Black and White

ladies and gentlemen please welcome Dan Z Sena and mishneh wolf so I think maybe I'll introduce Danny dan I'm so sorry you look like a friend of mine named Danny um I'm off to a terrible start Danny Sena yeah I've written five books mostly fiction and my first novel is Caucasia which was written it feels like in another lifetime about a young girl coming of age in Boston and the shadow of the civil rights movement and her father's black her mother's white and she is sort of forced to pass as white for various complicated reasons and my new book is called new people and it's sort of a dark comedy about race and I grew up in a interracial family my dad is black and my mother is white and um sort of issues of racial ambiguity and identity have really preoccupied my work and been a theme underlying everything I write and the kind of comedy of race and the sort of obsessive quality to it how it sort of never never goes away and it kind of keeps reemerging and the weight of history I also wrote a memoir and I know mishneh has a memoir so um about my family history actually because my mother is um from the largest slave trading family on the Northeast Corridor and I traced back her history to this very famous slave trader and family of slave traders which she was sad to have me exposed I know I can imagine that was a little like she's really liberal and you know why don't you skip Thanksgiving this year and my dad's family is from like the deep south and african-american family and Alabama and New Orleans so I traced both their family histories and looked at the sort of intersections and the and my family as a kind of microcosm of American history and all of its mixture and kind of violence and tragedy and connection so animation uh yeah I mean I feel like yeah I mean I feel like we have a similar thing in that I grew up in a blended family it's not it I guess it's not an interracial family but we were married I was married I grew up in a household that was you know half black half white and it was also a predominantly african-american neighborhood I grew up in and it was also very poor and I feel like one of the things that kids missed sometimes in these conversations about race is how much class is an equalizer in some ways like um like if you went to a big family gathering with my family like today right my big blended family you would see a lot of white people in that group that we're married or had kids with people that would not strike you as out of place at all just because they're a part of that sort of class group that I grew up with which was you know you know at times we were way below the poverty line where was this this was in South seea oh right yeah and and so I think too that that's you know but but both of us I feel like are in this soup you know there's nothing binary about sort of the feelings I had growing up and sort of my identity in in in that sort of way my father deeply identified as african-american and to the point where it's like how he dressed and talked and walked and lived was as a member of the yeah it's interesting I mean because the whole class question um I grew up you know the black people and the black world that I grew up in was highly educated and artists and writers and and my father's a writer and so I they weren't rich but there was a kind of cultural wealth yeah and cultural capital there and um so I'm always interested like when people conflate black culture with working-class yeah because it's it's to me there there has not always been that association like what is black is not that agreed so I have only kept really complex feeling about you know what constitutes black culture yeah I mean I would also say like the big issue I have sometimes with the conversation and I feel like there is now a conversation that we've seen in the media and that we're all sort of witness to in books and film about race is that it sort of conflates all white people and all black people and and one of the things I take issue with is there's only one voice in that discussion and it's an educated a upper-middle class or middle class voice generally doing the it's it's just a conversation in general because of who makes books and films and movies and all that stuff is generally and a privileged voice to begin with ya know and I think that's true for white and black white and black boys there's just going to glass it's a great kind of unacknowledged space in American politics like we we love talking about race we love talking about gender and sexuality but like the the privileged issue when it goes down to that level of who has access to all of these things that's where it's uncomfortable you know who has access to media yeah when we do see someone not of privilege or see a voice not of privilege it's usually from the lens of class tourism by a network or something and you get something like a honey bunny boo boo I was exactly thinking yeah yeah such yeah I get it feels horribly it's good it was horribly yeah yeah so I was just curious given your family upbringing and the larger family you come from do you feel like now that you're an adult have you has your life become more white or more sort of segregated than it was for you growing up like how has that affected you as an adults I mean I think when I was growing up that's a really good question and I can't really tell you except for you know my husband is white and my children are white and I feel like that's definitely you know a indicator of sort of where what where my feet landed I'm a card-carrying member of the n-double a-c-p you get great discounts with that card no I would say I have enough I don't know you know it's funny cuz I code-switch a lot and my husband points it out that when I'm with my sister suddenly he doesn't even know who I am and you know my he's like your voice changes like you speak like you know like you're back home and when I'm back home but it's weird you integrate into a self that inhabits your childhood self and your adult self and you know I'm very close to my family I have a really strong relationship with my stepmother my nephew her extended family so I'm in that community and then I wrote a book that you know is well liked by my own community so you