< 'I want to write myself into existence,' says 'Colored Television' author

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Remember when Donald Trump accused Kamala Harris of suddenly turning Black and he said, so I don't know; is she Indian, or is she Black? The confusion and suspicion biracial people are confronted with is the theme of the novels and the memoir by my guest, Danzy Senna. She also writes about what it means to be biracial and the meaning of race itself. Her mother, who is white, is from an eminent Boston family. Her father, who is Black, grew up in an orphanage in a small Alabama town. Her parents married in 1968, the year the Supreme Court overturned all existing state laws that banned interracial marriage. She was born in 1970 and grew up during the Black Power Movement.

Her new novel, "Colored Television," is both heartfelt and satirical. It's about a writer who's devastated when the novel she's been working on for 10 years, a novel about how the meaning of being biracial has changed over generations, is rejected by her publisher. If she can't publish that, she can't get tenure at the university where she teaches, which means not having enough money to get by. Her husband is an artist whose work doesn't sell. They have two children. She's discovering that some of her son's traits that she thought made him unique and interesting may be signs that he's on the autism spectrum. The family lives in LA, which they can't afford, so they've been living in an expensive home of a friend, a screenwriter, while he's working abroad. Some of the tension in her marriage is caused by financial problems, and the only solution she sees is to pitch an idea for a TV series - a TV series with a biracial main character. That requires covering up some problems in her current life. The book is filled with observations about race, marriage, parenting, teaching, generational differences and entering the world of prestige television writing.

Danzy Senna, welcome to FRESH AIR. I love your new novel, and I'd like to start with a reading that I think gives a sense of your writing and a sense of some of the themes of the book.

DANZY SENNA: Sure. Thank you for having me.

GROSS: And this reading is from early in the book, when she's reflecting on teaching and how a few students walked out of someone else's class who was talking about the history of comedy, and in quoting Richard Pryor, he used the N-word. Three students walked out and reported him to the administration. So here's that reading where she's reflecting on teaching.

SENNA: (Reading) The millennials didn't read anything Jane assigned unless she included a trigger warning. The trigger warning was what spurred them on to search the story for the upsetting passage. The Gen-Zers, on the other hand, only bothered to read stories that used a lot of white space. They didn't like big, sprawling, old-fashioned novels. Their brains had not evolved for that kind of reading experience. She was reminded of how when her own kids were toddlers, she'd had to cut their food into small pieces to guard against their choking. She had in recent years begun to assign only minimalist autofiction by queer POC authors to her undergraduates, and she had to admit it was a better classroom experience for all.

(Reading) Teaching had made Jane think a lot about her own Gen-X-ness. She decided it was the only indisputable identity she had. She checked all the boxes. She'd been a latchkey kid who had moved between the homes of her divorced parents. She'd had the de rigueur Gen-X molestation at age 10 and later lost her virginity in semi-consensual sex with a much older man. Like any Black Gen-Xer, she hadn't had time to worry about microaggressions, what with all the good old fashioned macroaggressions she'd experienced - white kids throwing rocks at her head, white kids calling her father [expletive] with impunity, white kids leaving bananas on her family's porch when they moved into the neighborhood.

(Reading) Of course, what made her most Gen-X of all was that she was part of the first baby boom of mulattos, whose parents were the first generation of legalized interracial marriages. Jane felt she'd been lucky to be raised in the early days of mulatto militancy, before you could check two or more racial boxes on school forms. She'd been raised knowing, in the immortal words of Tupac, that Black was the thing to be. She refused to use the cloying phrase that some of her cohort had adopted - the Loving generation. Her parents had always, as far as she knew, despised each other, so she was more a part of the hating generation. But in either case, she was deeply, authentically Gen X.

GROSS: So I think our listeners might have noticed you use the word mulatto instead of biracial, and I'll ask you to explain why.

SENNA: Yeah. I use the word mulatto a lot in my work, and I have sort of rejected the more politically correct term of biracial or multiracial, mainly because it's meaningless and vague and it could describe any two or three mixes that one could be. But mulatto, as problematic as the word is - and it comes out of some really - from - out of slavery and these sort of pseudoscientific ideas of race. As problematic as it is, it's the only word that really describes this very specific experience of being Black and white and being that mixture in America, which is singular and, I think, an important distinction from the other mixes.

