Danzy Senna, whose mom is white and dad is Black, has written about race and identity in several novels and a memoir. Her latest novel explores anxiety over what it means to be multiracial in Hollywood. It’s called Colored Television.
The book’s pages include the word “mulatto,” which she says is funny and fitting for this darkly comic novel, and she sees it as the most specific term to describe herself and her “people.” She and her friends, many of whom are both Black and white, use the term liberally.
“Because every other term — multiracial, mixed race … [is] just generic. You could talk about someone who's Korean and Lebanese, and say they're multiracial. But when you're half black and half white in America, it's such a specific historical context, only that word which emerges out of that history, and all of its problems, is accurate for describing my particular experience and identity,” she explains.
The origin of mulatto is “mula,” the Spanish word for mule. Senna says it was a racist, pseudo-scientific idea that mixing a Black person and a white person was the unnatural equivalent of mixing a horse and a donkey.
“Mules are infertile. So the implication was that we — mixed race, Black-white people, were heralding the end of humanity. And so it already implicitly had a negative connotation built into the word.”
In culture and literature, mulatto also represents a trickster figure. Senna says people have seen her in that way too. “Walking into a space and people say something, assuming that I'm white or Latina, and then realizing that I am Black and white; they act affronted, as if I came in and tricked them by not announcing this upon arrival. And so it speaks to the anxiety around you as this racially ambiguous shape shifter, and it's a completely projected idea.”
“I've had television shows and films be adapted from my work that haven't yet seen the light of day, but hopefully will at some point,” says Danzy Senna. Photo by Dustin Snipes.
Senna explains that Colored Television follows a broke novelist (Jane) who’s married to a starving artist (Lenny), and her life and career haven’t panned out the way she hoped. She then tries to write about the mixed race perspective for Hollywood. She ends up meeting a producer who shares the same interest, and they go on “a very windy and hilarious but also disturbing journey … to create what they call the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies.”
The producer, a Black man named Hampton Ford, is tasked by his network to create new, diverse content. Jane convinces him that mixed race people are the next big thing, but she struggles to come up with compelling storylines.
“As soon as you try to start from a place of racial representation, it becomes something that you can't hold. And she's also been a literary novelist, lived on the outskirts of all these ways of thinking about her identity all her life, and been in the … stew of a very long novel. And trying to write episodes for a punchy television show and satisfy this man's need for something that's going to sell to the white network executives — proves to be a really difficult task for her, and also a very funny task. Because … even when she shows up for meetings, she's always dressed wrong. She just can't seem to do anything right in Hollywood,” Senna says.
In the book, Jane also fantasizes about having a family that looks like the Hannah Andersson catalog, is obsessed with bourgeois normalcy, and wants to live in a fancy house in “multicultural Mayberry,” which is a thinly disguised South Pasadena.
Senna’s own home is on a street where every house is occupied by a different ethnicity or race, she says. “It felt like something that could have only occurred in California to me when I first moved here. It felt like this other version of multiculturalism that was specific to California, and specific to this part of California.”
Senna adds, “One thing that's specific for Jane is that she does not ever see families that represent her own. She only sees families reflect a world that she's not a part of. And so I think in some ways, that has made her more susceptible to all of these voices and images she has constantly telling her who she should be.”
In her own life, would Senna like to watch a TV show about a biracial family? She says she’d love to get more representation of mixed race families, but she’s never seen it done well.
“I've had television shows and films be adapted from my work that haven't yet seen the light of day, but hopefully will at some point. So that's a possibility for sure.”
Danzy Senna will be speaking at Barnes and Noble at the Grove on September 24, 2024.