The Mixed Marriage Project - by Dorothy Roberts (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

From Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body and a writer who "has brilliantly illuminated the Black experience in America for decades" (Bryan Stevenson), comes a spirited and riveting memoir of growing up in an interracial family in 1960s Chicago and a daughter's journey to understand her parents' marriage--and her own identity.

Dorothy Roberts grew up in a deeply segregated Chicago of the 1960s where relationships barely crossed the "colorline." Yet inside her own home, where her father was white and her mother a Black Jamaican immigrant, interracial marriage wasn't just a part of her upbringing, it was a shared mission. Her father, an anthropologist, spent her entire childhood working on a book about Black-white marriages--a project he never finished but shaped every aspect of their family life.

As a 21-year-old graduate student, Dorothy's father dedicated himself to the study of interracial marriage and her mother soon became his full-time partner in that work. Together over the years they interviewed over 500 couples and assembled stunning stories about interracial marriages that took place as early as the 1880s--studying, but also living, championing, and believing in their power to advance social equality.

Decades later, while sorting through her father's papers, Roberts uncovers a truth that upends everything she thought she knew about her family: her father's research didn't begin with her parents' love story--it came long before it. This discovery forces her to wrestle with her father's intentions, her own views about interracial relationships, and where she fits in that story. Rather than finish the book her father never published, Roberts immerses herself in their archive of interviews to trace the story of her parents and to better understand her own.

Though grounded in her parents' research, it's Roberts' captivating storytelling that drives this memoir. In following the arc of her parents' interviews and marriage, The Mixed Marriage Project invites us into the everyday lives of interracial couples in Chicago over four decades. Along the way, Roberts reflects on her own childhood as a Black girl with a white father, and how those experiences shaped her into one of today's most prominent public thinkers and scholars on race. Blurring the boundaries between the political and the personal, between memoir and history, The Mixed Marriage Project is a deeply moving meditation on family, race, identity, and love.

Review Quotes

"A rich and riveting blend of memoir and research that tackles issues ranging from redlining to intersectional racism and sexism to personal musings about discovering Roberts' mother's scholarly voice and her father's commitment to building community. An insightful and fundamentally joyful narrative about uncovering a family's hidden past."
--Kirkus [starred review]

"Few books manage to rewrite both a family's history and a nation's moral record, yet The Mixed Marriage Project miraculously does both. Dorothy Roberts transforms personal excavation into social revelation, unearthing how love, race, and law have intertwined across generations. With the precision of a scholar and the passion of a truth-teller, she restores voices long silenced and shows how the intimate and the political are never apart. This memoir is an astonishing act of remembrance and repair."
--Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

"A compelling, beautiful and fascinating exploration of race, identity and love. Dorothy Roberts has an important story to tell at a time when our nation needs to think more honestly about the legacy of racial inequality."
--Bryan Stevenson, bestselling author of Just Mercy

"In The Mixed Marriage Project, Dorothy Roberts, the most important contemporary scholar of race, gender and the law, turns her remarkable intellect and mighty pen to her most intimate subject to date: her sociologist father's many decades of research on interracial marriage as well as her parents' interracial union and her own coming of age. This book is tender, probing, and beautiful: filled with vivid characters and deep insight about twentieth century America in its midwest metropolis. An important addition to the canon of Chicago literature represented by figures like Carl Sandburg, Lorraine Hansberry, Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright, The Mixed Marriage Project is a brilliant and wholly unique yet widely illuminating book. "
--Imani Perry, author of South to America

"Dorothy Roberts is a bold scholar, always challenging the systems and structures of racial injustice. Here she is a daughter too, who explores her mixed-race lineage through the lives and scholarship of her parents. This tender, rigorous memoir shows how valiantly they worked to dismantle centuries of prejudice against mixed marriage and to create their own loving family."
--Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland

About the Author

Dorothy Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. The author of five books, including Killing the Black Body, a MacArthur Fellow, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.