GROSS: Tell me more about what it means to you that your parents got married in 1968, one year after Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that overturned all the laws still on the books outlawing interracial marriage.

SENNA: Yeah. I mean, they were part of a whole wave of the first, you know, marriages to come out of this huge political change. And so their marriage was filled with all this symbolism and hope for the future and the sort of integration of American society and the kind of movement beyond these incredibly strict, you know, laws of segregation. And they were both very politicized. And so what it meant was also that I grew up with, for the first time, maybe, as a mixed person with other mixed people around me who were also born out of the exact same moment, and the exact same political movement. And so I've never been able to kind of separate the politics of the moment in which I was born from the personal. Like, those things are so intertwined for me, and the history is so clear that I emerge out of, it's not - I think some people don't grow up with that history and the sort of legal context in which you're born in their heads as much as you do if you're born in this first generation.

GROSS: Well, your parents got married during the overlap of the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement. What do you think being in an interracial marriage meant to your parents? - because the way you describe it in your memoir, it almost sounds as if it was a political statement as much as it was about intimacy.

SENNA: I don't think that, you know, you could be a white woman of a certain class - and my mother is a blonde, blue-eyed white woman who grew up the daughter of a Harvard professor in Cambridge and has this lineage that, you know, goes back to the earliest, you know, Americans and also the slave-trading Americans. I don't think you could be her and marry a Black man without that seeming like an incredibly, you know, potent political gesture at that time. And then there was the class issue of my father being from the - first, from an orphanage, and then from a, you know, very poor family in the South and then the housing projects in Boston - and for him to marry someone of my mother's background was a huge class leap and a huge, you know, crossing all sorts of lines.

And so this - you know, I think people of - you know, Black and white people get married nowadays and it's so common and can be sort of seen as just - you know, we just fell in love. But at that time, you were really - you were breaking all of the sort of laws. Even those that had already been dismantled were still in place in people's minds. And I remember my mother went to the courthouse to get some paperwork for the marriage. And in Boston, where interracial couples hadn't been illegal at that time - and even recently - the woman said to her, wait. I have to go in the back and see if this is legal...

GROSS: Oh, really?

SENNA: ...That you two are getting married. Yeah. And there was, you know, constant experiences that we had in the world that really brought home to all of us that we were a radical statement in the culture as a family. Just merely existing as a family was a radical statement at that time.

GROSS: You're very light-skinned. And a lot of people first meeting you assume you're white, and then they're confused that you identify as Black. Though, I think now is it fair to say you identify as biracial?

SENNA: No, no. I've always identified as Black. And I don't really - it doesn't come up in the same way anymore, partly because I've written six books. So it's like, there's no short answer I have to give except read my work, because I think that's more...

(LAUGHTER)

SENNA: More of the story is in my work. But I grew up at a time, you know - if I was born today with my hair texture and my skin tone and features, I think maybe - and in a different sort of family, I could be identified as multiracial or white. And, you know, my Blackness would be a sort of interesting fact of my 23andMe results or something. But the time that I was raised and the context that I was raised, there was no mixed race category. And you were either going to identify as white and all of that, you know, all of what that meant for you, or you were going to identify as Black. And there was no doubt in my mind or my family's mind that I was going to identify as Black.

It was a political, you know, identity at that time. And it was also - I have a sister who was born 14 months before me, who is my closest comrade in every moment of my life, who would not walk into a room and be seen as white. So the decision had already been made when my sister was born, these are Black children. And my father, you know, had a lot of the sort of that time and the politics of that time, that he really wanted to impress upon us our Black identity. And so then I come along with straight hair, and that's not going to change anything about that decision that they had already made.

And my father's from the South. And he was born in Louisiana and raised in Alabama, and there are lots of Black people who look like me in the world in which he grew up. So I think it's confusing to us now at a time when we see people's race as being very much about how they present. But at the time of my father's childhood and my childhood, I was a Black person who could pass as white. That was what I was. And I was a Black person who had a white mother. And those things were not in contradiction at all.

GROSS: Well, you know, you write that back then, to claim whiteness as a mixed child was to deny and hide Blackness. So...

