All Jane Gibson wanted to do was write the great American mulatto novel, a sprawling, century-jumping work about mixed-race people real and imagined. An answer to the myth of the “tragic mulatto.” Then she finishes it, after 10 long years of toil, only to find that both her agent and her editor hate it. What’s a struggling literary novelist to do? It turns out that one possible answer is right in front of her. Jane’s friend Brett, a rich TV writer for whom Jane and her artist husband are house-sitting, has talked about creating a new comedy series about mulatto life. What if Jane kind of…borrowed the idea?

Danzy Senna’s new novel, Colored Television, asks thorny questions about what we want in stories about Black identity, what happens when personal expression collides with the mandates of the entertainment marketplace, and why antidotes to centuries of racist representations are needed.

Seduced by the possibility of the success she feels her work deserves, Jane takes her friend’s basic premise to a Black TV executive, Hampton Ford, who initially asks her to play up the stereotypes—but when she reaches for the big brass ring, she gets burned.

The novel touches on themes that run through movies about creating and selling Black stories and about the myths of tragic and depraved mulattoes.

Spike Lee’s acidic media satire Bamboozled (2000) makes similar inquiries, taking aim at the television industry that Senna targets in her novel. The story is a sort of variation on Mel Brooks’s The Producers. A TV writer who goes by the absurd name of Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans, sporting an accent that sounds like Richard Pryor’s impression of a white man strained through an Ivy League filter) works for a bottom-feeder network under a boss, Thomas Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport), who demands a hit. Dunwitty comes off like Norman Mailer’s “White Negro” taken to grotesque extremes, boasting that he knows more about Black people than Delacroix himself. In a fit of pique, Delacroix concocts an elaborately detailed take on the old minstrel show, complete with Black actors blackened up even further with burnt cork. Mantan (tap-dance genius Savion Glover) and Sleep ’n Eat (Tommy Davidson) live in a watermelon patch. Their routines are right out of Amos ’n’ Andy. Surely this will blow up in the network’s face.

It doesn’t. Like Springtime for Hitler, the intentionally offensive play in The Producers that is produced to bilk investors, Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show is a smash. Delacroix has inadvertently given the people what they want: a calculated dose of minstrelsy presented under the cover of “satire.” He has regrets, but the financial returns aren’t among them. Lee made Bamboozled in the time of UPN, the bargain-basement network that earned its own modern minstrel reputation with shows like Homeboys in Outer Space and The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer. Bamboozled is a largely unsung riposte that draws ample blood, a comedy of palpable rage and sadness. It eventually runs out of places to go, but not before it interrogates the entertainment industry’s historical relationship with race in a manner that few if any films ever have.

Senna’s Hampton Ford is more of an industry player than Pierre Delacroix. He hangs out with Kanye West and takes meetings with Will Ferrell. He drives a Porsche. But the two men share a talent for molding Black identity into a commodity. Jane distrusts the process, but she is entranced by its possible rewards—more money, a house in a nice neighborhood, the idea of people actually encountering her stories. But ultimately, in Colored Television, TV literally represents theft. It is a siren song difficult to resist.

Jane writes her mulatto magnum opus largely as a rejoinder to age-old depictions of mulatto life that present their characters as doomed, or much worse. The most egregious example in the movies is D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), a full-throated celebration of the Ku Klux Klan and a condemnation of Reconstruction that takes every opportunity to present miscegenation as the devil’s work. It does so on multiple fronts. The mulatto characters—including Lydia Brown (Mary Alden), the housekeeper and eventual mistress of abolitionist leader Austin Stoneman, and Silas Lynch (George Siegmann), the feckless Reconstruction lieutenant governor of South Carolina—are portrayed as subhuman inhabitants of a racial netherworld, or walking, breathing mistakes.

But if it’s bad to be a mulatto in The Birth of a Nation, it’s even worse to potentially conceive one. Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh), a symbol of white feminine virtue, throws herself off a cliff as she’s pursued by Gus (Walter Long), a “renegade Negro.” Gus represents that old racist trope, the lustful Black man out to defile precious white women. As in so many frontier captivity narratives, in which Native Americans pose a threat to white womanhood, succumbing to sex with the lascivious Other is imagined as a fate worse than death.

It should be noted that tragic-mulatto stories can actually be done well. The most canonized is probably Imitation of Life, which started as a 1933 novel by Fannie Hurst and was in turn adapted into a pair of high-profile films, in 1934 and 1959. The latter, directed by melodrama maestro Douglas Sirk, is a potent parable about identity and the shame that society can instill in children and adults.

Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner as a teen, Karin Dicker as a child) doesn’t want anyone to know that her saintly mother, Annie (Juanita Moore), is Black. As Annie explains early in the film, Sarah Jane’s father, who left before she was born, “was practically white.” When Annie becomes live-in housekeeper and confidant to Lora (Lana Turner) and her precocious daughter (Sandra Dee as a teen, Terry Burnham as a child), Sarah Jane develops a pathological hatred of her Blackness. She lashes out at her mother. She runs off to dance at tawdry nightclubs. Annie tries to sympathize. “How do you explain to your child she was born to be hurt?” she asks Lora. Sarah Jane’s shame ultimately proves lethal: after she leaves home, apparently for good, her mother dies, seemingly from her grief.

Mulatto tales don’t get much more tragic. But Sirk is such a committed filmmaker, and the performances are so strong (both Moore and Kohner, whose mother was the Mexican actor Lupita Tovar, were nominated for Oscars), that universal truths manage to flood through the cracks of cliché. Here, the protagonists aren’t inherently at fault so much as the hatreds that surround them—the white Greenwich Village boyfriend who savagely beats Sarah Jane when he hears she is Black, or even the numerous white characters who respond to their discovery of Sarah Jane’s racial identity with some variation of “I didn’t know!” as if she had a terminal and perhaps communicable disease.

Life in the United States has pinned Sarah Jane against the color line, but she’s past the point of seeing her two-ness. She has been conditioned to flee from the Black blood within her. Imitation of Life is, in fact, an American tragedy.•

Join us on September 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Senna will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Porochista Khakpour to discuss Colored Television. Register for the Zoom conversation here.