The Mixed Marriage Project

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. On the Adventures of Curiosity Cove podcast, when peanut butter disappears from school, Ella, Scout, and Layla launch a full detective mission. Their search leads them back in time to meet a brilliant inventor whose curiosity changed the world. In this Black History Month adventure, asking questions, thinking creatively, can lead to amazing discoveries. Listen to Adventures of Curiosity Cove every Monday from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, a.k.a. neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can scroll the headlines all day and still feel empty. I'm Ben Higgins, and If You Can Hear Me is where culture meets the soul. honest conversations about identity, loss, purpose, peace, faith, and everything in between celebrities, thinkers, everyday people. Some have answers. Most are still figuring it out. And if you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to if you can hear me on my heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, it's Joe interesting host of the spirit daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And today I'm talking with my dear friend, Krista Williams. It can change you in the best way possible. Dance with the change, dance with the breakdowns. The embodiment of Pisces intuition with Capricorn power moves. So I'm like delusionally proud of my chart. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast starting on February 24th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. I'm Dani Shapiro, and this is Family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. My guest today is Dorothy Roberts, professor, legal scholar, activist, recipient of a 2024 MacArthur Genius Grant, and author of the upcoming book, The Mixed Marriage Project, a memoir of love, race, and family. Dorothy's is a story, in a way, about the stories we tell ourselves about that most foundational element of our lives, our own family, and the ways those stories can radically change over time. It's also the story of a remarkable daughter who is able to illuminate and finish what her father never could. And in so doing, learn more about herself as she deepens what is already an extraordinary life's work. I was born in Chicago, but when I was only three months old, my parents moved to Liberia. My mother, she was from Jamaica, but in her 20s, she moved to Liberia and then came to Chicago to attend Roosevelt University where my father was teaching and that's where they met. And my father was an anthropologist. So they decided to spend a couple of years in Liberia where he would teach. And that was a place she was familiar with, having lived there before meeting him. And so at three months old, my parents and I moved to Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. This is in the 1950s. And my two sisters, twins, were born a year later in Liberia, West Africa. So our family itself is a very multinational, multiracial, white father, Black mother, Jamaican mother who was a Liberian citizen. And then when I was two or three, we moved back to Chicago. And that's where I grew up. So I spent my entire childhood in Chicago in a neighborhood called Kenwood, which is a very integrated, middle-class neighborhood next to Hyde Park, where the University of Chicago is. And I grew up in a big, giant Victorian house on a beautiful block, just a block away from my elementary school, and had a wonderful childhood in the 60s, the era of the Civil Rights Movement and anti-Vietnam War activism. And I lived there on that same block, same house, from when I was three until we then moved to Egypt when I was in eighth grade. At 13, my first two years of high school, my father had a Fulbright Fellowship in Cairo, Egypt. And so my world became very global once again. You describe that house on Kenwood Avenue in such beautiful, magical terms, not just in terms of just the kind of sprawling nature of it and the beautiful block, but also you describe a very sort of magical time there in a lot of ways. Yes, that is exactly the word I use, magical. It was a house built in the 1890s, and it had turrets and a cylindrical column going up and a big porch with columns and looked like a castle. and inside it just had so many fabulous features. So there was a grand hall you walked into with a closet where my sisters and I would pretend we were putting on plays. My mother put up a velvet curtain in front of it and we could come out in front of this winding staircase and our audience of our parents or friends could sit on the steps and watch us perform. and then there was the beautiful living room and dining room, a big kitchen. And one of the most interesting things about the house was that my parents bought it from a couple who were African safari enthusiasts. And the wife was an artist, and she painted several of the walls in our house with scenes from their African safari. So my sister's bedroom had giraffes and elephants roaming across the wall. And they had a big bedroom. So we're talking about a very large wall. my parents had a dressing room off of their bedroom that had floor to ceiling mirrors on the closets. And you could open the door if you stood in the middle and open the doors on either side. You saw your reflection going on endlessly. And one of those closets had a secret passageway into the hall. And so you could just imagine the three of us playing hide and seek. And then on the third floor. Holmes had ballrooms on the third floor. And my parents, or probably the prior owners, had converted the ballroom into a big playroom for us. And then there was my father's study also on the third floor, which he kept locked up with an old-fashioned key. And I would, when he wasn't around, pull a chair and stand on my tippy toes and reach the key and go inside. And He had a magnificent library of books, mostly about Africa and India, lining a wall. And those are my earliest memories of reading to myself, sitting on the floor and just pulling down books about foreign lands that I would read and be mesmerized by. Why do you think that your father kept the door locked? So my father was completely obsessed with