SOURCE: "Seeing Race as a Costume That Everyone Wears," in New York Times Book Review, May 4, 1998, p. E2.

[In the following review, Jefferson asserts that Senna's Caucasia is a moving novel which explores fully the implications of being racially or culturally mixed in America.]

When I was a child in the 1950s, you weren't supposed to use the word "mulatto." You only heard or overheard adults using it with eyebrows raised and quotation marks implied. It was considered backward: meant to demean when used by whites and, when used by your own, a sign that you were just a little too proud of your white blood. It would have been rude to use it around mulatto playmates, and it wasn't always clear who was the child of a Negro and a Caucasian and who was the child of a brown-skinned and a fair-skinned Negro.

You didn't talk about...