The Mixed Marriage Project
A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 10 Feb 2026
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- USD 14.99
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- Pre-Order
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- USD 14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sociologist Roberts (Torn Apart) unpacks in this intimate account the life and work of her white anthropologist father, who conducted nearly 500 interviews of interracial couples between the 1930s and the '70s. After her dad died in 2002, Roberts inherited the transcripts and made a project of reading them—and, by extension, her father, who married her mother, who is Black, in the '60s. Interweaving interview excerpts with personal reflections, Roberts explores the tensions between her father's conviction that interracial marriage inherently signaled racial progress and her own understanding, shaped by a lifetime of observing housing discrimination, colorism, and respectability politics, that "interracial marriage itself... does not necessarily advance racial equality." Roberts's portrait of her parents is affectionate yet unsparing: she entertains unsettling questions about whether her father's work was fueled, in part, by sexual desire, and illuminates her mother's overlooked role as co-ethnographer and intellectual partner. She also candidly weighs whether her parents' compatibility was grounded in shared values or in her mother's ability to move through white academic spaces "despite her dark skin." The result is a nuanced and graceful memoir that doubles as an eye-opening history of interracial intimacy in America.
