What questions should you be asking the people you love while you still can? That's the thread running through this conversation with Dorothy Roberts, whose memoir The Mixed Marriage Projectstarted with a stack of boxes. After her parents passed, Dorothy opened them and found nearly 500 interviews her white father had conducted with interracial couples in Chicago, beginning in 1937, almost two decades before he married her Black mother. Inside were wild parties, a nudist camp, a turn-of-the-century club for mixed couples, and a file labeled number 224 that turned out to be about her. We talk about the interviews her father never published and the book contracts he kept walking away from, why she hid her father's whiteness from her Black classmates at Yale, and the painful stereotypes that surfaced even inside a club devoted to interracial marriage. We get into the big question at the heart of the memoir too: whether love, the everyday intimate kind, can actually dismantle racism. Spoiler, it's complicated. Dorothy Roberts is a scholar, professor, and author of five books on race, gender, and the systems that devalue Black women and mothers. The Mixed Marriage Project is her first memoir, built from the nearly 500 interviews her father left behind. If this conversation moved you, share it with a friend and leave a review and rating. Purchase The Mixed Marriage Project Support the show: On Patreon Buy us a book Buy cute merch Subscribe to the Babes in Bookland Substack Connect with us and suggest a great memoir! Follow us on instagram! @babesinbooklandpod Thank you for listening! Xx, Alex Timestamps! 00:01 — Intro: The Mixed Marriage Project 02:22 — Finding the form: memoir as history and social analysis 04:09 — What was the Great Migration 05:55 — Interracial marriage laws, North vs. South 08:00 — The interracial couples' club and its blind spot on Black women 10:56 — Race, racism, and why the questions never get asked 12:19 — Choosing which couples made the book 14:00 — The Albertis: a lifelong family friendship hidden in the interviews 15:22 — Researcher, daughter, or both 16:53 — The twist: her father started this before he met her mother 19:51 — Her father's anti-racism, and the brother who disowned him 23:19 — The India trip that shaped everything 25:06 — Questions she'll never get to ask her parents 26:24 — Writing alongside her sisters, Helen and Evelyn 28:00 — The Bachelor chapter: the nudist camp, the wild party, the sister who wanted it cut 31:40 — A loving memoir, not an attack 33:22 — Her own "bachelorette" stories 34:21 — What her kids might find in her own papers one day 35:37 — Being recorded, being remembered — the podcast as legacy 38:36 — Her father's thesis: can interracial marriage end racism 41:29 — How her views shifted while writing 47:30 — Her father's first interview, 1937, and the racial caste system 49:17 — The book he never finished 51:28 — File 224: discovering she was one of his research subjects 55:59 — Hiding her father's whiteness at Yale 59:04 — Ashamed isn't quite the word 61:06 — Racial identity is made up — and hers is hers 63:06 — Favorite word, staying hopeful, Marvin Gaye Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
