David Remnick: Staff writer Julian Lucas traveled to Los Angeles recently to interview an author who's been on his radar and on his mind for the better part of the past 15 years.

Julian Lucas: Do you feel more like a Californian New Englander or a New Yorker?

Danzy Senna: That's the main split in my identity. The biracial thing is so small. I'm really like, "Which place do I belong?" I'm still conflicted about it.

David Remnick: The writer is Danzy Senna, and her big subject in novels, stories, and essays is the experience of navigating America's very complicated racial lines. Senna's new novel is called Colored Television. Here's Julian Lucas.

Julian Lucas: I first came to Danzy's work in college when I read her essay The Mulatto Millennium. To me, having grown up biracial in Northern New Jersey, discovering Danzy's work was so important to me because I had never before read anyone who captured the experience of being Black identified but racially ambiguous in a country that was increasingly putting enormous expectations on who we were and what kind of world we were supposed to bring about. One thing that I've always loved about Senna's work is its irreverence, and her latest novel is no exception.

A story that with an enormous amount of humor and compassion and also irony and sarcasm gets at the changing nature of biracial identity in America today and also the way that pop culture shapes how all of us see ourselves. You have incredible timing with this novel because you've written a novel about a biracial woman in contemporary California and the way those two mythologies intersect. Of course, in a turn that few of us expected, now we have a candidate for president who is a biracial woman from California, Kamala Harris.

Danzy Senna: Who looks slightly like the cover of my novel. I was looking at the face, I was like, "It looks a little like a young Kamala Harris."

Julian Lucas: It could be Kamala, but I was already thinking about Kamala connection with this novel before Trump's now infamous comments about her at the National Association of Black Journalists, where he basically said that Kamala Harris was not really Black because she's biracial.

You wrote a really powerful and also very funny op-ed in the New York Times about that, about the experience that biracial people have with this accusation of somehow being deceptive, trying to steal the valor of legitimate Black people, or in a white context, perhaps not being immediately legible as Black, and then being seen as a kind of spy for the other community. What did you see in that moment when Trump made those hateful comments?

Danzy Senna: Yes, it was the bewilderment that he expressed and the sort of stagey bewilderment because it felt like he was putting it on, but to say, is she Black or is she Indian like she was Indian and now she's Black. This idea that you can't exist, basically, is in that statement that resonated so strongly with me that who you are is a mathematical impossibility or scientific oddity. That you cannot actually be both of those things at once was so clear in his comment and that we're illegible and we're impossibilities that confound and bring out the suspicion of the world by our very existence.

Julian Lucas: Exactly. If I could quote a line from the op-ed, you say his accusation suggested that claiming Blackness could only be for the purpose of cynical political maneuvering. The implication was that if we could be anything else, Indian or white, why wouldn't we?

Danzy Senna: Right. This is an interesting moment. I'm 53 and was born in 1970. In my childhood, if you were half Black and half white, you were Black. That was not a conversation. There was no other category, in fact, that you couldn't say you were mixed because that wasn't a box to check. If you were the child of one Black parent, you were Black. That wasn't just because of the slave idea of the one-drop rule. That was also because I was being raised in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and in the advent of Black power.

My parents were very conscious of the fact of all of the racism that would meet us outside of our door, and that the identity that really needed protecting and elevating and affirming was the Black identity that whiteness would be taken care of and that was going to be elevated no matter what, but that they saw in us the potential for that shame and that denigration of Blackness because they were aware, politicized people.

I think we are at risk of historical amnesia when we pathologize the choice to identify as Black and that we're not understanding that these things emerge out of a particular context. For me, that context was the Black power movement. The choice to identify as Black was a political statement and it was a cultural and political choice as much as it was something that was the only option at the time.

I think that we're also living in a strange moment where once again, mixed-race people are up for debate and speculation, and there's a real return to the idea that your appearance is what matters, not what your background is or your identity. Your appearance is what determines what you are. If your appearance is unclear to us, then we're going to debate and we're going to discount you, and we're going to accuse you of being an imposter.

Julian Lucas: To go back to Trump's comments about Kamala, one thing that I thought was interesting about them is that he was making them in a context, actually, of you could say, somewhat feebly, trying to make common cause with a certain subset of the Black community that is skeptical of mixed-race people. Trump has talked a lot about immigrants are stealing your Black jobs.

The implication here was this is an Indian woman who is now trying to steal your Black identity. I don't think that flies with the vast majority of Black people in the US, but it does speak to a real anxiety within the Black community as well.

Danzy Senna: Yes. I don't think Rachel Dolezal did us any favor, to be honest, to actually have people coming and trying to be impostors when that's something we've been accused of our whole life was really inconvenient. There was a spate of white women who were revealed to be passing as Black in this period of time, and it really spoke to this Trump idea that-- Blackness as a career move. I know there's actually movements of-- I don't know what the group is called, but there's a group that's trying to protect Blackness from these interlopers of mixed race or people who are not of the American descendants of slaves, basically.