know it's hard to say you know but the tough time I find is that for better or for worse I've always looked you know people have always said oh you look rich you know what I mean so I have a lot of black female friends that I feel like you know when I first got to know them they were just like hey why is this why is this you know rich white woman so you know have all the same reference points as me and you know want to you know want to hang out and I think I think that's been a like not you know not anything but I remember when I was growing up when I went to my school that was very white from my neighborhood the black girls that were there initially thought I was too ghetto yeah no I mean I have the experience of passing which has been a real theme in my work as well but just that thing I think where you walk into a room and people project a certain meaning onto your physicality and it doesn't really acknowledge these places in you that are invisible and so yeah that's really eloquently play but just for me it's a it's also that experience of constantly being seen and read as a white woman and my husband is black and so we're always having interracial couples try to bond with us and I'm like actually we're not an interracial couple that's hilarious we're both black and you know it's just yeah it's sort of all these awkward moments and funny moments and like my kids every time they have to have forms at school the people put on the form that they're biracial and really yeah like actually it's not quite what it seems my older son has gotten more comfortable by clarifying but of course you know they are multiracial because black people in America are a multiracial group and on three of their four grandparents are black but then there's my blonde wasp mother and uh so it's you know they're they're all so understanding of blackness is is a very complex and multiracial concept of that like where there's different shades of blackness and there's different cultural spaces my husband's from the deep south and I'm from what my mother calls the deep north which was Boston and but Boston is one of them I mean I don't know how Boston is today but growing up I used to visit Boston a certain amount cuz my grandmother lived there and I found it to be she lived in Jamaica Plain that's where I grew up right around the corner from Spain hat offs ok so I spent my entire childhood wandering those mean streets which they called Jamaica Spain when I was going around all the Puerto Ricans lived there okay and that was actually just getting a little insider e but no but the like the Puerto Rican it goes back to this subject because people assumed we were Puerto Rican because those were the families where the kids ranged in complexion from very light to brown to kinky hair straight hair and so a lot of my close friends weren't those kids and it was sort of a gray area middle space that I found as a child and but I found him Boston to be one of the more segregated cities oh yeah no I mean that's why I call it the deep north because I mean our fan it was not an easy place to grow up as an interracial family and the level it's not segregated its straight-up racist okay straight-up racist that was me being nice to yeah no no it's like one of the most racist cities you'll ever grow up if you grew up in the time I did the things that were done you know to my family were when I got to college I lived in the black dorm and told all these kids from like Alabama and Louisiana and and you know things that had happened to black students there and they were like what they couldn't believe that that was in the south that that was happening to someone things they've never happened to them yeah so I mean the levels of sort of extreme racial hostility were intense there and it really formed my black identity I didn't grow up thinking of myself as biracial I grew up thinking myself as black and it was not an option like there was no form where you could have a category in as a child to say mixed-race right you would either pass as white or you were black and proud and I grew up you know with very politicized parents and I am a black person who happens to pass as white when I enter a room and now I identify more as a you know all of these things come into my work and onto the table but growing up there was in Boston in that era there was no other option see my version of that growing up was I remember I was on this team this basketball team called the satin dolls and the satin dolls were crazy they were they were coached by the first female professional basketball player who was on the Harlem Globetrotters but I think she was doing community service by coaching us because she had an on-again off-again drug problem so like it's really hard to mug like you know an eight balls worth of good feelings from coaching kids at basketball like she was so angry and these girls were incredible it was like me my dad had so many aspirations for me and then he's like does your talk yes exactly and then these these girls that had just like always had a ball in their hand and we would literally go to white community centers and win like 79 to zero at 11 like it was like crazy they were just like what is going on like you have to play this I have a hoop you do yeah I have a hoop I play a little horse horse but but I remember like they would the girls on my team would always try and figure out my family like it'd always be like so that's your half-sister cuz my sister had really curly hair and very big features like and they would always look at her and say so that's your half-sister and I would be like no that's my full sister and they'd be like but you guys don't have the same mom and I'm like can't we have the same mom like we're sisters and then they look at my step brother and sister and say but those are your half-siblings I'd be like no those are my step siblings and I feel like everywhere we went even if that wasn't a conversation that was the inner dialogue people were having was like which who by what marriage is this family yeah we were talking about how when we were in the green room about how invisible that kind of a family is in the popular culture still where there's all this diversity happening where you get all