Danzy Senna

It’s the kind of mirage that Senna delights in puncturing. She published her first book at the turn of what she dubbed, in an essay, “The Mulatto Millennium,” a late-nineties mania for intermarriage as the road to post-racial utopia. “Butterscotch dream children,” as she wrote in her novel “New People” (2017), ran amok in advertisements, and demographic change inspired visions of “mud-colored” youths who’d “come to carry the nation—blood-soaked, guilty of everything of which it has been accused—into the future.” To Senna, such prophecies rang just as false as the old prejudices. Being fetishized has dangers of its own, and in “Colored Television” she considers its consequences in a country where “the binary is still more marketable than the muddy middle.” But there’s no need to cue the piano just yet. “The worst version of me would be writing about biracials in a respectful way,” Senna told me. “I get to make fun of us incessantly.”