The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Writer Danzy Senna on Kamala Harris and the Complexity of Biracial Identity in America

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

In fiction and nonfiction, the author Danzy Senna focusses on the experience of being biracial in a nation long obsessed with color lines. Now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate for President, some of Senna’s concerns have come to the fore in political life. Donald Trump attacked Harris as a kind of race manipulator, implying that she had been Indian American before becoming Black for strategic purposes.  The claim was bizarre and false, but Senna feels that it reflected a mind-set in white America. “Mixed-race people are sort of 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,” she tells Julian Lucas, who wrote about Senna’s work in The New Yorker.  “And if your appearance is unclear to us, then we’re going to debate you and we’re going to discount you and we’re going to accuse you of being an impostor.”  Senna talks about why she describes people like herself and Lucas using the old word “mulatto,” despite its racist etymology. “The word ‘biracial’ or ‘multiracial’ to me is completely meaningless,” she says, “because I don’t know which races were mixing.  And those things matter when we’re talking about identity.”  Senna’s newest novel, “Colored Television,” follows a literary writer somewhat like herself, trying to find a new career in the more lucrative world of TV. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm 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. Do you feel more like a Californian, a New Englander or a New Yorker? That's the main split in my identity. The biracial thing is so small. Like, I'm really, like, which place do I belong?

I'm still conflicted about. 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. So I first came to Danzy's work in college when I read her essay, The Milato Millennium. And 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. And one thing that I've always loved about Senna's work is its irreverence. And her latest novel is no exception.

The 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 know, 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 interstores. sect. And 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. 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. It could be Kamala. But I was already thinking about Kamala in 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. And 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? Yeah, I mean, it was the bewilderment

that he expressed and the sort of stagy bewilderment because it felt like, you know, he was putting it on but to say, you know, is she black or is she Indian? Like she was Indian and now she's black. And 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 sort of illegible and were impossibilities that confound and bring out the suspicion of the world by our very existence. Exactly. And 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? Right. And this is an interesting moment. I mean, you know, I'm 53 and it was born in 1970. And in my childhood, if you were half black and half white, you were black. And that was not a, um, I'm a, um, conversation. There was no other category in fact that you couldn't say you were mixed because that wasn't a box to check. And if you were, you know, the child of one black parent, you were black. And 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. And 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 kind of 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. And so, you know, 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. And for me, that context was the black power movement.

And 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. the time. And I think that we're also living in a strange moment where once again, mixed-race people are sort of up for debate and speculation. And there's a real return to the idea that your appearance is what matters, not what your, you know, background is or your identity. Your appearance is what determines what you are. And if your appearance is unclear to us, then we're going to debate you and we're going to discount you and we're going to accuse you of being an imposter. 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, 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. And I don't think that flies with the vast majority of black people in the U.S., but it does speak to a real anxiety within the black community as well. And I mean, I don't think Rachel Dolazal did us any favor to be honest to actually have people coming and trying to be imposters when that's something we've been accused of our whole life was really inconvenient. And 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 like Trump idea that, you know, blackness as a kind of career move. And I know there's actually like movements of, I don't know what the group is called, but there's like 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. Exactly. That's the name of one group, which is very insistent on drawing a kind of hard line between African Americans descended from slavery in the United States and West Indians, Africans, Latin American people of African ancestry. And I think that's related to the impulse to kind of question the authenticity of biracial mixed people. I mean, on some level I sort of understand it too, because I think that, you know, 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 are. 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. You know, 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. But there's people who are not being let in that door who are, you know, the people who are not mixed. And so 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.

The writer Dancy Senna talking to the New Yorkers, Julian Lucas. There'll be more in a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. And on our program today is the writer Dan Z. Sinha, 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. Danzi Sena 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 Yorkers, Julian Lucas, And we'll continue that conversation now. And what 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. I mean, it's a beautiful word, for one thing. It just kind of sounds nice. Mulatto sounds a lot nicer than biracial, which sounds very technical and inciscerable. Absolutely. It's very technical and insect-like to me. But I think mulatto is, you know, a word with very problematic origins, as so much of our language has these origins.

And, you know, 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. So it was really a word that baked into it is to mix the races, is to do. do something unnatural and to lead to the end of humanity, actually. And I think the other thing that I prefer about that word is that it's specific to people who are of, you know, black and white American origins that come from this history of the American slave trade. And the word biracial or multiracial to me is completely meaningless because I don't know which races we're mixing. And 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. So 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. Absolutely. And on that note, you know, I have to tell you,

I grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, which, you know, my parents, for instance, they read in some magazine that it was the best place to raise a biracial kid. And 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? You know, eventually everyone's going to look like you. All of our racial problems are going to be solved.