writing a book about interracial marriage. And the book really dominated our lives. My mother's and my sister's and mine growing up, he was always up in his office. if he wasn't having dinner with us or going on outings. I have to say, my father spent a lot of time with us. My mother cooked every single night. And so he had dinner with us every night. And I also had lots of discussions with my father. So I was very close to him. It was important to him to spend time with us. But he also spent a lot of time up in his study working on this book. and I think he locked it because he didn't want little kids messing with him. First of all, it was right across from this playroom. We would be playing over there and maybe he didn't want it to spill over into his study. And maybe it was also just to have a sense of privacy. You know, it's funny, Danny, I have a similar habit. And I haven't thought about this before, but I keep the door to my home study closed. And my husband thinks it's very strange because his door is always open and doesn't understand why I would need to close it. But I have this sense that while I'm writing, I want to feel secluded. And I surround myself with books like my father did and piles of papers. and it might look a little bit messy to some people who are, you know, too neat. But it's just occurring to me now that I probably got that habit, that sense from my father. Your father's book very much was like almost its own member of your family. Yes. And so there was you, there were your two sisters, there was your mom, and there was this book and his relationship with this book and his struggles. Yes. Growing up during those years in that house, what did you think about that book? And how would you describe each of your parents from your childhood self? So I knew that Daddy had to work on his book, that it was very important to give him time to work to not bother him. It was a very important part of his life, his persona, and our family. I could just hear my mother say, you know, Be more quiet. Your father's working on the book. When we called it the book. And it just came up. It came up in dinner conversations. I knew he was interviewing couples for the book. Many of the couples he interviewed became part of our family life. So my piano teacher was the husband of one of the couples. Our plumber was. His closest friends were in interracial relationships. We would go over to the homes to visit of interracial couples and their children. And so it wasn't just the writing of the book up in his study. it was also the people he interviewed became integral parts of our lives. To me, my mother was, she was her own person. My mother had a very strong personality. She was very elegant, very smart. My sisters and I thought she could answer any question. Growing up, I knew that any question I had about homework or anything about life, I could go to my mother and she would have an answer. She went to a very selective British school in Jamaica that was free of charge, but you had to qualify to be in this Woolmers school for girls. Whenever we came to her with questions or tell her what we were studying, she'd always say, oh, I learned that far earlier in my life at Woolmers. She had a British accent combined with a Jamaican, you know, West Indian lilt to it, but it was quite British. and she was very proper. So what I remember most about my mother, other than her helping me with homework, is our shopping sprees. My mother loved to go into downtown Chicago, into the Loop, and go shopping. And my mother was very glamorous and she would buy designer clothes. You know, I feel like I'm giving this impression that I came from a wealthy family, which isn't true. My father was a professor at Roosevelt University, which is not a very prestigious university, but one perfect for him because it was very progressive at the time and very diverse. And it really fit his interests in what he called the racial caste system in America, our interracial relationships. and my mother eventually worked. She was a homemaker in my very young childhood, but she eventually worked for the Chicago Department of Public Health and then became a Chicago public school teacher. I'm not sure how she became so glamorous, but she was. And she could entertain. She put on fantastic dinner parties for my father's colleagues and friends and her friends, and she was just a magnificent person. So they were both quite a couple. They were really the life of the party, because my father loved to talk. He's a very friendly, gregarious person, very, put people at ease, and my mother just had this sparkle about her. Beneath Dorothy's family life, there is a low, constant thrumming. When is Bob going to finish his book? When is Bob going to finish his book? It's a question that never quite goes away. When Dorothy is in eighth grade, Bob gets a Fulbright grant, and the family moves to Cairo. They are in the throes of some financial strain, and they need to sell their house before leaving the country. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I definitely had the sense when I was in eighth grade and my father got this Fulbright Fellowship that they were in financial trouble. And the fellowship was, it was almost as if we were escaping to another country where we wouldn't have those financial pressures. And my parents decided to sell the house, I think because of the financial trouble they were in. The one thing I remember is that my father had invested heavily in Occidental Petroleum Corporation. I never really learned the details of it, but my father would talk about it. Here I'm talking about Occidental Petroleum and as if he was going to make a lot of money in this investment he made. And I know that something terrible happened and he lost the money. And then there was the book. He got a contract from Simon & Schuster in 1968, 1969, just before we were moving to Cairo. and it was for $2,000, which was a fair amount of money back then in the 1960s. And we were so excited about this that this book my father had been working on my entire childhood was finally going to come to fruition and be published by a major publisher. And I found out later that he