SENNA: Yeah.

GROSS: And you say also that growing up in the '70s, the mulatto was an inconvenient smudge on both white America's idea of itself as pure and superior and on the Black Power movement's ideal of a unified, uncontaminated Black front.

SENNA: Yeah, exactly. And I feel very grateful that I grew up with such a strong sense of Black identity and that it was never, ever associated with shame for me, which I think was what my parents were aware of, was that we were living in an incredibly racist city. Anyone who knows the history of Boston, it was - there were riots. There was, you know, a lot of violence against Black people. But it was, in America, in the air everywhere - was that Blackness was denigrated. Whiteness was extolled. And so they were just highly aware that when we walked out of the door of our house, that was the message we were going to receive. So they wanted us to kind of have this sense of pride in that background because that was the one that needed defending.

GROSS: And you were bused, too, weren't you?

SENNA: Yes. My sister and I were bused during the height of desegregation, when we were very small. And we were also sent to a sort of Afrocentric school for - it was called the Elma Lewis School of Black Arts, which was sort of to instill racial pride while learning for the Black children in Roxbury. And so I was steeped in politics, Black Power. And there was literally never a moment that I remember not being aware of race and not being aware of these categories. It was always in conversation in my household from the time I could speak.

GROSS: Let's compare that to your family now. So you have two children?

SENNA: Two children, yes.

GROSS: And you have siblings and cousins. And your siblings and cousins, when you add it all up, have brought into the family a Pakistani Muslim, a Jewish person and a Chinese person, I think.

SENNA: Yeah, yeah.

GROSS: And so your family is totally multicultural now. It's not just a question of Black or white or, you know, mulatto. It's like - you know, it's the Rainbow Coalition, or as you put it, Benetton (laughter).

SENNA: Benetton, yeah.

GROSS: Yeah. So can you talk about how your idea of being, you know, multiracial or biracial has changed as your extended family has grown, and, you know, the people represented in that family have changed?

SENNA: Yeah. I mean, it's kind of amazing how many different - I was just with all of the cousins in Massachusetts. And my kids are teenagers now, and those cousins are also in the same age range. And we took a photo. And I was, like, admiring how mixed this family has become. And it seems like the only tradition in my family is to marry someone who is outside of whatever your background is. And, I think, you know, I used to feel very protective of this Black identity and this choice to identify as Black and to kind of, I think, judge other mixed people who didn't hold up that identity. And that was sort of the residue of my childhood in the '70s. And I think the older I get, the more I'm just interested in people being able to define themselves and respecting those decisions that people make, that those are coming from a true, real place. So with all of these cousins, like, I would never impose what I think they are onto them. I let them tell me - and even with my own children, letting them decide who they want to go into the world and identify themselves as. So I've kind of softened my position on this a lot over the years.

GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Danzy Senna. Her new novel is called "Colored Television." We'll be right back after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "EGYPTIAN FANTASY")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with writer Danzy Senna. A recurring theme in her novels and in her memoir is about what it's like to be biracial, like she is. She identifies as Black. The meaning of being biracial and the meaning of race itself is also a theme of her new novel, "Colored Television."

So I want to ask you about what Donald Trump recently said at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists when he was talking about Kamala Harris. So let's hear the clip.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

DONALD TRUMP: I've known her a long time indirectly, not directly very much. And she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn't know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don't know - is she Indian or is she Black?

RACHEL SCOTT: She has always identified as a Black woman. She went to a historically Black college.

TRUMP: But you know what? I respect either one. I respect either one. But she obviously doesn't because she was Indian all the way. And then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went - she became a Black person.

SCOTT: Just to be clear, sir. Do you believe that she is...

TRUMP: I think somebody should look into that too. When you ask - continue in a very hostile, nasty tone.

GROSS: As I was reading your book, I kept thinking about what Trump said, and I'm wondering what your reaction was the first time that you heard it.

SENNA: For me, hearing that was actually not maybe as surprising as it was to a lot of people, because that was sort of the story of my life. The reaction to my racial chaos or the fact that I don't look the way I identify or that when I come out to people as being Black, the reaction is often that, in smaller ways. And I was really - I had to write about that when I saw it, because I thought, this is sort of - he's articulating the relationship of America to mixed race people, and the hostility, the suspicion and the kind of bewilderment with which we've been faced sort of historically.

