Love, Race & the ‘Mixed Marriage Project’

Public media is no longer federally funded, but the NPR network remains yours in service to and powered by you. Keep public media public with a donation today at donate.npr.org and thank you. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is legal scholar and Author Dorothy Roberts.

For decades, Roberts has challenged the idea that institutions like medicine, the law, and child welfare are neutral. Her landmark books, Killing the Black Body and Torn Apart, helped reshape how we understand the policing of reproduction, parenting, and race in America. Her new book now turns that lens inward. It begins with 25 boxes of her late father's papers. Robert Roberts was a white anthropologist who spent his career at Roosevelt University in Chicago, and over the course of 50 years conducted hundreds of interviews with interracial couples across the city, an extraordinary archive dating back to the 1930s.

Her mother, Iris, a black Jamaican immigrant, was his wife, and what Roberts finds inside those boxes challenges the story she'd always believed about her own family. Roberts is a professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and a 2024 MacArthur Fellow. The memoir is called The Mixed Marriage Project. A memoir of love, race, and family. Dorothy Roberts, welcome to Fresh Air.

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