had these aspirations so that it was going to be made into a motion picture because there was another anthropologist whose book had turned into a motion picture, and he'd written to his editor to make sure there was a clause in the contract about motion picture rights. So he was dreaming big. He was dreaming big. This was going to be the first major book about interracial marriage. And at one point, he was going to call it something like sex and marriage in America. On the one hand, he had this idea of making a trade press book that was going to be a bestseller. But he also, and this is what really doomed him finishing the book, was that, well, there were lots of things that doomed him. But one was he wanted to write a book about the history of interracial marriage. And he got bogged down in that history. I think he also really liked interviewing people and interacting with them And he wanted to keep doing interviews And he just couldn stop and write the book And so when he didn't fulfill the contract and had to return the advance he'd gotten, that just added to the financial disaster. And so my parents never bought a house again. And we went from this magnificent house, which I suppose they probably couldn't have afforded in the first place, to renting a house. Was when your father had to return the advance, was that something that you knew back then? Or was that part of the discovery that you later make? So I knew, we all knew, the whole family knew when he got the advance. Right. You celebrated. He celebrated, but it was not so much that he had gotten an advance. I don't even think I knew what that was at the time, what an advance was. We knew he had a contract to publish the book with a major publisher. And we went out to dinner, one of our rare dinner outings, to Contiki Ports in the Sheridan Hotel in downtown Chicago. I'll never forget that. That was the most exciting thing that happened to our family throughout my entire childhood. You know, I write, it was bigger than when my mother became a U.S. citizen. I don't remember going out to celebrate that, but we definitely, it was just major jubilation in the house. And then I also remember when he didn't meet the deadline for the book. Now, I learned later how much he had gotten and that he had to return it. Those details I didn't know. But I did know that it was very disappointing and disastrous that he did not finish the book. We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Hi, this is Jo Winterstein, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And I just sat down with a mini driver. The Irish traveler said when I was 16, you're going to have a terrible time with men. Actor, storyteller, and unapologetic Aquarian visionary. Aquarius is all about freedom loving and different perspectives. And I find a lot of people with strong placements in Aquarius like are misunderstood. A sun and Venus in Aquarius in her seventh house spark her unconventional approach to partnership. He really has taught me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms, on different houses, in different places, but just an embracing of the isness of it all. If you're navigating your own transformation or just want a chart side view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity, and real life, this episode is a must listen. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast starting on February 24th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP, its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated. And Black America is at a breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What do you do when the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins, and if you can hear me, it's where culture meets the soul, a place for real conversation. Each episode, I sit down with people from all walks of life, celebrities, thinkers, and everyday folks, and we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest about the big stuff. Identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore. Loss that changes you. Purpose when success isn't enough. Peace when your mind won't slow down. Faith when it's complicated. Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. By Dorothy's senior year of high school, there's a quiet sense of deflation in the family. An accumulation of compromises and disappointments that no one quite names. But academically, Dorothy is thriving. The family is living in Evanston now, a suburb of Chicago, in a rented house. A move her mother insisted on so Dorothy could attend Evanston Township High School, one of the best public schools in the area. Private school was never an option. But this was her mother's way of opening doors, of positioning her daughter for something bigger. When Dorothy is accepted to Yale, her first choice, she is thrilled. But the acceptance exposes a rare and visible conflict between her parents. Yale means distance and significant expense. Northwestern, just blocks away, means living at home and avoiding the cost of room and board. Her father wants the practical choice. Her mother doesn't hesitate. This is Dorothy's dream, and she wants her to take it. And I overheard my parents arguing, which was very rare. My mother would fuss at my father all the time, principally about writing the book. You know, I can hear her, boom, boom, finish the book. Which he never did, so she would fuss with him. I always thought she was kind of mean to him. But they didn't argue. They certainly didn't yell at each other. I never heard either of my parents curse at all, let alone curse at each other. My father was very mild-mannered. And I heard them arguing, which was so unusual for them to be arguing back and forth. And I stood at the top of the stairs. They were on the first floor. I stood at the top of the stairs listening. And I realized they were arguing about my father not wanting to pay room and board at Yale. and they went back and forth. And my mother was accusing him of being stingy and he was trying to tell her that the family couldn't afford it. And I just will never forget the end of the argument. My mother said, you're dashing Dorothy's dreams. That was it. And what happened was the Evanston