Mat Johnson’s satire of race in America, ‘Loving Day,’ is picked up by Showtime

Showtime has optioned Mat Johnson’s “Loving Day,” a satire about race in contemporary America. The story, which follows a mixed-race man as he returns home to Philadelphia, is about identity, fatherhood, and trying to manage adult relationships after discovering that -- surprise -- you’ve got a teenage daughter.

Johnson, who teaches creative writing at the University of Houston, will co-produce the project with Random House Studio’s Peter Gethers and Jeffrey Levine, Deadline reports.

“Johnson’s riff on racial identity starts as a scene, turns into an episode and morphs into a motif that never lets up,” Jim Ruland wrote in the L.A. Times review. “His unrelenting examination of blackness, whiteness and everything in between is handled with ruthless candor and riotous humor.”

In a conversation with Salon in May, Johnson discussed weighty issues of race and identity at length, and explained his unique perspective. “I think we are in multiple tribes. We’re in the writer tribe, and then we have our ethnic tribe, and then we have our place tribe. We do have these identities that are different. But specifically with black identity, there’s no question of blackness for mixed people. If a cop is walking down a street and sees a mixed person that he’s suspicious of, he doesn’t really care that they’re mixed. He’s looking at the blackness. ... My first tribe is black nerd. If the war goes down, that’s the camp I’m going with. We’ll be over there with our ‘Star Wars’ paraphernalia fighting off the zombies.”

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