Danzy Senna’s first novel, 1998's “Caucasia,” is about two biracial siblings who are forced by family circumstances to assume new identities. It was a hard sell; publishers didn’t know what to make of burying one’s ethnicity, of passing yourself off as something you aren’t. “There was bewilderment about what perspective I was writing from,” says the bestselling author, whose sixth novel, “Colored Television,” is out now. “The idea of racial passing wasn’t in the cultural conversation at all.
Her mother, Fanny Howe, is an acclaimed poet and novelist; her father, Carl Senna, was a civil rights activist of Mexican African descent who has written books on the history of the Black press and Colin Powell. “Race was a constant conversation in my family,” says Senna, who, along with her two siblings, was bused to public school in the ‘70s as part of Boston’s desegregation policy. “We grew up in a very intense racial climate,” she says. “Boston was like being biracial on steroids.