Township High School had an academic scholarship for a senior who excelled, you know, in courses and leadership and that kind of thing. And my counselor told me that I had been elected to receive it. I don't remember the exact amount of money, but it was substantial enough to make a difference. And it was for each of the four years of college. And so at that point, my father had to give in and I ended up going to Yale. During this time when you get to Yale, how are you thinking of yourself as the daughter of a white father and a black mother? At this point in your life, how are you identifying and how are you experiencing yourself? Well, when I was very little, I really adopted my parents' view that there was something special and important about interracial relationships. And that the children of interracial relationships were special in the sense that we were able to navigate different cultures better. He was trying to contest the dominant view that children of interracial relationships would, you know, biracial children would have some kind of psychological problems or social problems. They wouldn't fit in to either community and, you know, the tragic mulatto idea that was still present in the 1960s. So my father was very determined to challenge that. And my parents imbued us with this idea that our family represented the potential for racial harmony in America. And so at that point, and this would be before I was, say, 10 years old, you know, I might have answered, I'm human. And somebody asked me to choose. But I always thought of myself as Black. But the idea that it was more important I was a human being than my racial classification was the lesson my parents were teaching me. And as I grew older, especially when I read the book Black Power in seventh grade, I began to question that view, especially the idea that interracial intimacy was the answer to racism in America. and I began to identify more strongly as a Black girl. Then when we went to Egypt, that really intensified. I think maybe because I wasn't around Black Americans. I went to an international school, and I think the only Black students there were the children of the Liberian ambassador. I think I was probably the only Black American student there. So that and reading the autobiography of Malcolm X and just growing up, you know, I began to feel much more strongly that I identified as Black. When I went to college, I met a group of Black students there who were very, very close. We bonded almost immediately. We hung out together. We studied together. They were really my closest friendship group and classmates at Yale. And I went through this period where I didn't want anyone to know that I had a white father. So I'm drawn from when I was very young, being proud that my parents were of different races and feeling that I represented some kind of hope for America. No pressure or anything. In college, not wanting anyone to know that my father was white, I even deliberately hid it. I hid it to my boyfriend who was black, who I met very soon after I got to Yale, and never told him that I had a white father. It didn't even really come up. He just assumed that my parents were black. And one time I had taken some photos with my father over the winter holidays and brought them back with me to show my boyfriend. But I only wanted to show him the photos that my father had taken of me alone. I deliberately hid the photo of myself with my father. And at one point, I realized that you could see my father in the mirror, in the bedroom where we had taken the photos. And as soon as I saw his image, I freaked out. I can remember the stets I had, my slenching, my stomach. Oh, my goodness, Bobby is going to see that my father is white. And I immediately snatched the photo from him and put it face down on a table that was there. And, you know, he later told me that when he did visit my home during spring break, this is now several months later when I got, you know, I knew him better. I wasn't so afraid to tell him more about me. When my father answered the door, he was shocked. He had no idea that my father was white. And then there was another situation. my first semester at Yale, I took a sociology course on ethnicity, very basic ethnic studies type of course. And there was a study group that I belonged to where one of the assignments was that we were supposed to guess each other's backgrounds. And everyone said, for me, I was Black American. and there was one white student who said, I think she has some white ancestry. And everyone looked at me and thought, is that, did he get it right? And I said, well, I do have a white grandmother, but I never met her. She died before I was born, which is true. Just not the whole truth. Not the whole truth. I left out the part about my father. Was it fear of being sort of rejected or was there some kind of shame? Just wanting, you know, at that point in time, wanting things to be simpler, just wanting the way that you identified to be the way that it just really was. Yeah, I think it was. First of all, even though it was so long ago, I can still feel viscerally the fear that I had. Now, what was that fear you're asking me? That's harder to remember. But I think part of it was that this was really the first time I was with a group of people where I identified completely as Black who didn't know I had a white father. And I didn't want them to question my identity as a Black woman. And there was also part of it was that I didn't want people to think that I thought I was special because I had a white father, that I was different from them. I never liked that. You know, I'm thinking also even in high school, when I was at Evanston Township High School, there was a situation where my sisters and I were on the bus riding home from school. And my parents pulled up alongside the bus. And when the bus came to a stop, my mother knocked on the bus door and came up on the bus. And she said, are there three light-skinned girls on the bus? I was horrified. I was horrified. I was so embarrassed. And because I didn't want the other black girls on the bus to think that I was any different from them. I identify so much with my mother who