these different groups being represented on television and film and and yet there's still I think a real lack of what we know you know to be a real and true and not that unusual and unusual at all variants of having a family that's all different races and that's all I know and that's normal to me so it's strange to have it be completely unrepresented in a way yeah it's it's the invisible family in the media yeah I don't know why that is I can't figure it out well it's I mean there's the history of not allowing black and white people to kiss on screen especially black man and a white woman right but that seems like that's at least happened now so there should be some yeah they should get married at some point at some point they should all turn together yes I mean it'd Rosella and Kate Winslet should have a baby absolutely like come on after you get out of that mountain they should yeah you'll have some agreed okay so should we open it up to questions I think we should how many questions yes sorry oh sorry so the question was our ears yeah but the first part of the question was and both of us yeah so the question was how we were treated in both by our black and white peers and our childhoods growing up and then how we see America in terms of the relations between blacks and whites right now do you want to well I feel like I had a peer group of sort of the school I went to was very upper middle class white liberal and while I felt like I blended in physically with them they could not understand and they could they had no idea the world I came from and they could not wrap their head around a community and I'm not speaking about all communities I'm speaking about my family and I'm not speaking about the black community in which education was not a priority at all they could not even believe it not only was education not a priority at all in my in my family but it was there was almost a you know it just was a that was them they're not working class there was just an attitude of sort of snottiness subscribed to you know my friend's parents who worked at like nonprofits so I just don't think they could imagine like I would come to school with like my I would never I like never did my homework and they they like it was just this like couldn't believe it they were like what would you do it wasn't like well I had chores you know and then I had you know then I had like two hours of basketball and then you know I had to take care of the babies and get them ready for bed and then I went to sleep you know and and I feel like that was really the disconnect between me and my white peer group was just like how we spent our evenings and I mean even to like I had jobs really early I had to work you know there were just was not this like there was no like there was no conceiving of a version of things where school just wasn't be most important thing in your life yeah I mean um that's interesting that class issue that comes into because I I went to a sort of scrappy public schools of different races and hmm my I think one of my most formative experiences racially was of seeing the two faces of white America because I was privy to the conversation that white people had when they didn't know I think there was a black person in the room and then the conversation they had when they were being liberal and and I think I've been very aware of that kind of gas lighting of black America where it's like we don't see race and we don't you know have any racism and there's we're not even noticing that you're black actually and then I'm in the conversation when all of that mask falls away and that's one of my earliest experiences of race was having having that and how did blacks relate to me well there were no blacks in the sense that I only when I look back on my life I see very specific individuals and I had some of my most you know my best friends were some of those people and some of them were people who were bullies and some of those were people who didn't embrace me but but it wasn't really about me appearing white to them when I had it's bad experiences in the black community um I think in the black community there's always been a range of complexions and as soon as I'm known to be biracial the black community has been very accepting of my Who I am and that that understanding of of gradations of blackness is has been there from the beginning of this country so um I went to an afro centric school when I was a for a year and that was kind of a rough experience because it was a rough school and the people I made friends with were the black middle-class children of professors and artists I always found myself finding the people whose parents were also artists and my best friend's father was a filmmaker and so I think we reduced people when we talked about them as black or white and the traumas I had like going to a working-class Irish Boston Irish school had as much to do with the history of the Boston Irish you know I I don't like to reduce people to these groups without all of these complex issues of class and cultural reference points yeah and I would say like for me like my sister made the jump from white to light and I didn't and you know just within the car social group in our neighborhood you know what I mean and I don't think that has anything to do with the color of our skin it is just like culturally she fit with this group and culturally I did not and then she still identified as black light-skinned or no no I wouldn't say at all but that you know I mean that was a long journey for her and that's her own story yeah you know you know she had some some good experiences and some bad experiences but I I think you know our neighborhood was also the scene of a lot of you know at the time growing up it was a really fun place we were super free range kids we had a lot of autonomy and independence and we had a lot of really fun adventures and it was also a place of a lot of dysfunction and violence so you know and I also remember a really steep jump in my community in the early 90s when when crack was introduced into you know sort of the whole sphere and there was a big sharp change in the cultural life you know sort of feel of things right but yes yeah yeah yeah yes the question was whether my