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 the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. The author of five books, including Killing the Black Body, a MacArthur Fellow, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Marcia Chatelain is the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of two books, South Side Girls: Growing up in the Great Migration and the Pulitzer Prize winning Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. Her forthcoming book, How Bright the Path Grows: The Women who Made the March on Washington will be released in fall 2026 with Pantheon Books.

(recorded 2/11/2026)