was dark skin and had a very African features. I know it seems strange, but when I think of myself, I think of myself as looking like her. And so it was partly, I'd never heard her describe me and my sisters like that before. I'd never heard her refer to our color before. Well, and it's almost like a, you know, possibly an indication of how she saw you and your sisters. Maybe. And it never occurred to me that she saw us that way. Yeah. It never occurred to me that she saw us that way I just have this very strong revulsion at the idea of Black people who have lighter skin being you know any better than anybody else Or, you know, I just, I don't use that term to describe me and I don't feel that it describes me, even though maybe it does. we'll be back in a moment with more family secrets hi this is joe winterstein host of the spirit daughter podcast where we talk about astrology natal charts and how to step into your most vibrant life and i just sat down with a mini driver the irish traveler said when i was 16 you're gonna have a terrible time with men actor, storyteller, and unapologetic Aquarian visionary. Aquarius is all about freedom loving and different perspectives. And I find a lot of people with strong placements in Aquarius, like are misunderstood. A sun and Venus in Aquarius in her seventh house spark her unconventional approach to partnership. He really has taught me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms on different houses in different places, but just an embracing of the is-ness of it all. If you're navigating your own transformation or just want a chart-side view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity, and real life, this episode is a must listen. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast starting on February 24th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had both been assassinated. And Black America was out of breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. to be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What do you do when the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins, and if you can hear me, it's where culture meets the soul, a place for real conversation. Each episode, I sit down with people from all walks of life, celebrities, thinkers, and everyday folks, and we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest about the big stuff. Identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore. Loss that changes you. Purpose when success isn't enough. Peace when your mind won't slow down. Faith when it's complicated. Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are other moments, too, when Dorothy is aware that her father's whiteness comes into play outside their idyllic neighborhood of Kenwood. Moments that remain unspoken, a tacit agreement made without words. When the family would take road trips, they stayed in motels, not hotels. Places where Dorothy's mother and the girls would remain in the car while their father checked them in. My sisters and I, more recently when we've talked about our memories, both of them said that they knew that's why we never went to hotels. We always went to motels where we could stay in the car and it was just easier to slip into the room without anybody seeing my mother and my sisters and me. And, yeah, we just knew that that was why, that there might have been objections to us staying at a motel. And we knew that that happened. Again, this was the 60s. There were places that would say were full if they saw Black people trying to rent a room. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting. It's like, you know, your Kenwood experience was this idyllic bubble. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because it was a bubble in the sense that there was a lot of diversity and integration and interracial relationships in Hyde Park Kenwood. But at the same time, it was also a place where we were very aware of the civil rights movement. We're very aware of racism in America. And so it was a bubble with a lot of social consciousness and awareness. awareness. Yeah, that it was this very special place where there was, I mean, at one point you write something like apathy was not an option. There wasn't a sense of any kind of being separate from what was going on in the world. That's right. That's right. We were expected to keep up with the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, to support it and to feel that we had to be engaged in some way with social justice movements. And most of the parents were, and our school was. So I went to Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School, and that school was dedicated to teaching us lessons about our common humanity, about the importance of social justice, the civil rights movement. We participated in it. There was a school boycott while I was in elementary school and Shoesmith closed down and we went to an alternative school for the day at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, which was also very involved in supporting the civil rights and anti-war movements. We learned movement songs. We had assemblies where the whole school would sing if I had a hammer and this land is your land and those kinds of things. We had assemblies where civil rights leaders would come and talk to us. When Dr. King was assassinated, the school, all the students were expected to write poems to Mrs. King to express our condolences and our love for Dr. King and our concern for her and her family. It was just part of the school. And I think about how different that was compared to how some children are being taught today, where all of that is erased. It's shocking. Dorothy's mother has advised her in no uncertain terms that she must get an advanced degree before marrying. And so Dorothy does. She goes to Harvard Law and receives a J.D. As an attorney, she practices for eight years. But what she really wants to do, what really lights her up, is teaching and research. So she returns to academia and becomes a professor of law at Northwestern University. By now, having heeded her mother's advice, Dorothy's married and has a daughter. Dorothy's father dies in 2002, and her mother passes away