Julian Lucas: Exactly. That's the name of one group which is very insistent on drawing a hard line between African Americans descended from slavery in the United States and West Indians, Africans, Latin American people of African ancestry. I think that's related to the impulse to kind of question the authenticity of biracial mixed people.

Danzy Senna: On some level, I understand it too because I think that there's a shift taking place and there are people out there who have never identified with the Black historical forces that have brought them the privileges that they have. I think in some ways, mixed-race people have been that they've benefited more than anyone else from the Black freedom struggle, to be honest. Because of our adjacency to whiteness, we are the ones that white people feel comfortable hiring. We are the ones that are populating these private schools that are calling ourselves Black.

There's people who are not being let in that door who are-- the people who are not mixed. I don't think it's completely crazy, actually, that there's a policing of Blackness in this moment because I think people are observing the beneficiaries of Black struggles, and those are not necessarily always Black Americans who are not mixed and who are not immigrants.

David Remnick: The writer Danzy Senna talking to The New Yorker's Julian Lucas. There'll be more in a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour.

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David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and on our program today is the writer Danzy Senna, who's been speaking out about the role that identity plays in her work and in the world specifically, biracial identity, which has a complicated history in a nation long obsessed with the color line. Danzy Senna teaches writing at the University of Southern California, and some of her own life story is reflected in the protagonist of her new book, Colored Television. She spoke with The New Yorker's Julian Lucas and will continue that conversation now.

Julian Lucas: I wonder if we could back up for a second and actually just talk about this word mulatto, which you and I love, but which ruffles many feathers. Many people consider it to be a slur. I wonder how you feel about this word and why you choose to use it.

Danzy Senna: It's a beautiful word, for one thing. It just sounds nice. Mulatto sounds a lot nicer than biracial, which sounds very technical and insect-like to me. I think mulatto is a word with very problematic origins, as so much of our language has these origins. It comes from the word mule, which was to describe the mixing of two species. The mule would be barren and would not be able to reproduce. It was really a word that baked into it is to mix the races is to do something unnatural and to lead to the end of humanity, actually.

I think the other thing that I prefer about that word is that it's specific to people who are of Black and white American origins that come from this history of the American slave trade. The word biracial or multiracial, to me, is completely meaningless because I don't know which races we're mixing. Those things matter when we're talking about identity, the history of what ship you came here on, and what history you emerged out of.

I like the specificity of the word mulatto and how it really defines a very specific group that I'm talking about. I'm not talking about someone who's half Japanese and half German. I'm talking about us.

Julian Lucas: Absolutely. On that note, I have to tell you, I grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, which my parents, for instance, they read in some magazine that it was the best place to raise a biracial kid. Going to high school there in the lead-up to Obama's election, I literally had the parents of white friends ask me questions like, "What does it feel like to be the future? Eventually, everyone's going to look like you. All of our racial problems are going to be solved." Very quickly, that was revealed for an absurd fantasy.

A great line I love in one of your novels is, someone expresses a version of this fantasy, like, "We're all going to be mixed up and it's all going to be harmonious." One of your protagonists who is biracial responds, "That already exists, dummy. It's called Brazil." Brazil, of course, has all kinds of racial problems of its own. What is this belief that biracial people like us are going to change America in some way?

Danzy Senna: We're going to save the world in all of our beige glory. It's a funny idea that I think came about, especially in the '90s. It was a reaction to the way that the "mulatto" had been seen historically as tragic and barren and as this doomed figure. Then in the multicultural '90s and in the wake of all the biracial people coming of age in my generation, there was this opposite idea of us as being this solution to the problem of America's racial conflicts.

Martin Luther King has that image in the speech of the little Black boy and the little Black girl holding hands with the little white boy and the little white girl, and of course, he doesn't get to the part where they end up falling in love or getting married or having sex. We're the result of that dream in this fantasy. Somehow, we're going to mix the racial problems out of existence and be this sort of promised land.

Julian Lucas: People who are the children of some of the first interracial marriages in the US often describe themselves as the Loving generation after the Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, which legalized interracial marriage. You describe yourself as a member of the hating generation, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that means and your own story and your parents' story.

Danzy Senna: Yes. I am part of that Loving generation as it's called. My parents married in 1968. My mother is a white woman from New England, Boston, sort of Mayflower heritage, and my father is a Black man from Alabama and Louisiana who comes from-- He's a descendant of slavery. I came of age with a lot of these other children who were also of this moment, and most of us, our parents are divorced, and it didn't end in loving. I have that in my novel.

The character, I think, says she comes from the hating generation. I think that gets to my instinct to always push against these sort of sentimental tropes around mixedness and these kind of fantasies around us. We're never living outside of history. There's still the specter of the slave trade in my family. My mother comes from one of the largest slave trading families in the New England Corridor.

Julian Lucas: You actually discovered that you're descended from a slave ship captain with a name and with records of his activities. What was that like discovering that?

Danzy Senna: Yes, no, I have actual stories of the horrible things he did to these people on his ships. It's a notoriously awful family history to have come from. My mother comes from that line, but also, she comes from a line of liberals and intellectuals, and later, it evolves into something else. The 1960s is the place and the only place where someone from her heritage would marry someone from my father's background. That was that dream, that Martin Luther King dream of them growing up and falling in love and having these children.

