Book Review: ‘Colored Television’ turns our racial obsessions into comedy

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Not much dust had settled on his old playbook when Donald Trump felt inspired last month to probe Kamala Harris’s racial identity. Like some prudent antebellum buyer, he wanted to understand what he was getting. “I don’t know,” Trump wondered aloud. “Is she Indian? Or is she Black?”

To say we’ve been here before is an understatement. We’ve never left. The myth of racial purity lies at the heart of White supremacy, and keeping that poisonous ideology alive requires fixating on the ancestral “mysteries” of people of color, while assuming that Whiteness is undiluted, unsullied.

In 1998, a decade before America elected its first biracial president, Danzy Senna published a debut novel called “Caucasia” about two sisters who, like the author, have a Black father and a White mother. Since then, in witty fiction and nonfiction, Senna has continued to explore the lives of biracial people and to prick our crazy-making anxiety about racial ambiguity.

Now, on the short list of good things happening during this election season, you can put Senna’s sly new book, “Colored Television.” It has nothing to do with politics, except that it has everything to do with politics. It’s an exceptionally assured novel about trying to find a home and a job in a culture constantly swirling between denigrating racial identity and fetishizing it.

Senna’s shrewd comedy starts right there in the title with its discomfiting pun, but “Colored Television” quickly pushes even harder against the boundaries of genteel speech. The protagonist is a biracial woman named Jane Gibson, who’s hoping to earn tenure at a university where she delivers trigger warnings and assigns “only minimalist autofiction by queer POC authors.” When the story opens, Jane is on sabbatical and has just finished her second novel, titled “Nusu Nusu,” Swahili for “partly-partly.” It began as a story inspired by the life of Carol Channing, the actress who didn’t publicly acknowledge her African American ancestry until late in life. Somewhere along the way, though, Jane’s manuscript mushroomed into a collagelike 400-year-history of “mulattos” that ropes in everyone from Sally Hemings on Jefferson’s plantation to Slash in Guns N’ Roses.

I know … a novel written by a biracial author about a biracial author writing a “mulatto War and Peace” sounds woefully claustrophobic. But “Colored Television” pries open this self-referential premise to explore the quandary of being an artist of color in America, and it has a surprising amount of fun along the way. Jane purposely employs the term “mulatto” – a slur derived from the Spanish word “mule” – because she feels it’s more precise than “biracial.” Meanwhile, Senna uses that stubborn old slur to kick the hell out of the country’s neurotic fixation on racial composition.

Thrilled by completing her epic manuscript and convinced she’ll soon be hailed as the “voice of her people,” Jane is genuinely surprised to learn that there isn’t a vast market for a 457-page historical novel about racial nomads. Her agent advises her to stop writing about “the whole mixed-race thing.” The implication seems to be that she’d be better off focusing on “normal people” like, say, Sally Rooney does.

Under any circumstances, that professional rejection would be hard to bear, but for Jane it’s a disaster that Senna has designed for calamitous effect: If Jane can’t sell “Nusu Nusu,” she won’t get paid by her publisher or receive tenure from her university. And without those benefits, she and her family will never own a house in the “Multicultural Mayberry” of her dreams.

Indeed, the problem of where to live is one of many themes that Senna explores here with sharp insight. She has a keen sense of the mingled strands of frustration, hope and delusion that keep millions of Americans swinging over the housing market, imagining that if they just put in a little more umph, they could land on a three-bedroom, two-bath Craftsman in a good school district.

“Equal parts superior and ashamed,” Jane and her husband, an abstract artist of unsellable paintings, have moved from one rental to another before scoring their best situation ever: They’re housesitting for a year in the gorgeous home of a wealthy TV writer who’s working in Australia. While disparaging the absentee owner as a biracial sellout – “a tragic mulatto” from the “Tiger Woods school of cluelessness” – Jane entertains friends in his mansion, wears his wife’s clothes and even drinks up his fine wine collection, becoming, along the way, acclimated to a lifestyle that she and her family cannot possibly afford. Particularly if she can’t sell her novel.

So, “living on borrowed time in a borrowed house,” Jane holds her nose and turns to the glowing embrace of television, an industry eager to feign interest in diversifying its offerings. Assuming the money could buy salvation, she pitches “a comedy about a kooky but lovable mulatto family.” Why shouldn’t she, an expert by virtue of lived experience and academic research, be the one to fill TV’s biracial quota? Groveling before the studio suits, she even forces herself to proclaim, “Television is the novel of our times.”

Hollywood executives are easy to mock. Their mountainous egos, hairpin capriciousness and vapid insincerity are as iconic as Leo the Lion roaring before an MGM film. (Senna’s husband, Percival Everett, drew a similar bead on the follies of publishing in “Erasure,” the basis for the recent Oscar-winning film “American Fiction.”) But Senna creates her own fresh satire with a Black producer named Hampton Ford. Rich and arrogant, Hampton latches on to Jane’s TV proposal with a level of enthusiasm that feels simultaneously exciting and alarming:

“It’s perfect. A comedy about mulattos,” he tells her. “They exist. They’re here. They’re not going anywhere. If anything, they’re multiplying like rats. So let’s get there first. Let’s get ahead of the issue. Let’s make a show with a premium vibe – edgy – but not so out there that we lose the masses. … This could be the greatest comedy about mulattos ever to hit the small screen. You realize that? The Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies. It could be, like, Pinky meets – I don’t know – Modern Family. Imitation of Life meets, like, Everybody Loves Raymond.”

Jane’s Faustian bargain with this trailblazing showrunner produces a series of awkwardly funny scenes about the way Hollywood exploits racial identity under the guise of honoring it. The brainstorming sessions in which Jane, Hampton and his slavish assistants drum up episodes of their biracial sitcom are cringe in print. Senna has such a well-tuned ear for tortured conversations in which one person is trying her best to ignore what another person is actually saying. Jane wants to write about people who just happen to be biracial; the studio needs plots about something called “biracial people problems.” The effect of this spiraling satire is delightfully head spinning. Senna unfurls a novel that somehow deconstructs its own racial preoccupations, as though she’s riding a unicycle up and down a set of Escher staircases.

What’s most rewarding about “Colored Television,” though, is how effortlessly Senna keeps the wings of this plot from getting clotted with bits of didactic wisdom or social reproof. Even when Jane really wants to sell out and cash in, she never abandons her sense of irony nor her determination to resist being the “tragic mulatto” of somebody else’s tale. Indeed, the way Senna keeps this wry story aloft may be the closest paper can come to levitation.

In a quirky love letter to her husband, Jane claims she hates “redemptive endings.” I’ve got bad news for her.