THE MIXED MARRIAGE PROJECT

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.