And, you know, that's something I'm exploring in "Colored Television" as well as in my other work - is this particular space that we hold that has been here from the beginning where we're - our existence is denied. From the very first time, you know, there's a mixed-race child born onto a plantation, that child's mixture is denied. That child's - who that child really is, you know, systematically denied, the paternity, and it continues throughout the history of mixed people in this country that we are constantly in - in my novel "Caucasia," I call it - we're like the canary in the coal mine. You can look to us to see, to take the temperature of the country around questions of race and our relationship to Blackness and whiteness. We're the Rorschach test that kind of reveals what the person looking at us thinks. But it doesn't really tell you anything about us. It tells you about Donald Trump in that moment.

GROSS: Well, it's time for another break. So let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Danzy Senna. Her new novel is called "Colored Television." We'll be right back. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MONTY ALEXANDER'S "SETTLE DOWN")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR, I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Danzy Senna. She's biracial, and what it's like to be biracial in America is a theme of her novels and her memoir. Her novels include "Caucasia" and "New People." Her new novel, "Colored Television," is a satire about race, marriage, parenting, financial problems, trying to get tenure at a university, art, literature, TV and how biracial is becoming the hot new demographic.

So in your new novel, the main character is a writer whose novel is rejected. This is a novel she spent 10 years writing, and since it's rejected, it means she's not going to get tenure. She's not going to get the raise that she not only wants but really needs, and she doesn't know what to do. And she can't return to the novel. She doesn't - it's enormous. She doesn't think she could fix it. No one thinks she could fix it except her husband, who urges her to. So she decides that her solution is probably to pitch a TV series around the idea of a biracial character. And this is, like, prestige TV. It might be a streaming network or a broadcast network. We're not really sure as a reader.

But the head of this network knows that the biracial population is the fastest growing group or one of the fastest growing groups in America, and by 2050, the majority of the country is likely to be biracial. It's the new hot market to market to, the new hot demographic, so the executive and the producer are excited about the possibility of a series with a biracial character at the center. Is it your experience as the writer of books about mulattos, as you put it - is that becoming more appealing to editors and executives? And are they willing to pay more money for it as a result?

SENNA: You mean in Hollywood?

GROSS: Well, in both. In the book world...

SENNA: In both.

GROSS: ...And in television because I know you've done some work in television. Nothing you've written has been produced. The books that have been optioned haven't been actual - you know, produced either yet. So you have experience in both worlds, and I'd be interested in hearing your take on both.

SENNA: Yeah, I mean, when I first started publishing was in the '90s with my first novel. And there really wasn't anything like that. And that was a novel about a young girl of mixed race and racial passing. And I was met with - you know, I had, like, eight rejections from agents when I first sent it out. And they would say, you know, this is too specific.

GROSS: Is this "Caucasia"?

SENNA: Yeah, this is my novel "Caucasia." And I don't recognize this family, and I don't understand this character's identity, and they're strange to me. And finally, I found an agent who really loved it and sold it. And, yeah, when I published that book, you know, it was met with a lot of acclaim. And I had this really great experience in terms of my first novel. But one of the things I kept hearing from publishers was, you know, don't do this again. Don't keep writing about mixedness. Like, it's time to graduate onto something new, and just leave that behind. And it was almost as if they thought that mixedness was a plot and not a world and not a people, not a geography. And I've heard that over and over again when I publish, that - you're still writing about mixed people?

GROSS: (Laughter).

SENNA: Are you just going to keep writing about mixed people? And I find that so interesting because I never hear people say that to white authors who write about, say, a particular world of white people. And I actually don't hear it as much about Black authors who write about Blackness or Black worlds or race. But when I write about my people, it's considered somehow a very special episode that...

GROSS: (Laughter).

SENNA: ...That I shouldn't do again. And I think part of the reason that I find that so sort of telling is that it's that idea that you're a predicament. You're not a world. And what I think of it as is this is the world I write from. This is the geography and the culture that I write from and it's interracial America. It's mulatto America. And to me, that is a whole world that from that point I can write about anything else, as any other writer can. You can be from Dublin and keep writing about Dublin, but nobody says to you stop writing about Dublin. You're writing about marriage or parenthood or class or divorce or, you know, all sorts of things. And this is the space that I write from.

