The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family

Sociologist Roberts (Torn Apart) unpacks in this intimate account the life and work of her white anthropologist father, who conducted nearly 500 interviews of interracial couples between the 1930s and the ’70s. After her dad died in 2002, Roberts inherited the transcripts and made a project of reading them—and, by extension, her father, who married her mother, who is Black, in the ’60s. Interweaving interview excerpts with personal reflections, Roberts explores the tensions between her father’s conviction that interracial marriage inherently signaled racial progress and her own understanding, shaped by a lifetime of observing housing discrimination, colorism, and respectability politics, that “interracial marriage itself... does not necessarily advance racial equality.” Roberts’s portrait of her parents is affectionate yet unsparing: she entertains unsettling questions about whether her father’s work was fueled, in part, by sexual desire, and illuminates her mother’s overlooked role as co-ethnographer and intellectual partner. She also candidly weighs whether her parents’ compatibility was grounded in shared values or in her mother’s ability to move through white academic spaces “despite her dark skin.” The result is a nuanced and graceful memoir that doubles as an eye-opening history of interracial intimacy in America. Agent: David Halpern, David Halpern Literary Management. (Feb.)