Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. There's no silver bullet to fix racism.

No easy single switch that we can flip and then, aha, we live in a racially harmonious utopia.

But one man thought there was, and that sole solution was interracial marriage.

He was a white anthropologist named Robert Roberts, and he devoted his research to this goal.

And while his daughter, Dorothy Roberts, was always aware of the broad strokes of her father's work,

she wasn't aware exactly how devoted to his work he was, and how his work actually involved her.

She's got a new book out telling the story.

It's titled The Mixed Marriage Project.

She talks about it to NPR's Michelle Martin, after the break.

It began with a few dozen boxes left behind after the death of her father.

I confronted them because they'd been in my basement for a decade already, and so I wanted to see what was in there.

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. He believed that black and white people

marrying each other was the best path to this mantling white supremacy and what he called

the racial caste system in Chicago and in the United States.

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. 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

...