And so I think, maybe six books in, people are beginning to get that, that this is just a world. And this is, you know, something I could write about forever and not repeat myself because these are characters in different situations. But with television, I think they haven't yet gotten to it yet. And I think that was what I was exploring in this is, you know, they've attempted it, but it hasn't been done well. And, you know, the idea is that, you know, you can write about mixed people and it doesn't always have to be about their racial struggle. They can be the space that you begin from and then move onto these other issues that we have. And write about us with complexity and nuance. And I haven't seen that done yet in television, but I think it's imminent. I think it's going to happen in my lifetime.

GROSS: So in your new novel, after the main character's novel is rejected, she decides she hates the novel. She hates writing novels. It's bad for her mental health. It takes her away from her family. It takes too much time. But she's also conflicted because when she's writing, it's hard to leave the solitude and the world of her characters and return home to the demands of her children and to her husband's sometimes crankiness. And I'm wondering if you experience that as a writer, if you ever feel like it's taking you away from the rest of life, taking you away from the actual world and that you're going a little crazy just being confined to the world of your imagination.

SENNA: I absolutely feel that, and it's kind of a joke between some of my friends and I, who are all novelists, about how much we hate being novelists.

GROSS: (Laughter).

SENNA: But we actually don't fully hate it because we keep doing it. And I've lived in LA for, you know, almost 20 years now and have been sort of committed, like Jane, to this form that is not the industry of the city I'm living in. So it's added to my alienation from LA as well that I'm going to parties, and I tell someone I write novels and they say, oh, have any of them been optioned? And it's almost as if the novel is just the sort of gateway to getting a movie made, but it's not anything in and of itself.

GROSS: Well, I've read my share of novels that seem to be gateways to getting the movie made.

SENNA: Right. No, I know. I think that's become a thing as well. But it's almost as if it doesn't register as important in the city that I live unless it's had that other form come out of it. And it's just notes for an adaptation. And so living in that space and also just living at the time in which I started this novel at the height of prestige television and teaching creative writing, I was really aware of how much my students, but also the other faculty, spent all of our time talking about "Succession" or "White Lotus" or "Insecure." And these were the conversations that everyone was having. And I would sort of try to bring it back to novels. And I was thinking, have we been replaced by this? Is this the novel of our time, this other form which I love and I think has such amazing writing in it? But have we kind of evolved to a place where we really need the visual and the actors and the whole - this other form to to think about our culture through?

So, you know, I just started to think about these questions when I began this novel, and then there was this sort of thing I always feel in the middle of writing a novel that was like, I don't know if this is good for my mental health to spend days and days inside talking to people who don't exist. And - you know, and now I have children. And can I balance my life as a novelist, which requires you to be in a kind of dream state and to be kind of obsessed, with the fact that these other two people need me to be in the sort of grunt of everyday living and the sort of - really out in the bright light with them, you know, thinking about doctors appointments and what's for dinner and did they do their homework? And do these things work together and thinking - starting to fantasize that maybe a kind of 10 to 8 television writer's room job or something would be better for me as a as a person in the world than writing a novel? Yeah.

GROSS: How close did you come to actually being a part of the TV world? Have you done writing for television or rewriting of other people's scripts?

SENNA: I've actually only three times worked developing things and writing a pilot. I wrote a pilot for a show that was based on my work. I wrote an original pilot for a limited series that is still out there being shopped around that's not to do with my work. And I've worked on another adaptation of one of my books. And so I've only worked in sort of mini rooms and in collaboration with one other writer. I've never actually been in a writer's room.

GROSS: Yeah.

SENNA: And I think Jane never gets that close to being in the writers room either, though she longs to be in that room. And, you know, what I've felt writing scripts is I really like it. It's very interesting and sort of technical-feeling compared to writing novels. And I will continue to do it 'cause it's a nice break between books, and it kind of can pay for your stove or something, you know, to get a new stove in your kitchen. Like, there are actual financial benefits to doing it. But I think my soul is in the page and in writing novels and in - being in control of the entire universe that I'm writing is really what feeds me on a much deeper level. And so I will never kind of fully abandon the written word. It just feeds me in a whole other way. But unfortunately, it doesn't literally feed me...

