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Danzy Senna Can’t Stop Thinking in Black and White
Colored Television, the author’s latest comic novel about a mixed-race Black woman, holds diminishing returns.
The hyperbole lands sideways at a time when an epidemic of cynical box-ticking means every power center in the country is eager to promote (light-skinned, well-behaved) people of color as a way to have their DEI cake and eat it racistly too. Back in 1998, in an essay for Slate titled “Mulatto millennium,” she wrote: “Pure breeds (at least the black ones) are out and hybridity is in.” Colored Television, by comparison, reads like a treatise on Why Representation Matters. Senna puts too much shoulder into justifying Jane, waving back at the character’s lonely earlier years and her trauma from childhood, which she spent torn between broke and acrimonious bohemian parents.
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