in 2009. Dorothy and her sisters are all well into adulthood now, with busy, jam-packed lives. After their mother's death, their father's research, comprised of many, many boxes, assumedly all the work on the book he never published, are sent to Dorothy, as she is the one with the most storage space. There they sit, for years. What is it about boxes? It's a bit of a motif on this podcast, the fear about what they might contain or reveal, the resistance to opening them. In 2012, Dorothy accepts a new professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, and the unopened boxes travel with her. The thing about sealed boxes is that they also continue to taunt, to whisper. At some point, Dorothy cracks the first one open, And it's here that she realizes that there's so much about her father that she's been flat out wrong about, that she just doesn't know. These boxes are a whole world that Dorothy needs time and space to go through painstakingly, using all her research skills as an academic, and all her daughter's love for both her mother and her father. Dorothy's life is exciting and successful and rich, But she needs to go away by herself to do this work. There is only one place she can imagine going. She finds a sublet right around the corner from her childhood home in Kenwood. The first moment of revelation, the shock, was when I pulled out that very first document from the boxes. And it was this yellowed, crumbling, the edges were literally crumbling at rusty, stapled several pages. And I looked at the top of it and it said February 19th, 1937. And I thought to myself, OK, this must be when this couple was married. I could see that it was a transcript of an interview. It had my father's name on it. It had part of an address on it. And as I saw that other interview transcripts also had 1937, I realized that these were interviews my father conducted in 1937. And that was the most shocking discovery. That very first one, because it completely upended the way I viewed my father's research on interracial marriage and my parents' relationship. because I always thought that he had become interested and so obsessed with interracial marriage when he met my mother and that falling in love with her and marrying her sparked this fascination with interracial marriage. And then he decided he was going to study it. But 1937 was when he was only 21 years old, a graduate student at University of Chicago. And that meant that he first was interested in interracial marriage, and that married my mother, which is a very different story. And as I read the interviews, I discovered that he was very interested in dating Black women from when he was very young. And so, you know, it wasn't that he happened to fall in love with my mother, it meant something that she was a Black woman. He was looking to meet Black women in his 20s. You know, that just, it turns, you know, 360 degrees the way that I thought about the relationship between their marriage and their love for each other and my father's interest in interracial marriage. And that's when I realized that I really needed to read through all the interviews to spend time with them and think about what they meant for my family, my relationship with my parents, what I thought about their marriage, what I thought about my own identity. I did look at some of the interviews, but I didn't sit down and really immerse myself in them until I found this apartment that was owned by a couple who lived in Eastern Europe and rented their place over the summer and over the academic year. and the summer was available and it was right around the corner from my old house. I could see Shoesmith Elementary School from the living room window. It was just amazing. And I set up a whole procedure. I put the six boxes of interviews, 1930s, 1950s, 1960s, against the dining room wall. And then I would take out stacks, lay them on the dining room table and carry a stack every day into the study that they had, kind of like my father's study. It was lined with books. And so as I went through the transcripts and read them, well, there were just so many discoveries because I learned so much from the interviews in each era. You know, the 1930s, my father had interviewed almost 100 couples in the 1930s, and 25 of them were married in the 1800s. I just don't know of any other source of information about interracial marriage in a northern city, especially in that era. and there is a book, I should say, there is a book written by my father's close colleague, St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis, where he has a chapter based on my father's interviews. Blessing, they're not, he doesn't discuss all of the interviews and it's not the same as reading my father's notes as he met with these black-white couples in Chicago. So it wasn't just what the couple said. It was all the notes my father made about how he found the couples and the questions he asked them and what else he was doing. One other discovery is that the interviews became so much part of his personal life to the extent that I could hardly tell the difference between whether he was writing a diary entry and whether he was writing his notes on an interview because he's friends with these people he was interviewing. So that's one set of discoveries. But then I get to the 1950s, and of course, I want to find in these interviews, how did Daddy meet Mommy? Where does he talk about that? And the first place I see my mother mentioned, this is after discovering him mentioning other Black women, which, you know, I can figure out we're not my mother. My mother first appears as someone interviewing one of the couples. And I discovered that my mother had become co-investigator with him. She was more than a research assistant. She was finding couples with him. She was interviewing the wives while he interviewed the husbands. And I find in the 1950s and even into the 1960s transcripts that she recorded and notes that she made. And I see this completely different side of my mother where she's an ethnographer and she's writing notes that sound like a novel. I never knew that. We thought it was Daddy's project. And now I discover it was Mommy's too. That