Dorothy Roberts delivered the 2026 Victor S. Johnson Lecture earlier this month. She discussed her book The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family, published in February.
Roberts is an award-winning author and expert on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction, bioethics, and child welfare. She is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights.
Her lecture explored the historical and contemporary implications of interracial marriage in America. Drawing on her father’s research — completed on interracial couples living along the color line in Chicago — she discussed the significant legal constraints that interracial couples faced, even in racially progressive cities.
Roberts was drawn to her latest project by her father’s research and her own experience as a child of an interracial marriage. She recalled her father believing that interracial love and relationships were able to conquer and transcend racial divisions and discrimination. He dedicated his life to researching other interracial couples seeking to prove this hypothesis.
“The book my father was writing, but never finished, dominated our family life. The couples he interviewed filled our dinnertime conversation, [and] many became our closest friends,” Roberts said. “And his hope that interracial marriage could challenge racism, what he called the racial caste system in Chicago, shaped my earliest understandings of family and love.” 
Roberts came into possession of her father’s research after his passing, where it sat untouched in the basement of her Chicago home. It wasn’t until her relocation to Philadelphia that she began to sort through the boxes of paperwork, where she found hundreds of interviews her father had conducted with interracial couples, beginning in the 1930s.
“The most fascinating part,” she explained, “was my parents’ own relationships. It was the story that my parents revealed through the interviews told and their marriage and my own identity as a black girl with a white father. That led me to write a memoir.”
Roberts was struck by how racism permeated these relationships in racially progressive cities that promised opportunity and escape to black and other communities of color.
“At the time, most southern states still banned interracial marriage, but these unions were legal in Chicago. Illinois did have an anti-miscegenation law but repealed it after the Civil War decades earlier,” Roberts explained. “Yet, again and again, couples told my father the same story: mixed marriage didn’t free them from racial constraint; it intensified it.”
She pointed out how Chicago constrained its black population to a narrow strip of blocks created by racially restricted covenants — known as “the black belt.” Interracial couples were restricted to living in this section of the city because of discriminatory housing practices, as well as threatened and actual violence.
“These stories show how racism discouraged and punished interracial unions, not through prohibition, but through racist structures like residential segregation, as well as ordinary institutional decisions that determined who was treated as legitimate and those who were deemed suspect,” Roberts said.
She also pointed out how, for some interracial couples in Chicago during the early 20th century, crossing the color line did not always mean challenging the hierarchy behind it. She mentioned a club for interracial couples called the Manasseh Club, a social group that, as her father’s interviews revealed, was riddled with anti-black sentiment and a desire for lighter-skinned children.
“In these conversations, interracial intimacy wasn’t automatically rebellion against racism or patriarchy; sometimes it was a route to preserving whiteness from one generation to the next,” Roberts said. “Some people had married because of their partner’s color, not in spite of it.”
Conversely, other interviews revealed couples who actively fought against the black belt and the city’s structural racism in a variety of ways, through the Communist Party, the civil rights movement, and other local displays of resistance.
Through writing the book and reflecting on her father’s interviews, Roberts learned that love can only become politically transformative when it confronts, rather than denies, systemic inequalities.
“If we want to create a world built on care and shared humanity, we must start with ourselves, even in our most intimate relationships,” she said. “I don’t think that means we have to marry someone of another race, but I think it does mean that we have to practice equality now. Even as we continue to live in a world governed by racial hierarchy, we need to learn to struggle within that tension of living in a racist society while envisioning a future in which racial hierarchy is unimaginable.”
Watch the full lecture below or on our YouTube Channel: