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Did Her White Father Marry Her Black Mother for Love, or for Research?
| N904PD | 02/27/26 |
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Date: February 27th, 2026 4:00 PM Author: N904PD In “The Mixed Marriage Project,” Dorothy Roberts reflects on her anthropologist father’s lifelong project: to document — and promote — interracial marriages like his own.
“For as far back as I can remember, my father was writing his book,” Dorothy Roberts recalls in her searing memoir, “The Mixed Marriage Project.” Robert Roberts, an anthropologist at Roosevelt College in Chicago, spent five decades studying interracial marriage, but died before finishing his project in 2002, leaving behind 25 boxes of interview transcripts and research materials.
The author, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, kept the boxes in storage for several years before setting aside a summer to examine their contents, hoping to learn the reason behind her father’s writer’s block. In the process, she discovered more than she anticipated about her own family’s origins.
She’d always assumed that her white father’s interest in interracial couples was sparked by his relationship with her mother, a Black Jamaican immigrant who was once his student. But the documents revealed that her father’s project began decades before their marriage, which raised disturbing questions in her mind: Did her father marry her mother for love? Or was she — and by extension their three daughters — part of his research?
“The interviews didn’t just illuminate history,” the younger Roberts writes; “they pulled me headlong into mysteries that shattered my settled understanding of my family.”
The author is in an odd position here: a sociologist probing her anthropologist father’s attempt to sway public opinion in favor of mixed-race couples. She’s the founding director of Penn’s Program on Race, Science & Society, and has written extensively on the intersection of gender, race and class. Her best-known book, “Killing the Black Body” (1998), examines systemic controls on Black women’s reproductive freedoms.
In “The Mixed Marriage Project,” she seems to be squinting at her father’s words, trying to discern the truth of the man behind them. She winces at his use of the word “Negroid” to describe biracial children but admires his focus on commonalities between humans at a time when many anthropologists were pushing theories of white superiority.
When Robert Roberts conducted his first interview in 1937, most states still prevented whites from marrying people of color, and scientists warned that children born of such unions would be defective, “hybrid humans.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/books/review/the-mixed-marriage-project-dorothy-roberts.html
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