This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is legal scholar and author Dorothy Roberts.

For decades, Roberts has challenged the idea that institutions like medicine, the law, and child welfare are neutral.

Her landmark books, killing the black body and torn apart, helped reshape how we understand the policing of reproduction,

parenting, and race in America. Her new book now turns that lens inward. It begins with 25

boxes of her late father's papers. Robert Roberts was a white anthropologist who spent his career

at Roosevelt University in Chicago,

and over the course of 50 years, conducted hundreds of interviews with interracial couples

across the city, an extraordinary archive dating back to the 1930s. Her mother, Iris, a black

Jamaican immigrant, was his wife.

And what Roberts finds inside those boxes challenges the story she'd always believed about her own family.

Roberts is a professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and a 2024 MacArthur fellow.

The memoir is called The Mixed Marriage Project, a memoir of love, race, and family. Dorothy Roberts, welcome to fresh air. Thank you so much, Tanya. It's such a

pleasure to be on this program. A pleasure to have you, and let's start with these 25 boxes,

because you tell us right from the start of the book that they were sitting in your basement for almost a decade after your parents died. And the date on the first transcript is February 1937. And this date stopped you in your tracks. You actually described feeling frozen, kind of like you were going to faint as you clutch those papers to your chest. What was it about that date in particular that that undid you?

Well, I always assumed that my father was writing his book on interracial marriage, conducting the

interviews that were the basis of this book he was working on in the 1960s while I was growing

up. I have very vivid memories of him conducting the interviews and being up in his study

on the third floor, writing the book.

It really dominated my childhood.

And so I assumed because of that that he got interested in interracial marriage and wanted

to learn the stories of black-white couples because he met and fell in love with my mother, which happened in the

1950s. And so now discovering this transcript of an interview from 1937, it just completely

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