Penn professor Dorothy Roberts published a memoir about four decades of interracial marriage in Chicago on Tuesday.
Roberts, who holds appointments in the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and the School of Arts and Sciences, based the book on a collection of interviews that her father conducted with interracial couples in Chicago. Through the interviews, which spanned a period between the 1930s and the 1980s, her book explores a history of racism and marriage in the United States.
Roberts told The Daily Pennsylvanian that a “big part” of the memoir is about her “identity as a Black girl with a white father.”
“I wanted to write a book about this treasure trove of interviews, but as I explored them, I became even more intrigued with these personal questions about my family,” Roberts said. “So I shifted from writing a book about the couples' stories to writing a book that weaves those stories with the story of my family and of myself.”
The memoir, titled “The Mixed Marriage Project,” was released on Feb. 10.
Roberts explained that the book may resonate with readers interested in “the history of racism and the fight for racial justice in America,” as well as those interested in interracial relationships, multiracial identity, and what it takes “to love each other as equal human beings in a racist society.”
She connected the book’s themes to her academic career spent “writing against racial injustice, especially against the devaluation of Black women and uplifting the voices of Black women.” She added that the memoir “really aligns with the themes that I have focused on throughout my career and that I teach at Penn.”
Researching and writing the book deepened Roberts' understanding of “the multiple ways that false concepts of race get reinforced in our society and culture and politics, and also what it will take to continue the struggle against them.”
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One of Roberts' discoveries was the “anti blackness among many of the interracial couples.”
“White wives married light-skinned Black men, hoping their children could pass, and the Black men married white women, hoping their children would pass,” she said. “Even though these were couples who were crossing the color line in Chicago, some of them had anti Black, racist ideas and desired children who could pass as white.”
However, Roberts clarified that the couples were not “all racist.”
Most of the couples her father interviewed said they “married their spouse out of love” and claimed that “race didn’t matter to them,” which Roberts described as “a bit naive.”
Roberts also explained the backlash couples could receive from their communities when entering an interracial relationship during a time of deep residential segregation in Chicago.
“If I move forward to the 1960s, the most interesting couples to me were Black men who were leaders in the civil rights movement.”
Roberts said that some leaders, such as Malcolm X, had “harsh words” for Black men who married white women, while others, like Martin Luther King Jr., “had accepted” it.
Civil rights leaders' communities could see that they were “dedicated to advancing Black freedom,” and “overlook” or “accept” their interracial marriages, according to Roberts.
Roberts' father spent years researching interracial couples during her childhood in the Chicago of the 1960s, but he never published a book based on the interviews. Decades later, she rediscovered his interview transcripts and was surprised to learn that her father had begun his research “quite some time prior” to meeting her mother, a Black Jamaican immigrant.
“It really upended my understanding of the relationship between my parents' marriage and my father's research,” Roberts said. “So now it was clear to me that the research didn't follow my parents' marriage, my parents' marriage followed my father's research.”
Roberts spoke about her book at the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Parkway Central Branch on Feb. 11 through the Author Events Series. She will also have a book celebration event in collaboration with the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society at Penn Carey Law’s Levy Conference Center on Feb. 18 to celebrate the book’s release.
Roberts, who is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology, Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, and 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor, is also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society.
In 2024, she was named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow for her work exposing racist policies in social systems.