Julian Lucas: Your latest novel, Colored Television, is almost a version of you as a failure in a way. The protagonist is this novelist Jane Gibson, and she had a critically acclaimed first novel. It's been nine years that everyone has been waiting for her second book, and she writes it, and it's kind of a flop. It doesn't sell. Immediately, she begins to think of an alternative path.

She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two kids, and she dreams of having a stable life for them. They're always moving around between friends’ houses. She turns to the world of television, and she begins trying to write the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies. First, I just wonder, where did this conceit come to you in your own life? I know you've done some writing for film and television. When did the idea for this book come about?

Danzy Senna: It came about, I would say, maybe six or seven years ago, but I had been living in LA for 18 years and wanting to write an LA novel because I find LA to be a fascinating city and a culture. I've been writing novels here and kind of aware of this glittering otherworld of the film and television writers who I knew, and I was aware of how much better they were doing financially than me the whole time I've been living here.

That was part of the inspiration for the book, was just thinking about that tension for a novelist living in LA and also the moment of prestige television that we're living in and thinking about how strange it is to be teaching literature to my students and to be teaching creative writing in a university. All of the English professors and all of the students, the stories that they're talking about are Succession or White Lotus. They're not standing around the water cooler talking about The Great Gatsby.

I was really feeling that sense that I think a lot of novelists have felt over the last 15 years or maybe longer like are we being replaced by-- is television the novel of our time, and am I putting my energy into the right form for a culture that seems to want this other way of hearing stories? As I dabbled in television and film, I was also interested in the way that there's this hyperbolic language when you meet with producers and it's like, "You're a genius. This is amazing." If you're a novelist, you're really not used to hearing that, and so you believe it at first.

They're like, "We're going to make a show." Everything sounds like it's going to happen until it doesn't. I was just thinking of a character down on her luck and how that figure walking into her life could completely throw everything off for her and the mania and the feeling of my ship's about to come in. Putting a character in that situation seemed like a really rich scenario. What is she willing to give away? What is she willing to do to make this life happen for herself in this moment of failure and feeling that everything is precarious?

Julian Lucas: One of the funny things about the novel is Jane doesn't actually have a lot of angst about her racial identity. She's very secure in that. Instead of the expected conflict between am I white or am I Black, it becomes, am I a novelist or am I a television writer? You take the traditional passing narrative, and it's almost like she's a novelist who one day begins passing as a television writer. Actually, she doesn't even tell her husband that she's doing this because she's afraid he'd be ashamed of her.

Danzy Senna: Yes, no, I love that idea that there's the passing narrative in here, but she's passing as a TV writer. It's that thing of fake it till you make it. She's trying to pass as this TV writer so that they can become that and she can manifest this world of being a success and living in Los Angeles, owning a home, and having this bourgeois life that has eluded them as high artists. Her and her husband have remained in this space of the fetishized but ultimately unrewarded; abstract painter and a literary novelist.

She has to perform both as a real writer and also somehow work out how to sell a show and how to create a really marketable biracial comedy that will finally bring mixed-race, mulatto people into the mainstream and make us something that's really sellable. The biracial thing is really just a selling tool for her. It's a thing she's trying to turn into a gimmick so that she can make some money off of it. It's not the source of a lot of angst for her as much as it is a-- The angst is about her career and her failures as a novelist.

Julian Lucas: She's not having identity issues. She's having issues commodifying her identity to her satisfaction. Her real angst is about status and really about class. Jane aspires to move to Multicultural Mayberry, which is your fictionalized vision of Pasadena, a kind of old American town, which is nevertheless diverse and prosperous and progressive and a kind of vision of the future, but Jane still cannot achieve this multiracial American dream for class reasons. She's forced to sell a certain representation of herself to this showrunner in order to achieve that.

Danzy Senna: Yes. I think that gets to this world we're living in now, where biracial signifies wealth more than-- If you bring your kids to a tour of a private school, they might say it's 40% people of color. I would say a lot of those kids are biracial kids. That is the kind of third race that is being elevated into this world of the cultural elite. That's the world that she's trying to enter, is this world where there's all these blended people who are all very prosperous and have cashed in on this dream.

She remains on the margins with her husband, these scrappy artists who don't have what it takes to sell this story. They haven't sold themselves properly, so they haven't benefited from this fantasy land of the Obama-esque future that she locates in this town called Multicultural Mayberry. That's actually South Pasadena.

Julian Lucas: Where you live.

Danzy Senna: Where I live, where I’ve made it to the multicultural fantasy. I think allowing that character to have as complex and real a future as I can is part of the work I'm doing that I don't want that mythology to stop us from talking about the reality of what it is to still be mixed, which is not the tragic mulatto, but it's also not the fantasy.

Julian Lucas: This has been so much fun, Danzy.

Danzy Senna: Great to be here.

David Remnick: Danzy Senna's new novel is called Colored Television. Julian Lucas writes about Senna and her work in The New Yorker this week.

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