Authors Write About Living As Mixed-Race in America

Americans are checking more boxes under the race category on their census forms, which is further complicating America's muddled conversations about race and identity. Some multiracial authors are penning acclaimed books about growing up as mixed-race people. In the process, they're blowing up neat narratives about who gets to belong to which groups, and how race is actually lived.

"I want more complexity around the topic of race, not less, in examining the idea that pure blackness or pure whiteness or pure anything exists," the author Danzy Senna told the New York Times. Senna wrote the much-acclaimed 1998 novel, Caucasia, which focuses on the lives of two biracial sisters --- one who looks black and the other who could pass for white --- and the divergent paths they follow as they try to explore their identities. (Senna herself identifies as both black and biracial.)

Of course, authors of both black and non-black heritage are nothing new. Few people would have thought of Frederick Douglass or Malcolm X as mixed-race: any blackness in their backgrounds made them black, full-stop. But it's a different world when Barack Obama --- himself a biracial author who has written about being raised by a white mother and white grandparents --- can exercise a choice over how he wants to identify. (He listed himself as an African his census form.)

"We are saying we are the American experience," Heidi Durrow, the author of the bestseller The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, told the Times. "There is nothing exclusive about this club at all."

While these authors may be tackling issues of identity and belonging in their pages, how might these new understanding of race play out on the shelves? Black authors and readers have long lamented that the books they're looking for are relegated to the "urban" section of bookstores, a clumsy catch-all that often includes everything from Steve Harvey's relationship advice books to science fiction written by Octavia Butler. But complicating the conversation about what black authors look like might also change what it means to write and publish a "black book."