GROSS: Right.

SENNA: ...Very much.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: Yeah. Well, let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Danzy Senna. Her new novel is called "Colored Television." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIJAY IYER'S "BLACK AND TAN FANTASY")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Danzy Senna. Her new novel is called "Colored Television."

I want to talk with you a little bit about your childhood. So your mother was kind of from white Boston aristocracy in a way. Tell us a little about your mother's family tree and the most famous and infamous parts of it.

SENNA: She comes from a very long line of Bostonians. Her father was a Harvard law professor who was a civil rights lawyer, actually, and very liberal. And one of her great or grandfather or great-grandfather was one of the founders of The Atlantic magazine, The Atlantic Monthly. And she had mayors and, you know, goes all the way back to not literally the Mayflower but a different boat. And also in that history of these sort of learned Bostonians was the history of slavery. And some of the most horrific slave traders in American history were in her family in the Northeast Corridor, the DeWolf family. And her father's middle name was DeWolf. So she has both this sort of wonderful literary history and then also this disturbing history of slavery IN her family. But by the time I was born, we didn't have any of the money. We only had some silverware with those initials on them. And so it was kind of this tarnished, lost aristocracy feeling.

GROSS: My impression is that you found out about the slave trader members of your family tree doing research, like, from a book.

SENNA: Yes.

GROSS: It's not like your family talked to you about it. What was it like for you to learn that?

SENNA: It was - I mean, the details in these books about my mother's family and my family have really horrible details about, you know, this man, this very powerful slave trader cutting off the hands of the slaves who he threw into the water, who were trying to hold onto the boat. There were terrible details in there, but I didn't experience it personally as shame or that this is my family. I think that I take as a given that these are all of our ancestors. We're all connected to these people. And, you know, the idea that that's something special didn't come into my head. I thought, this is American history that I descend out of. And so my memoir was really kind of taking my family as a microcosm of our country's history - both sides of my family.

GROSS: And you learned a lot about your father while writing a memoir about your childhood and your family. And your mother is from, you know, this, you know, eminent Boston family. And your father spent some of his childhood in an orphanage. And, you know, his family was very poor. Was that confusing to you growing up? And especially since growing up, in spite of your mother's background, your parents didn't have money because they lived in a - you know, they were writers. They lived in a world of artists and bohemians, which was kind of outside of the official class structure of America.

SENNA: The class identity for me was never sort of separated from the racial identity and the sense of being sort of illegible, again - because both my parents had so much education and they had published books, but we were getting food stamps. And it was like, one more thing about me that didn't actually make sense, and I certainly didn't see represented on television or in films or novels. And I think always some of my impulse to be a writer comes from that feeling that I want to write myself into existence, and I want to write the worlds that I've lived in and the people I've been in the world with into existence because I never see them. And so even, you know, with this novel wanting to kind of write a family that, you know, is a Black family in contemporary America who are highly educated, creative people who have no money, I think, writes against some of what I keep seeing replicated in the culture around, you know, Black people are either the Jeffersons living in the housing projects or they're in a Tyler Perry movie and living in a mansion. And there's something else that's more complicated that I want to write into existence, both about race and class.

GROSS: So in your novel, the main character is teaching English literature in college, and she finds that now she's only assigning autofiction by queer writers of color, and that makes the classroom experience much better. Is that something that you've gravitated toward, too?

SENNA: No, that's - I mean, me...

GROSS: That's you being satirical.

SENNA: ...Writing comedy (laughter). Yes.

GROSS: Yes. OK. So where is that coming from?

SENNA: I mean, it's always, you know, that moment when you're giving your students your syllabus and sometimes, you know, you feel like, am I checking all the boxes? But in my case, you know, I think some of the most interesting writing is coming from queer writers of color and writers of color, and it's sort of organic to my syllabus that it would be filled with those voices. It's not a choice based on a box-checking. It's sort of who I'm finding exciting and the - who I'm reading at the time. But it's also got a lot of dead white men. And I teach writers who I don't fully - you know, who have things that are demeaning to someone like me in them. But I think they're brilliant writers. And so I always say I'm greedy and I will read whoever can teach me something, even if I have to, you know, notice things in it that aren't palatable to me. If their writing is really great, I want to read it.

GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you again. If you're just joining us, my guest is writer Danzy Senna. Her new novel is called "Colored Television." She's also the author of "Caucasia" and "New People." We'll be right back after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Danzy Senna. Her new novel is called "Colored Television."

The marriage in your novel is kind of unraveling. One of the things that holds the marriage together is they hate a lot of the same things. So I want to run through some of the things they hate, and I want you to tell me if you hate them too, and if so, why. We'll start with world music festivals. Hate it?

SENNA: Hate it (laughter).

GROSS: Because...

SENNA: I've never been to one, but I've just seen footage of them. And it's like my idea of hell, to be a muddy sort of throng of hippies dancing together.

GROSS: But is it any music festival or specifically world music festivals that you hate?

SENNA: I think it's a very specific one in, like, Portland.

GROSS: OK (laughter).

SENNA: (Laughter).

GROSS: OK. Poetry readings - now, you're a novelist. Your mother is a poet. Do you hate poetry readings?

SENNA: I grew up having to go to a lot of poetry readings, and it was like experimental poetry readings, and I had no idea what they were talking about. And my sister and brother and I would sit in the back sort of banging our Barbie dolls together and, you know, just kind of like bored and enraged to have to be there. So that was kind of a joke about my childhood.

GROSS: White feminism - do you hate white feminism? And if so, what do you hate about it?

SENNA: Feminism, I think, is something that I deeply have been influenced by. But when it is taken outside of the context of race analysis and class analysis, I think it becomes just extremely problematic and alienating. And so it hasn't been something that I've sort of ever been able to fully get on board with, because of those absences in the history of feminism.

GROSS: Redemptive endings - and I imagine you're talking about novels and movies and TV. What do you not like about redemptive endings?

SENNA: I think that was sort of just these characters actually being so cynical and so kind of dark in their affinities in terms of art and alienated from sort of mainstream popular culture, that she was saying that they hate redemptive endings like you see in movies.

GROSS: So I'm wondering if the idea of not liking redemptive endings influenced how you decided to end the book, because you have to deal with endings in your fiction. Do you want them to have any trace of redemption? How do - you know, how do you decide how you want it to end?

SENNA: Well, the last book I wrote, "New People," had a very maybe disturbing ending. And I left the character in a really precarious place. And with this novel, I wanted something a little more mixed, with some of what's been lost, and then also what's still there to be found. And so I - this is probably the most redemptive I was going to get, but I won't say too much about it, but I felt it was important not to completely give up at the end here.

GROSS: Since you've written so much about race, about your own, you know, racial mixedness, and you've written about your ancestors to some degree on both sides of your family, have you done your DNA? And if so, what did you want to find out? Like what were the questions you wanted answered by your DNA? And did they get answered in a way that was useful or helpful?

SENNA: Of course I've had my DNA done.

GROSS: (Laughter).

SENNA: As Hampton Ford says to Jane, you mixed people love to spit into vials.

GROSS: (Laughter).

SENNA: And I did it just because of course I was going to do it. And it came out exactly as I had already known myself to be. My father is mixed race and, you know, didn't know his father. His mother had three children by, clearly, people she didn't name, but the children were lighter skinned than her. And so when he had his - when we did my memoir, when I did my memoir, we found out that his father was a Mexican boxer who had gone back to Mexico. And, so I'm actually, you know, only a quarter West African and I'm a quarter indigenous Mexican Indian, and I'm half British and British, basically. And it really added up to what I thought I was based on my father's history, which we had already researched. And that was not really - it didn't really change anything about my identity to find it out.

GROSS: Well, Danzy Senna, it's been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much. And congratulations on your novel.

SENNA: Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure.

GROSS: Danzy Senna's new novel is called "Colored Television." Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. She's written a new memoir that gives a rare glimpse into her legal mind, detailing her life and the experiences that led her to become the first Black woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The book is called "Lovely One." I hope you'll join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @NPRFreshAir.

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GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producers are Molly Seavy-Nesper and Sabrina Siewert. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.

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