And very quickly that was revealed for an absurd fantasy. Great line I love in one of your novels is someone kind of expresses a version of this fantasy, like we're all going to be mixed up and it's all going to be harmonious. And one of your protagonists whose biracial responds, that already exists, dummy, it's called Brazil. And 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? We're going to save the world in all of our beige glory. And, you know, it's a funny idea that I think came about

especially in the 90s, and it was a kind of reaction to the way that the, quote, mulatto had been seen historically as tragic and barren and as this kind of doomed figure. And then in the kind of multicultural 90s and in the wake of all the sort of biracial people coming of age in my generation, there was this kind of opposite idea of us as being, um, 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. And we're the result of that dream in this fantasy.

And somehow we're going to mix the racial problems out of existence. and be this sort of promised land. People who are the children of some of the first interracial marriages in the U.S. often describe themselves as the loving generation after the Supreme Court case, Loving versus 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. Yeah, I mean, 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, you know, he's a descendant of slavery. So 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. And so I have that in my novel. You know, the character, I think, says she comes from the hating generation. And I think that kind of gets to my instinct to always push against these sort of sentimental tropes around mixedness and these kind of fantasies around us. You know, we're never living outside of history. Like, they're still the specter of, you know, the slave trade in my family. My mother. comes from one of the largest slave trading families in the New England corridor.

You actually discovered that you're descended from a slave ship captain with a name and with records of his activities. Yeah. What was that like discovering that? Yeah, no, I mean, I have actual stories of the horrible things he did to these people on his ships.

And, you know, it's a notoriously awful family history to have come from. And my mother comes from that line, but also she comes from a line of liberals and intellectuals. And, you know, later it evolves into something else. And the 1960s is the place and kind of the only place where someone from her heritage would marry someone from my father's background. And that was that dream, that Martin Luther King dream of them growing up and falling in love and having these children. 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. and 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 kind of stable life for them. They're always moving around between friends' houses. And so she turns to the world of television,

and she begins trying to write the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies. So 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? It came about, I would say, like maybe six or seven years ago, but I had been living in L.A. for 18 years and wanting to write an L.A. novel, because I find L.A. to be a fascinating city and a culture. And I've been writing novels here and, you know, kind of aware of this glittering other world 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.

And so that was part of the inspiration for the book was just thinking about that tension for a novelist living in L.A. And also the moment of prestige television that we're living in and thinking about how, you know, strange it is to be teaching literature to my state. and to be teaching creative writing in a university and 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. And so, you know, I was really kind of feeling that sense that I think a lot of novelists have felt over the last 15 years or maybe longer, you know, like, are we being replaced by, is television the novel of. 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? And as I dabbled in television and film, I was also kind of interested in the way that there's this kind of hyperbolic language when you meet with producers and it's like, you're a genius, this is amazing. And if you're a novelist, you're really not used to hear that. And so you sort of believe it at first and they're like, we're going to make a show.

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

and feeling that everything is precarious? You know, 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. And so 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?

And you take kind of the traditional passing narrative. And it's almost like she's a novelist who one day begins passing as a television writer. She actually, she doesn't even tell her husband that she's doing this because she's afraid he'd be ashamed of her. Yeah, no, I love that idea of that there's the passing narrative in here, but she's passing as a TV writer. And it's that thing of like fake it till you make it. She's trying to pass as this TV writer so that they can sort of 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, you know, abstract painter and a literary novelist. So 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 like really sellable. And so 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 sort of failures as a novelist. She's not having identity issues. She's having issues commodifying her identity to her satisfaction. And her real angst is about status and really about class. So 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. And she's forced to sell a certain

representation of herself to this showrunner in order to achieve that. Yeah. And I think that kind of gets to this world we're living in now where biracial signifies wealth more than if you go to bring your kids to a tour of a private school, they might say it's 40% people of color. And I would say a lot of those kids are biracial kids. That is the kind of third race that has been elevated into this world of the sort of cultural elite. And that, you know, that's the world that she's trying to enter is this world where there's all these sort of blended people who are all very prosperous and have cashed in on this dream. And she remains on the margins with her husband, these sort of 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 sort of fantasy land of the Obama-esque future. She locates in this town called Multicultural Maybury. That's actually South Pasadena. Where you live? where I live, where I've made it to the multicultural fantasy. And, you know, I think allowing that character to have as kind of 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, you know, the tragic mulatto, but it's also not the fantasy.

This has been so much fun, Dancy. Great to be here. Dancy Senna's new novel is called Colored Television. Julian Lucas writes about Senna and her work in The New Yorker this week. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Students, and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccan. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund. Thank you.