Long before Zendaya was our biggest young movie star, before the Kardashians became an aesthetic and economic juggernaut and certainly before Barack Obama (let alone Kamala Harris) ascended the political ranks, novelist Danzy Senna predicted we’d soon be living through what she called the Mulatto Millennium.

“Strange to wake up and realize you’re in style. That’s what happened to me just the other morning,” she wrote in a 1998 essay. “I realized that, according to the racial zodiac, 2000 is the official Year of the Mulatto. Pure breeds (at least Black ones) are out; hybridity is in. America loves us in all of our half-caste glory.”

Droll, insouciant, provocative? Of course — Senna wrote it. Over nearly three decades, she has spun up hilarious (and occasionally unsettling) stories about the lives of characters who happen to be multiracial — “the country I come from,” as she put it. Her debut novel, “Caucasia,” also published in 1998, followed two biracial sisters born in 1970s Boston who are separated by their parents and whose lives take very different paths. It was a bestseller.

Her latest book, “Colored Television,” her sixth, satirizes Hollywood, academia, the publishing industry, the housing market, ambition and, not least, the pervasive trope of the tragic mulatto.

It is also very, very funny.

Like much of Senna’s fiction, “Colored Television,” which Riverhead recently released, borrows elements from her own life and torques them to the extreme. The novel follows Jane Gibson, a biracial novelist in Los Angeles married to a brilliant, slightly mad painter named Lenny and their two young children.

A shared sense of humor — particularly about the absurdity of living in the United States as people of color — is a refuge in their unstable, uncertain existence. Financial security remains elusive. Lenny’s paintings are inspired but don’t sell, and it has been nearly a decade since Jane published a book.

But when her family stays in the sophisticated home of one of her friends, a fellow “mixed nut” with literary inclinations who struck gold as a TV showrunner and is temporarily living abroad, Jane is sure she can finish the manuscript she has been wrestling for years — what Lenny calls her “mulatto ‘War and Peace.’ ”

Jane’s ambitious, deeply researched novel ends up a bloated story called “Nusu Nusu,” a Swahili phrase meaning “partly partly.” Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson appear, as do Slash from Guns N’ Roses and the Melungeons of Appalachia, a historical, sequestered community of mixed-race Americans.

You don’t need to work in publishing to anticipate that the project is dead on arrival.

Desperate, Jane turns to television writing, shopping around a half-baked idea for what turns into “the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies.” Along the way, she grapples with questions of passing (both racial and economic), commodification and self-exploitation.

Like Jane, Senna has dabbled in screenwriting and adaptations, and drew on her experience with that world to write the book.

During an interview in June, Senna recalled one such project. Her collaborators loved everything she did. “It was Hollywood hyperbole, which, if you’re a novelist, you’re not used to,” she said. “Completely overnight, I became a monster.”

When that fever broke, “I suddenly had a moment of thinking it would be funny to put a novelist who’s down on her luck into this world,” Senna went on. The setup allowed her to play with tokenism in the entertainment industry, giving Jane the urgency to be “the mulatto of the month” in the eyes of Hollywood power brokers, and Senna an outlet to air increasingly screwball conceits (i.e., Labradoodles as cultural emancipators).

Senna, 53, was born in Boston, the daughter of a white, patrician mother descended from some of Massachusetts’ oldest families and an African American father. Her parents, Fanny Howe and Carl Senna, were in the first cohort of interracial couples who could legally marry in the United States.

Both of her parents were politically engaged in civil rights, and the family talked openly and resolutely about race.

“For both of my parents, it was very clear to them we were going to identify as Black — in a city as racist as Boston, in a country as racist as America, that the identity in us that needed protecting and shoring up was our Black identity,” Senna has said. “It wasn’t the white side of us.”

Senna lives in Pasadena with her husband, novelist Percival Everett, and their two teenage sons. She began the novel that became “Colored Television” years ago. The manuscript sat in a drawer while she helped her family navigate the pandemic, and when she returned to it, she was relieved to find the premise still felt funny. Writing a novel is so solitary, she said, “you might as well have fun while you’re doing it.”

In her fiction and in life, Senna is intentional with her use of the term “mulatto.” The word comes from the Spanish word for “mule” — an infertile beast of burden produced by two distinct species.

“Antebellum ideas are still so embedded in everything we do, and the insistence that we don’t exist is embedded in the word ‘mulatto,’ ” she said. “The word ‘mulatto’ means we are the end of society.”

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.

“Goodbye, mulatto. You have haunted my dreams and my waking days for far too long.”