The Mixed Marriage Project

A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family

De: Dorothy Roberts

Narrado por: Dorothy Roberts

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.

Bought it the day it came out!

Wow. What a story. I wish the author would still do what her initial thought was: finish her father's actual book. The stories were fascinating and I would love to be able to read them in their entirety.

As for what Robert's did write: What a life she and her family have had!

My gripes:
1. The author is in her late 60s or early 70s and calls her parents "Mommy" and "Daddy." I found it incredibly infantilizing and grating to listen to. I didn't encounter old people calling their parents mommy and daddy until my mid-50s and found it odd.

2. Roberts is sooooooooooo reverential re her parents (despite their flaws); it was a bit much for me.

3. This is a strange one but nothing bad happens. Roberts gets hit by a car as a child, passes out, but is fine and it's just a funny family story. Her life, as she tells it, is like a fairytale, but the reader knows this can't be true. Her mother seems like she was a drill sergeant (as well as being loving, taking care of the family, etc.). If I (and so many people) had a mom or dad like that, serious rebellion would have ensued, but Roberts and her sisters don't seem to have any issue with it. Rebellion takes the form of eating one bite of a candy bar, feeling sick, and deciding her mom is right and they should never eat candy..

I'm not sure my gripes will strike a chord with anyone else and despite them, this is a "must read" type of book!