The Writer Danzy Senna on Kamala Harris and the Complexity of Biracial Identity in America

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Obama, News, Wnyc, Washington, Barack, President, Lizza, Wickenden

4.2 • 3.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 September 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is the political scene and I'm David Remnick.
0:07.0	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.
0:21.0	Do you feel more like a Californian New Englander or a New Yorker?
0:27.0	That's the main split in my identity.
0:28.5	The biracial thing is so small.
0:30.0	Like I'm really like, which place do I belong? I'm really like which place do I belong I'm still conflicted about.
0:37.0	The writer is Danzy Sena and her big subject in novels, stories and essays
0:42.4	is the experience of navigating America's very complicated racial
0:46.3	lines.
0:47.3	Senna's new novel is called Colored Television.
0:51.3	Here's Julian Lucas. So I first came to Danzy's work in college when I read her essay, The Molado Millennium.
1:01.0	And to me, having grown up biracial in northern New Jersey, discovering
1:05.4	Danzy's work was so important to me because I had never before read anyone
1:09.5	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.
1:21.0	And one thing that I've always loved about Sena's work
1:24.0	is its irreverence, and her latest novel is no exception.
1:28.5	The story that with an enormous amount of humor and compassion and also irony and sarcasm gets at the changing
1:38.1	nature of biracial identity in America today and also the way that pop culture shapes how all of us see ourselves.
1:50.0	You know you have incredible timing with this novel because you've written a novel about
1:56.7	a biracial woman in contemporary California and the way those two mythologies intersect and of course in a turn that few of us expected now we have a candidate for
2:07.6	president who is a biracial woman from California Kamala Harris.
2:13.0	Who looks slightly like the cover of my novel.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WNYC Studios and The New Yorker, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.