MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
It began with a few dozen boxes left behind after the death of her father.
DOROTHY ROBERTS: I confronted them because they'd been in my basement for a decade already, and so I wanted to see what was in there.
MARTIN: That's MacArthur genius award winner Dorothy Roberts, an African American woman known for her scholarship around race, gender and the law. Her father, Robert Roberts, was a white anthropologist from Chicago, who spent much of his life steeped in a research project.
ROBERTS: He believed that Black and white people marrying each other was the best path to dismantling white supremacy and what he called the racial caste system in Chicago and in the United States.
MARTIN: Dorothy Roberts' new memoir is "The Mixed Marriage Project," in which she chronicles the discovery of more than an unfinished manuscript. I started by asking her if she had a sense of what she would find when she finally dove into those boxes.
ROBERTS: I knew there would just be a lot of research, but it was a complete shock to me to find out that there was a hundred years of marriages in these interviews. But even more shocking was that I always thought that he got interested in interracial marriage, especially Black-white couples, when he met my Black mother. So this really flipped my whole conception of their relationship. So the question for me was, why did he get interested in this topic? And did he get interested in my mother because of his obsession with interracial marriage?
MARTIN: Did you feel a sense of - I don't know, is betrayal too strong of a word? I mean, did you feel...
ROBERTS: (Laughter).
MARTIN: ...In a way that you were part of his research?
ROBERTS: (Laughter) Yeah, well, of course, that question then extended to me. So it was not just a question of how my mother fit into his research project, but also how I and my sisters fit into. You know, there was this belief that children born to mixed-race couples would have psychological, social, even biological problems because they didn't fit into one group or the other. And he wanted to disprove that.
And so when I found out that he had started these interviews and gone on this mission prior to creating, you know, our family, and then later discovering a file he kept on me, it did raise the question, well, am I part of his research experiment to prove that children like me would be well-adjusted?
MARTIN: Sort of threaded through the book is your own inquiry, but it's also his notes from the interviews...
ROBERTS: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...That he did with interracial couples. Would you talk about some of those interviews? Because some of them are kind of painful to read, you know, frankly.
ROBERTS: Oh, yes.
MARTIN: Some of the attitudes that some of the partners had about each other.
ROBERTS: I had so many feelings about these fascinating interviews. So there were stories of courage and deep love and commitment. But also, many of these couples still held, in my opinion, very racist beliefs. For example, my father discovers a club called the Manasseh Society, where he'd hoped to find mixed-race couples to interview.
And he discovers that most of the couples consist of white women and Black husbands. And when he inquires about what happened to the Black women married to white men, one white wife says very bluntly, the Manasseh Society women don't like colored women. And why don't they like colored women? Because they believe colored women have loose morals and they don't demand that white men marry them.
MARTIN: Professor Roberts, those are some really painful stories. But you also say in the book that there was a point at which you didn't want people to know that you had a white father. Can you say more about that?
ROBERTS: Yeah, that's true. Something I regret now, especially after reading the file that my father had on me and thinking back on how much he contributed to my identity. But it happened when I was in college. I joined a group of Black students who were very, very close to each other, just a dazzling, brilliant group of students. And I didn't want them to know that I had a white father. I thought that somehow that might interfere with my connection to them.
I now feel that it probably wouldn't have made a difference, but I didn't want to take that risk. And I thought a lot about that in writing my memoir, just memories of how close we were, how much he respected my opinion and then accepted when I disagreed with him. And so I did come to realize how important his lessons about human equality, the way he was so dedicated to his research, his mission to challenge the racial caste system - you know, all of those lessons in my upbringing carried with me to this day.
MARTIN: You've had a very distinguished career in the academy. You've written seminal works like "Killing The Black Body," which many people may know. So how did this deep dive into your parents' lives cause you to reflect on your own work?
ROBERTS: I still don't believe that interracial intimacy by itself is the answer, but I do think that we have to start with ourselves and our most intimate relationships when we think about how we're going to create a world that - you know, a future in which racial hierarchy is unimaginable. And I also came to realize that even though my work prior to this didn't touch on interracial intimacy or interracial love, that the deeper questions that my father was asking, they are questions that I've asked throughout my work as well. I think underlying it is the question of, what will it take to love each other as equal human beings?
MARTIN: Dorothy Roberts is a sociologist and law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Her latest book is "The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir Of Love, Race, And Family." Professor Roberts, thank you so much for talking with us.
ROBERTS: Oh, thank you so much. It was a real pleasure. I appreciate it.
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