The Mixed Marriage Project - by Dorothy Roberts (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"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, #1 New York Times bestselling authors

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--from the author of the "must read" (Michelle Alexander, New York Times bestselling author) Killing the Black Body.

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.

Over the years, Dorothy's parents interviewed more than five hundred 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, Dorothy 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 motivations, her own views about interracial relationships, and where she fits in that story.

Blurring the boundaries between the political and the personal, between memoir and history, The Mixed Marriage Project is "a tender, thoughtful, unsentimental chronicle of the author's beloved family and America's messy racial history" (Booklist).

Review Quotes

"One of those most intimate, nuanced, and astute meditations on interracial families ever written."
--The Emancipator, best Antiracist Nonfiction books 2026

"Searing... What a gift that [Roberts] has completed [her father's] work, in her own way, here."
--Julia Scheeres, The New York Times

"An enthralling mash-up of memoir and sociological treatise. ... Not a traditional memoir. ... An ambitious enterprise: enthralling in its detail, matter-of-fact in its storytelling."
--Julia M. Klein, The Pennsylvania Gazette

"A compelling exploration of the meanings of race, love, family and the ethics of observation."
--The Colorado Sun

"Roberts shares insight about the history of interracial relationships in the United States and brings to light her father's research in this highly recommended memoir."
--Library Journal (starred review)

"A tender, thoughtful, unsentimental chronicle of the author's beloved family and America's messy racial history."
--Jenny Hamilton, Booklist

"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 Africana Studies, Law, and Sociology at 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.