parents politicized me growing up and if that was helpful or not helpful and you know my parents were very political and very racialized they were both obsessed with the subject of race they married in 1968 six months after Martin Luther King was assassinated in loving versus state of Virginia the you know Supreme Court decision was that yeah the anti-miscegenation laws were considered unconstitutional so there was a baby boom and a marriage boom of interracial couples so I'm part of the loving generation that is what they call us because we were all born from like 68 to the early 70s there were suddenly the spike of interracial couples and my mother wrote for MS magazine she brought us on Take Back the Night marches she had actually framed pictures of JFK and Martin Luther King in our house we had a lot of tenants or people coming artists and from Africa and Latin America living in our house um and my father was writing he wrote a book called the fallacy of IQ about racism and standardized testing and was constantly talking to us about blackness and history and Egypt and the origins of civilization and and I feel now very grateful for that education that I had and the books they forced me to read and Frantz Fanon and you know the crisis and the Negro intellectual things that were shoving down my throat as a child and um and I do feel this ambivalence because I think they had their sort of political activists artists world and then we were the foot soldiers the children and forced to go fight these battles on this really ground level and it was scrappy and and I do think that for most mixed people when you're told you're just black and you know you're also these other things that can be very confusing but I also at this age in my life feel very grateful and I've met a lot of mixed people in the last decade who I feel because we are in a racist culture it's very easy for that to sink into your pores and for you to feel shame about your blackness because that is the identity that needs protecting and boosting in this world when you leave your house so I get it when I meet people who didn't have that because I had not a moment in my entire life of having any shame or anything but pride about being black and so I think that I sort of forgive a lot of the other things when I think of what they were sort of defending me against because it wasn't a liberal fantasy world and I was hearing things that could have sunk into my pores and they were giving me this armor that I appreciate at this point yeah yes you had your hand raised yes LA where have we come the last 20 30 years around race yes yeah I mean it is different now and I mean I think it's naive to deny that certain things have changed and I think all of those policies that you know the right wing has sort of demonized have been really successful in many ways you know like having affirmative action and enforced diversity like that those were necessary steps we if you think back to where we were but I think um racism and race division it's so much part of the fabric of the sort of origins of this country that um it's going to kind of keep flaring up like a cancer that goes into remission and it kind of seems to like there are all these things that are still not dealt with like police brutality and the reason that we talk about it now is literally only because of the cell phone like otherwise there would be that gaslighting where that doesn't exist but somebody has a cell phone now and we know that this has actually been happening as it always has so I think that as these things become exposed it kind of opens the wound again and forces us to look at it but certainly we're at a more um I think enlightened place than we were in my childhood and my children are growing up in California where it's not the black/white thing like their school is 60 percent Asian and 20 percent Latino and so their conversation is not the same one and I'm learning a lot from them actually yeah and I I would say I had a recent experience in my family that involved detectives the court system and it was us it was you know there it was a situation in which you know a family member was murdered and and I sort of showed up Iram her very being very conscious of the fact that I was showing up to be a well-dressed white lady with with my family and that they needed a well-dressed white lady with them and I was right you know because that's still that's just that's a thing and it's a thing when you shake a detective's hand and they're like whoa and they think they thought I was a lawyer you know they thought I was a lawyer and I was really you know or when I when I went when I went and stood next to my stepmother in court that's all I did stand there I had nothing to offer the situation I do not have a law degree I'm barely good moral support um you know I have to eat all the time and you know I I always have to go use the bat like I'm not the best day in court with anybody oh don't bring me if you have to go I've like oh he's looking at my cell phone um but I knew that's what this situation needed and I was not wrong you know what I mean it changed the outcomes of these days and and until you've actually had that experience I feel like as a white person it's just like it's it's mind-bending it's really mind-bending and I will also say this I've also had the experience of just plain old this is a whole nother thing but just plain old being poor like I remember walking into stores when I was a kid and the security guard following me around the store cuz it's just what I look like and that never happens to me anymore and it's awesome that that never happens anymore but I do feel like having being poor or having people think you might be poor or having people think you might be any number of things creates a shame that is really it sticks with you and you bring it to situations and in an apologetic 'no stat is not really apropos of a lot of situations I know I'm going off on a tangent but but I okay right you it was a magnet program and and might you have to repeat the question okay oh I'm sorry she asked how I got in this great school from this this this sort of poor neighborhood that I grew up in and the the answer is I had a pushy parent my mom she was a