Danzy Senna Is Amused by Your Mixed Feelings

The sad music snuck up on us, stealing into the conversation just as we turned to the future of biracial identity. “We’re under deep suspicion at the moment,” Danzy Senna confided over lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where we’d settled down at a booth near the piano. Donald Trump had just accused Kamala Harris of fabricating her Black heritage; a few months earlier, Kendrick Lamar had called Drake, whose mother is white and Jewish, a “colonizer” in the chart-topping diss track “Not Like Us.” Senna is hardly one to cry over spilled melanin. A novelist who chronicles the lives of “mixed nuts” with screwball humor and ironic detachment, she would rather be caught dead than wail what she called, in a recent Times essay, the “racial specimen blues.” But our theme’s collision with the pianist’s schmaltzy noodling—Barbra Streisand? Céline Dion?—reduced us both to tears. “I’m really unable to speak,” Senna gasped, wiping her eyes between spasms of laughter. “It’s making me feel like a tragic mulatto.”