With my first novel, when I was having such a hard time letting it go, I remember my brother saying to me, “It’s just a record of your creative minds… - Danzy Senna

Late in “Colored Television,” Jane returns to a passage by a (white) scholar whose study of mulattos influenced her doomed manuscript. “My life’s work has been to try to define a people that cannot be defined or even located — for the mulatto is the only race in our nation’s history that is perpetually shifting, changing colors, morphing into something unrecognizable,” the scholar writes.

I use the word mulatto a lot in my work, and I have sort of rejected the more politically correct term of "biracial" or "multiracial," mainly because it's meaningless and vague, and it could describe any two or three mixes that one could be. But mulatto — as problematic as the word is, and it comes out of slavery and the sort of pseudoscientific ideas of race, as problematic as it is — it's the only word that really describes this very specific experience of being Black and white and being that mixture in America, which is, singular, and I think an important distinction from the other mixes.

I was making fun of the fact that the people with the least financial reward – the smallest piece of the pie – fight the most viciously amongst themselves. In other words, poets. There is no practical or market value to what poets do. It’s probably the purest form of writing in the artistic sense, but perhaps because of this, it’s the most ego-driven. Don’t get me wrong, I love poets, but there is a level of snark in that world that puts to shame any other genre. Novelists are second – almost as bad as poets about one another. I’ve never seen anyone get so much deep pleasure as a novelist reading a terrible review of another more successful novelist. Television is unlike poetry or fiction in that it’s a collaborative art. And because of this, amongst TV people there’s less viciousness on the surface. At least Jane [the protagonist of her novel Colored Television - Wikiquote] thinks so. But just beneath that smiling surface, there’s something maybe more dangerous.