bus driver and she worked nights and weekends and so my dad when they got divorced got you know sort of primary custody of us but she made a deal with him that I was going to the school and he was not thrilled with the idea he did not like my classmates he didn't really like my teachers he didn't like the other parents at the school but it was just it was part of the deal and he would always like sort of try and reeducate me it was a great school I got a great education through high school but he would always like it was very important that he read me - when I got home and you know we'd have long conversations about bias and redlining and you know it was it was you know it was his way of saying you know these people don't know everything but the answer is I had a very pushy parent yes Helen came from Silicon came from the Bay Area - yeah variously cuz we got your slang later I was from Seattle and the slang would start in the big did you grow up in Oakland no your Boston yeah but but Stanford the question is did the black kids have more power socially I did not grow up around any white kids up until I was like eight years old so I spoke Ebonics I did all the hand chance that self-identified me as a black person I did not have the experience of really being around a lot of white kids so yeah they dominated socially but but in a situation like that it's more about who's fastest who's strongest but mostly it was about who was wittiest who was funniest who was quickest who was sharpest and I have to say like my neighborhood didn't have a lot of opportunity but it had a lot of creativity and the kids I grew up around were sharp you know they were really sharp kids that I learned a lot of about comedy writing which is what I do for a living today and I didn't learn that and my gifted magnet school I learned punctuation now the computer can do that yeah education but you know Jason Trey you know there were kids that really taught me how to be quick on my feet and used my personality and use wit and be present and you know and just the value of being able to tell a good story came from them it did it it didn't come from anybody else and it didn't come from my parents either it came from the you know the mean streets of boys and girls yes um I mean I think a lot of people remember the night Trump was elected right you know there were you I I was um I was not expecting that outcome as most people I was around for not and maybe it's because I live in LA and a sort of democratic bubble but we were nobody was expecting that and I remember the party I was at and everyone sort of it was a celebration party we were all hanging out and like I remember the room just getting quieter and quieter and like that dread coming into the room and then people just started leaving um and at the same time I think um after in the aftermath of that election I did not shrink into a fetal position I sort of over the months that came I was I was like yeah there's a you know this person in charge right now and and um a lot of my white liberal friends like literally had nervous breakdowns it felt like yeah and I was like what I mean I feel like Obama was the anomaly and I was actually like oh this is the America I have known and we were returning to something and then he got you know even crazier than the America I'd known but like I felt like my I had things to draw on as a black person in America that allowed me to move forward with optimism under the era of Trump that my friends who were and and there was also with them I thought a kind of horror and shame about being white suddenly that had not that they were like really trying to show how depressed they were as a way of shame saying I'm not this kind of right and it was like wait why are you going so extreme with this performance of grief like just wipe off your pants and get on with it like there was just a strange gap there where like the black world I was in we were just kind of like yep yep and then it was like so I had this strange experience to having a very close black family member pro Trump yeah I know I've where I was but it was all about his male hood oh there's a misogyny it was like all about his manhood so it was just like yeah he's gonna make it good for me for us hard-working men again yeah no one's personally yeah and I was just really like okay we'll see you know ya know I mean well yeah I think I understand what you're saying there's there's this um you don't understand but do something about this fix this but you don't understand think that sometimes I feel like well there's a Che Guevara quote which I'm going to get wrong which is um when the left-wing the American Left is asked to form a firing squad they form a circle and you know I think there is a lot of sort of attacking one another within that that that can be really unproductive yeah and I like to think what is our goal like what's our outcome that we want and that was the way that the civil rights movement succeeded was being very goal-driven like we want this law to be revoked we want this decision we want these spaces opened and these schools and so I think when we lose sight in the sort of fever of social media in particular I think social media has been toxic for political conversation in many ways um I think when we lose sight of actually what our goal is as a group we're trying to change things and begin to become more sort of in this narcissistic identity politics self-righteous frenzy we we kind of lose that sense of what we're actually here to do and I see a hand up over there but we're about to get cut off here is there something quickly I think it's hard for people from low socioeconomic backgrounds to find a microphone period but you're also asking if people can write from another perspective if you're writing from another point of view I think you know if you there is that risk on but I have more to say on that then I have time to say but I think that as an artist I'm more open minded about these things if you can do things well then you can do anything yeah I mean there there there used to be this thing that the difference between a misogynistic joke and an edgy joke is an edgy jokes funny right exactly that's right I think we're out of time so thank you all