"The Mixed Marriage Project" | Reviewed by Bill Schwab

Dorothy Roberts, a sociology and civil rights professor, has written an in-depth and poignant memoir of her father’s life and work. Mr. Roberts received his PhD from the University of Chicago. He became a long-time anthropology professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

Robert E. T. Roberts’ doctoral dissertation was based on nearly 500 interviews with interracial couples in Chicago between the 1930s and the 1960s. Roberts, a white man, married Iris, a Jamaican-born Black woman who was initially his student. Iris became his research partner, interviewing all the wives in the mixed marriage project, while Robert interviewed all the husbands. Regrettably, this first sociological analysis of Black-white marriages was never published.

  When her father died in 2002, Dorothy inherited an archive of interview transcripts. She read them over the course of many months. In writing about the mixed marriages, she added personal reflections on her family life and examined the project’s efficacy. The result is a meditative memoir centered on family love, race, and identity.

The author explores the tensions between her father’s theory that interracial marriage is an indicator of progress in race relations and her perception that “interracial marriage itself... does not necessarily advance racial equality.”  Dorothy bases her conclusion on years of observing housing discrimination, colorism that favors lighter-skinned people over darker-skinned people, and decorum behavior where marginalized people conform to mainstream standards of dress, morality, and behavior to gain acceptance and avoid discrimination.

While sitting in her living room drinking a cup of tea, Roberts pores over hundreds of interviews. The documents reveal a history of interracial intimacy and provide new data on the complexities of race relations and the nuances of racial prejudice.

Her reading uncovers debates about miscegenation laws, eugenic sterilization, and the one-drop rule that any amount of “Black blood” makes a person black. The extreme prejudice aimed at Black women, and the effect of Black Americans passing as whites for economic reasons, are curious to her.

Roberts cites Supreme Court decisions to support her argument that mixed marriages do not indicate a decline in racial prejudice. The 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision ordered an end to miscegenation laws, but cultural forces continued to discourage interracial marriages. Likewise, racial equality was not fully achieved by the Brown v. Board of Education or the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 60s.

Her memoir becomes very personal as she grows introspective, tracing the evolution of her self-identity. She reflects on the ethics of her father pursuing a relationship with a student and questions the usefulness of her father’s research. Dorothy reveals the internal struggle she faced in forming her unique identity, often hiding her father’s race in new situations. She insists that her father’s dream about the end of racism was naive.

By the end of the book, Robert’s reflections on her upbringing and her father’s career evolve into a more measured narrative. She recounts her idyllic childhood in Liberia, Chicago, and Egypt. She embraces her parents’ qualities and sees them in herself. She ends with a better appreciation of integration, mixed marriages, and the roles mixed marriages play in dismantling White Supremacy.

“The Mixed Marriage Project” is published by One Signal. It is 307 pages, including endnotes, and is devoted to a subject I had never pursued. It is a moving exploration of race, identity, and family love.

About the author: Dorothy Roberts is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. Roberts is the author of four previous books, including the internationally acclaimed “Killing the Black Body.” She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, in 2024, was named a MacArthur Fellow, an $800,000 award given annually to individuals who show exceptional creativity and potential.

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