also throws into a new light the you know Bob when are you going to finish the book Exactly Exactly I realized mommy wasn being mean to daddy when she would nag him constantly about finishing the book She had put her own blood, sweat, and tears into this book. And this is something I think so often career husbands don't realize, that their wives are helping their career, even if they're not involved in the actual work of the career. She was taking care of my father's three children. You know, he was involved, but he wasn't combing our hair. He wasn't getting us dressed in the morning. He wasn't making sure that we were well-behaved. That was all my mother's doing. My mother was cooking his meals every night. She gave up her PhD in order to take care of me and my sisters. She gave up a lot. And not only her contributions, but she expected that by marrying my father, at the time he was a junior professor, but he was working on a book that she helped. She thought he was going to publish the book and become a renowned anthropologist and leave Roosevelt University and go like his friend St. Clair Drake to Stanford or Yale or Harvard or something. She's very ambitious, my mother. And it wasn't, I realized so much that she was putting all her hopes in my father. It was that she had sacrificed so that he could become this renowned professor, so that he could publish this book. It was her work that did it. And so when he fails to publish the book and he has no interest in climbing the academic ladder, You know, he was perfectly satisfied, which is fine. I mean, Roosevelt was a great university. He became chair of the sociology anthropology department. He wrote articles and published them, but he didn't achieve what my mother expected him to achieve. And it would be one thing if she hadn't contributed to it, but she did. And she never said a word. Never said a word about her actually participating in interviews. Exactly. It's interesting because they stayed together the whole of their shared lives. Yes. And the word that keeps on coming to my mind in all the different ways that you've described her is your mother was very disciplined. Yes. And your father, maybe not so much. And she wanted this certain kind of, well, the same thing that she wanted for you girls, right? Yeah. And, I mean, fascinating that she said to you, do not get married before you have your advanced degree. because she was protecting you, whether she was aware of this or not, she was protecting you from her own fate. I think so. Absolutely. Maybe she didn't say it in so many words, but we got the idea that she was disappointed in my father's failure to write and publish the book. And she didn't want anything like that to happen to us. She had given up a lot to support his career, And she wanted to make sure that we never did anything like that, that we got our advanced degrees. We stood on our own two feet. We had our own careers. And we didn't rely on a husband to do that or to let a husband interfere with it. When my mother said to my father, you're dashing Dorothy's dreams, I can now hear in it, you dashed my dreams and I'm not going to let you do that to Dorothy too. And at the same time, she also is protective of him by never saying anything to the three of you about, you know, really how disappointed she was and how she perceived his failure to wrangle that book into what she and he believed that it could have been. It was a kindness to him, right? And to your family. When we think about the things that we say and the things that we don't say, you know, that was maybe she just wanted to keep things because there was a lot of beauty in all that. Yes, there was. And we had a very happy family. We did a lot together. We went on so many excursions together and road trips and travel and going to the Field Museum on Saturdays to watch movies about people's adventures and all sorts of interesting escapades. We went on together. We went camping together. So our family was very harmonious. I think she never wanted to degrade my father. He saw his potential. That's the thing. She didn't think that he was incompetent or anything like that. She thought he wasn't living up to the potential she saw in him. And he just, he was not as ambitious as she was. So, Darcy, what was it like for you being holed up in this apartment in your childhood neighborhood? You know, like breathing the air, walking the streets, seeing your old house, seeing your old elementary school. being alone with this history and this research and these realizations. I don't know what it must have taken. At one point you write, when you get to the 1950s part of his research, you write that you were filled with part curiosity, part trepidation, and you wrote, I knew what I was stepping into. Yeah, because even though I was constantly surprised, I still knew that when I was growing up, My father was working on this book that he never finished, and I knew that it had a big influence on my childhood. So I realized that by then, after discovering the 1930s interviews, I realized that even though I was very familiar with his project, there were going to be surprises as well. I've never spent this kind of intense time really steeped in the research. I've never spent a whole summer where I practically did nothing but work on the project. You know, I did go get some groceries or went for a run in the morning. But other than that, I did nothing else. I just got up in the morning and made my tea and yogurt and ran around the block, but then spent hours upon hours all day reading and taking notes about my reactions to the interviews. And it was such an almost indescribable experience because of this combination of the history that I uncovered in the interviews. The couples my father interviewed and my mother later also interviewed were just totally fascinating. But then there was also the personal aspect of it, of learning about this part of my father's life. I didn't know about at all. It was completely new to me. And then discovering my mother's voice as well, which I was unaware of. And so there was that combination of the historical insights that were so path-breaking, just the work my father was