Colored Television

Danzy Senna is an award-winning novelist and essayist. Her work, including Colored Television, often incorporates autobiographical explorations of themes around race, gender, class, and politics. Senna was born to a white mother and a Black Mexican father in Boston in 1970, only a few years after the 1967 Supreme Court ruling Loving v. Virginia overturned laws banning marriage between people of different races. Her award-winning debut novel, Caucasia (1998), is a bildungsroman about two biracial sisters growing up in 1970s Boston. Danzy Senna is married to the award-winning Black writer Percival Everett, best known for his novel Erasure (2001).

Elements of Colored Television likewise draw from Senna’s autobiography. Like Senna, Jane Gibson is a light-skinned biracial woman with a white mother and a Black father who divorced when she was young. They are both Gen X writers. Jane is married to a Black artist whose physical description mirrors Percival Everett. Senna also reincorporates elements from Caucasia in Colored Television, as when Jane describes how Black students at her school growing up called her “Puerto Rican” due to her light skin.

The use of the word “mulatto,” which Senna uses throughout the text to describe people who have one Black and one white parent, is controversial.