNA tests and promptly turn into Native and Irish caricatures, isn’t that a signal that their preexisting biraciality was never really an identity at all?

Senna has a flair for sketching her characters with a kind of thick minimalism: Snippets of backstory and an array of ticks and quips deliver an unexpectedly fully realized person. Jane comes to life on the page, careening among flights of artistic insecurity, California-chic fantasies, and the warm banalities of motherhood. She is far more rounded than the “walking, talking predicament” that she herself has derided. Still, Colored Television can feel like an exercise in shadowboxing. The pacing is brisk, and Senna throws sharp jabs and hooks. But the objects of ridicule are so numerous that they tend to blur.

Senna can’t resist letting her eyes wander from her tightly drawn critique of identity politics to a series of other, equally fashionable sources of ire. Here she skewers Hollywood, with its sellouts and bottomless appetite for lowest-common-denominator racial profiteering. There she takes aim at the American literary canon, which has too often reduced the mulatto to a tortured soul or sacrificial lamb. She doesn’t spare academia, with its system of feudal labor that ruthlessly separates anointed tenured professors from serflike contingent labor. Or the progressive public, with its identitarian fetishes, its class-agnostic multiculturalism that is all gums and no teeth. Yet the result of Senna’s broad reach is that she risks a certain flatness: Her project often seems animated by the reflexes of the moment, pummeling familiar targets that were beaten and bruised before she ever laid hands on them. Deft though many scenes are, the novel never quite builds to truly cutting satire.

Colored Television is here to tell us that deciding on some tidy new biracial identity to replace the stereotypical tragic mulatto is a farcical, futile exercise. You won’t find any definitive statement about the mulatto condition post–Civil Rights Act, post-Obama, post-Trump, post–George Floyd in Senna’s pages. “The mulatto people … were a riddle that could never be solved,” pronounces a scholar near the end of the novel, having thrown up his hands after a career of trying—earning Jane’s enmity at first, and then her empathy. That sentiment is one that some readers might consider a cop-out, but it also delivers a welcome dose of comic humility. Jane never triumphs with her mulatto War and Peace. Still, a tragic end is out of the question. In a quick, coda-like closing, Senna grants Jane and Lenny an enviable rescue—which includes scoring a fixer-upper “on expensive dirt.”

This article appears in the September 2024 print edition with the headline “Does the World Need a Great American Biracial Novel?”