Dorothy Roberts, THE MIXED MARRIAGE PROJECT

Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body and Professor of Law and Sociology at University of Pennsylvania, discusses her debut memoir, The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family. 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.

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.

Dorothy Roberts is a groundbreaking scholar, social justice advocate, and award-winning author whose work has transformed how we think about race, family, science, and the law. A distinguished professor of Africana studies, law, and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, she is widely known for her influential books, including Killing the Black Body, Shattered Bonds, Fatal Invention, and Torn Apart. Her pathbreaking work bridges rigorous research and urgent public engagement, and she has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, MSNBC, CBS Sunday Morning, and other major media outlets. Her TED Talk has been viewed more than 1.6 million times. Recent recognitions of her leadership include elections to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Medicine; honorary doctorate degrees from Rutgers University and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland; TIME Magazine’s 2025 The Closers list; 2025 STATUS list of leaders in life sciences; Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award; Juvenile Law Center Leadership Prize; and American Psychiatric Association Solomon Carter Fuller Award. In her forthcoming memoir, The Mixed Marriage Project, Roberts turns to her own story, tracing how her identity as a Black girl with a white father and her intellectual passions were shaped by her parents’ pioneering research on interracial marriage. With clarity, courage, and a deeply personal lens, she asks what it means to love across racial divides and invites readers into the experiences that forged her voice as an acclaimed champion for justice.

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