Myth of Post-Racial America: Biracial novelist says America still has a long way to go

Myth of Post-Racial America: Biracial novelist says America still has a long way to go

Northwestern University
News Center
2010-03-08

Wendy Leopold, Education Editor

EVANSTON, Illinois — In a speech titled “The Myth of Post-Racial America,” writer Danzy Senna warned members of the packed audience in Fisk Hall against the urge to view America as having moved past issues of privilege, race and class.

Delivering the annual Leon Forrest Lecture last week, Senna, who is biracial, called such thinking “a dangerous impulse” that seeks to “stop conversation” about racism and genocide that are at the very heart of American history and culture…

…Senna, whose novels and memoirs address biracial and multiracial identity, is the daughter of a Boston blue-blood mother and a black father who grew up “dirt-poor” in the Deep South. She won acclaim for her debut novel, “Caucasia,” which told the story of biracial sisters growing up in the 1970s in racially charged Boston…

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