The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family

Summary

“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).