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

by 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 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Race, Memoir

320 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication February 10, 2026

About the author

Dorothy Roberts is a scholar, professor, author and social justice advocate, and currently the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She has published a range of groundbreaking articles and books analyzing issues of law, race, gender, health, class and social inequality, including Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997), Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2002) and, most recently Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2012).

Reviews

[Sharon Orlopp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dorothy Roberts has written a phenomenal book, The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family. Dorothy had a White father and a Jamaican mother. Throughout his life as a college student and his career as an anthropology professor, Dorothy's father interviewed over 500 interracial couples from the 1930s through the 1980s. His goal was to write a book about his findings. He passed away without writing the book and all of his files were given to Dorothy.

Initially Dorothy thought she would publish a book about her father's findings. As she dove into the detailed notes from all of the interviews, Dorothy realized she would write a book that included information about her father's research as well as lessons about love, race, and family.

There were several significant surprises as Dorothy reviewed the research. The historical context is thorough, and her parents interacted with several leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. One of the themes is whether interracial marriages were due to love or to make a social statement that would ultimately lead to racial equality. One of the most troubling aspects is the disparaging remarks about Black women that are made by White women, Black men, and White men.

The Mixed Marriage Project is beautifully written with love and honor for her parents. It's thought-provoking and gut-wrenching about race relations and humanity.

This is my first book by Dorothy Roberts, and I have put her other books on my TBR list:

* Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
* Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century
* Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World
* Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare
* Sex, Power and Taboo: Gender and HIV in the Caribbean and Beyond

Recently I read More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew by John K. Blake. Blake's father was Black, and his mother was White. His mother left the family when Blake was a young child. His memoir traces his journey of self-discovery.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I highly recommend The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family.

[Cheryl Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Formally, this book reminded me of Ada Calhoun's Also a Poet, in which a woman tries to both honor and interrogate her father by picking up his long-abandoned research project. Both are beautiful examples of intergenerational dialogue. The other thing that stood out to me is that this book—Roberts' account of combing through her father's hundreds of interviews with Black/white couples from the 1930s through the '70s—can be placed on my small mental bookshelf of memoirs by people who had (mostly) happy childhoods. Roberts paints a loving portrait of both her white anthropologist father, who was relentlessly curious and genuinely open-minded, and her Jamaican mother, who was highly educated, strict-but-kind, and deeply invested in her family, even as she mourned her own academic career. Roberts never buys into her father's steadfast optimism about marriage as a way of bridging the color line—she notes couples who are colorist social climbers rather than beacons of racial harmony and acceptance—but she does come to see how the qualities both parents imbued in her can make the world better. That's a lovely conclusion to a project that is equal parts gentle and rigorous, generous and unflinching.

[Mabel Neri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you, NetGalley for allowing me to review this book. I don’t think there is a way that you could rate this kind of book. I feel like history what people went through and all of those situations make a great story and increase your knowledge so I will recommend for you to read it if you enjoy knowing what happened in history through the eyes of someone else.

[Rachel Warren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you Dorothy Roberts and Atria Books for a NetGalley ARC copy of The Mixed Marriage Project

5/5 ⭐

“Any lasting partnership requires each person to recognize the other’s individuality. Your partner isn't an extension of you - they have their own body, history, perspective, thoughts and feelings.” … “interracial couples might come to this realization more quickly because they have to contend with society’s assumption that they are fundamentally different”

I cannot express how powerful and meaningful this book has been to me, both from a historical standpoint and from the perspective of someone in an interracial relationship. “Enjoy” isn’t the right word to describe my time spent reading this book. While there were many happy moments there were far more spent on heavy reflection of my own relationship through the scope of what it would have looked like historically. I will always value the conversations sparked with my partner over shared quotes and pieces of history we learned together.

Along with her parent’s interviews and research the author also shares many stories surrounding her childhood during the civil rights movement of the 50s-60s, into adulthood and time spent in higher education. A theme highlighted several times through these retellings is how the author's view of her own racial identity has shifted at different points in her life. While not something I have personally experienced, I admired the author’s sincerity and insight while discussing this topic.

Overall I found The Mixed Marriage Project to be a beautifully written piece about both history and human nature and I will gladly be reading the author’s other works.