doing, the fact that he was a 21-year-old white graduate student going into the Black Belts to interview couples about this personal and taboo aspect of their lives. You know, that alone was so fascinating, but then to learn these details about his life that I wasn't aware of, and my mother's life as Well, it just added another aspect to it. And on top of that, that it had to do with my own discovery about myself. Everything I was reading not only taught me new revelations about my parents, but those revelations were related to my own identity. So I'm learning about myself as much as I'm learning about them as I'm reading it. All those layers were mind-boggling, but also just very, very satisfying, very gratifying to be able to dig so deeply into my family history, but also my own identity. so where does this leave you in terms of your identity now you know so much more you have so much more information about your parents and you've interrogated you know so deeply the complexities of coming from a biracial couple and the privilege of your father's whiteness which is something that you hadn't really interrogated before and the wanting to reject that but you know you can't it is what it is. So where does it sit with you now, having finished the book and having really like almost so deeply communed with both of your parents, like you researched the research? I like that term communed. It was a way of communing with them as I never had before after they both had passed away. Well, what really got me to grapple with the meaning of their research, their relationship, and my identity was when I discovered the file number 224 on me that my father. And I read these, a letter from him to me and an essay I had written for college and an essay I had, it seems, written for him, where I made some, I think, very hurtful statements about wanting to hide his identity, hide him from other people and deny that he was part of me. And that really forced me to grapple deeply with what it means for me to identify as a Black woman with a white father. And to realize that even though we disagreed about the role that interracial marriage could have in ending racism in America, that the main lesson he taught me was about our common humanity and how much that influenced the work that I do and how I view my role, my commitment to ending racial injustice in America. I came to really appreciate that the fact that he's white doesn't mean that he could not contribute to my identity as a Black woman and the way I think about my life and about society and what I think that my mission in life should be. Also, even though I still believe that interracial intimacy and marriage alone cannot be the answer to racism. They cannot dismantle racism. One thing that comes out from the interviews he conducted was how much racism governed the lives of these interracial couples. And though they were courageous enough to cross Chicago's color line. They were very much constricted by Chicago's color line. But I became more open to thinking about how love is an important part of our struggle against racial and other forms of injustice. And we need to really wrestle with how our personal relationships relate to the social injustices that constrain us. And that there were couples I read about, like my parents, whose love had a kind of transformative capacity, even though it could not end the racist structures that constrained it. It still could potentially contribute to that struggle. And so I felt reconciled, even though I didn't feel I had all the answers at the end. But I definitely come to a place, obviously by writing this memoir, where I don't believe I have to hide that my father's white. I don't think that that takes away from my identity. I want to embrace every aspect of my identity, and I don't think that that means that I'm any less a Black woman because I have a white father. Here's Darcy reading a passage from her powerful memoir. I feel a weight of sadness thinking about all those years my father poured into writing his book. I can imagine the mounting disappointment with each missed deadline and canceled contract. And yet that sadness is outweighed by the extraordinary adventure my parents' research gave our family while I was growing up. I wonder if, in the end, my father felt that the joy he found in interviewing couples over half his life was worth letting the book go unwritten. The world was deprived of the text he worked so long to finish. But I've had the gift of reading the stories he gathered and of carrying with me the lessons they taught about love, race, and family. As I place the folder filled with contracts and letters back into its box, my heart is full of gratitude for the mixed marriage project, which shaped who I am and is still a defining part of me. Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zakour is the story editor, and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail, and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is 1-888-SECRET-0. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Writer. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir, Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the Adventures of Curiosity Cove podcast, when peanut butter disappears from school, Ella, Scout, and Layla launch a full detective mission. Their search leads them back in time to meet a brilliant inventor whose curiosity changed the world. And this Black History Month adventure, asking questions, thinking creatively, can lead to amazing discoveries. Listen to Adventures of Curiosity Cove every Monday from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? 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Listen to If You Can Hear Me on my iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast Doubt, The Case of Lucy Letby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023. But what if we didn't get the whole story? I've just been made to fit. The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed. What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe? Oh my God, I think she might be innocent. Listen to Doubt, The Case of Lucy Letby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.