The mixed marriage project A memoir of love, race, and family

Review by Booklist Review

As a child, Dorothy Roberts (Fatal Invention, 2011; Torn Apart, 2022) always knew that her (white) father was working on a book about interracial marriage, a research project Roberts and her sisters understood to have been inspired by his marriage to their mother, a Black woman. The book was never finished. After her parents died, Roberts spent a summer reading through her father's research files and discovered--to her shock--that her father's interest in the subject long predated his first meeting with Roberts' mother. The Mixed Marriage Project interweaves the stories of the couples he interviewed with Roberts' reflections on her parents' life stories, her father's research, and her shifting understanding of the complexities of racial identity. The interviews offer a fascinating glimpse into a fraught racial past, but it's perhaps most moving to witness Roberts as she strives to grapple with her parents' full personhood and how they diverged from and aligned with the family narratives she always knew. A tender, thoughtful, unsentimental chronicle of the author's beloved family and America's messy racial history.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Sociologist Roberts (Torn Apart) unpacks in this intimate account the life and work of her white anthropologist father, who conducted nearly 500 interviews of interracial couples between the 1930s and the '70s. After her dad died in 2002, Roberts inherited the transcripts and made a project of reading them--and, by extension, her father, who married her mother, who is Black, in the '60s. Interweaving interview excerpts with personal reflections, Roberts explores the tensions between her father's conviction that interracial marriage inherently signaled racial progress and her own understanding, shaped by a lifetime of observing housing discrimination, colorism, and respectability politics, that "interracial marriage itself... does not necessarily advance racial equality." Roberts's portrait of her parents is affectionate yet unsparing: she entertains unsettling questions about whether her father's work was fueled, in part, by sexual desire, and illuminates her mother's overlooked role as co-ethnographer and intellectual partner. She also candidly weighs whether her parents' compatibility was grounded in shared values or in her mother's ability to move through white academic spaces "despite her dark skin." The result is a nuanced and graceful memoir that doubles as an eye-opening history of interracial intimacy in America. Agent: David Halpern, Robbins Office. (Feb.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Roberts (law and sociology, Univ. of Pennsylvania; Torn Apart) has taught and written books about race, the law, and culture and conducts research on how the law impacts Black people across all facets of life. In this memoir, she explores the childhood and familial origins of her academic interests. One inspiration for her work was growing up in the 1960s as the daughter of an interracial marriage between her father, a white man, and her mother, Jamaican-born Black woman. It was after the death of her parents, with 25 boxes her sister shipped to her, that Roberts discovered her father's field notes of interviews of interracial couples from the 1930s to the 1960s, when he was a graduate student. Roberts's mother was her father's research assistant in this project, which became part of their lifelong advocacy for racial equality, though they never published this research. What Roberts didn't know was that her father's interest in interracial relationships predated his own marriage, which forces her now to reckon with his intentions and her own work. VERDICT Roberts shares insight about the history of interracial relationships in the United States and brings to light her father's research in this highly recommended memoir.--Laura Ellis

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A scholar turns her deceased father's research on interracial marriage into the book he never got to write. After her father died, Roberts--a University of Pennsylvania professor and author--received 25 boxes containing his papers. Inside, she found transcripts of interviews that her father conducted with interracial couples over three decades, as well as multiple rejections of his attempts to turn his work into a book. While she remembers that her "father's book dominated our family life" in the 1960s, until she opened the boxes full of his possessions, she hadn't realized that he actually started the work in the 1930s. This is shocking not only because Roberts underestimated the profundity of her father's work, but also because his interest in interracial marriage--he was white--predated his own interracial marriage to Roberts' Black Jamaican mother. Roberts had always assumed that her parents' marriage prompted her father's research interest. She writes, "As a child, I saw my father's research as a reflection of the love my parents had for each other….This new timeline suggests that an academic interest in mixed marriages might have prompted my father to pursue one himself." Consequently, Roberts spends the book simultaneously analyzing her father's fascinating interviews--some of which her mother helped collect--and interrogating her own ideas about her family history. The result is 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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