Dorothy Roberts Book Celebration - "The Mixed Marriage Project"

The Program on Race, Science and Society (PRSS) presents a very special book celebration event for Prof. Dorothy Roberts' memoir The Mixed Marriage Project. The book is described as "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." Join us for an engaging and heartfelt talk from Roberts, followed by a conversation with Marcia Chatelain.

"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 her mother’s scholarly voice and her father’s commitment to building community. What results is an insightful and fundamentally joyful narrative about uncovering a family’s hidden past. A history of interracial marriage that perfectly balances scholarship and memoir.” - Kirkus Reviews

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, bestselling author of The New Jim Crow

Dorothy Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society.

Her path breaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent social justice issues in reproductive justice, policing, family regulation, science, medicine, and bioethics. Her major books include Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2001); Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2011); and Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books, 2022), as well as more than 100 articles and essays in books and journals, including “Race” in the 1619 Project book.

Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Harvard Program in Ethics & the Professions, Stanford Center for the Comparative Study of Race & Ethnicity, and the Fulbright Program. Recent recognitions of her work include elections to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and National Academy of Medicine; Rutgers University Honorary Doctor of Laws degree; Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award; and American Psychiatric Association Solomon Carter Fuller Award.

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Host or Publisher Center for Africana Studies