Colored Television

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racism and includes racist terms for Black and biracial people in direct quotes from the source material. 

Jane Gibson is the main protagonist and point-of-view character in Colored Television. Jane is a complex character who changes significantly throughout the novel. Jane is a 40-something Gen X writer and college professor. Her mother is white, and her father is Black. They divorced when she was a child. She has one sister. Jane lived in New York City for most of her 20s. She moved to Los Angeles a decade ago with her husband, Lenny Gibson. Jane has two children and struggles with feelings of guilt about her parenting and balancing The Demands of Motherhood.

At the opening of the novel, Jane is on a sabbatical from her teaching position at an unnamed university. She is to use this year to finish her second novel, a requirement for qualifying for tenure. Her novel, an over 500-page sprawling historical fiction, is an exploration of the history of “mulattos” in the United States. Although Jane has felt dragged down by her novel for the past decade, she is feeling optimistic about it at the beginning of the