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Not much dust had settled on his old playbook when Donald Trump felt inspired last month to probe Kamala Harris’s racial identity. Like some prudent antebellum buyer, he wanted to understand what he was getting. “I don’t know,�� Trump wondered aloud. “Is she Indian? Or is she black?��

To say we’ve been here before is an understatement. We’ve never left. The myth of racial purity lies at the heart of White supremacy, and keeping that poisonous ideology alive requires fixating on the ancestral “mysteries�� of people of color, while assuming that Whiteness is undiluted, unsullied.

In 1998, a decade before America elected its first biracial president, Danzy Senna published a debut novel called “Caucasia�� about two sisters who, like the author, have a Black father and a White mother. Since then, in witty fiction and nonfiction, Senna has continued to explore the lives of biracial people and to prick our crazy-making anxiety about racial ambiguity.

Now, on the short list of good things happening during this election season, you can put Senna’s sly new book, “Colored Television.�� It has nothing to do with politics, except that it has everything to do with politics. It’s an exceptionally assured novel about trying to find a home and a job in a culture constantly swirling between denigrating racial identity and fetishizing it.

Senna’s shrewd comedy starts right there in the title with its discomfiting pun, but “Colored Television�� quickly pushes even harder against the boundaries of genteel speech. The protagonist is a biracial woman named Jane Gibson, who’s hoping to earn tenure at a university where she delivers trigger warnings and assigns “only minimalist autofiction by queer POC authors.�� When the story opens, Jane is on sabbatical and has just finished her second novel, titled “Nusu Nusu,�� Swahili for “partly-partly.�� It began as a story inspired by the life of Carol Channing, the actress who didn’t publicly acknowledge her African American ancestry until late in life. Somewhere along the way, though, Jane’s manuscript mushroomed into a....

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