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- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:02]
Liberty Mutual Ad Voice
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- [00:31]
Ebglis Medication Ad Voice
Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from Ebgliss. After an initial dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking EBGLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.
- [00:53]
Ebglis Medication Detailed Info Voice
Ebglis Librekizumab LBKZ a 250 milligram per 2 milliliter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. EBGLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to Epglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Epglis. Before starting Epglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection.
- [01:26]
Ebglis Medication Ad Voice
Searching for real relief? Ask your doctor about epglis and visit epglis.lily.com or call 1-800-or 1-800-545-5979.
- [01:34]
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- [02:03]
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- [02:32]
Ebglis Medication Detailed Info Voice
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartradio.
- [02:43]
Danny Writer (Host of Family Secrets)
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, 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, a 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.
- [03:45]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
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 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 2 or 3, 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.
- [06:03]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
You describe that house on Kenwood Avenue in such a 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.
- [06:21]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
Yes, that is exactly the word I use, magical. It was a house built in the 1890s, and it had turrets and 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 opened 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, homes had ballrooms on the third floor. And my parents are 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. 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.
- [09:11]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
Why do you think that your father kept the door locked?
- [09:15]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
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. 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 with. Up in his study working on this book. And I think he locked it because he didn't want little kids messing with it. 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. 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.
- [11:12]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
Your father's book very much was like almost its own member of your family.
- [11:18]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
Yes.
- [11:19]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
So there was you, there were your two sisters, there was your mom, and. And there was this book and his relationship with this book and his struggles.
- [11:27]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
Yes.
- [11:28]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
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?
- [11:40]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
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 saying, you know, be more quiet. Your father's working on the book. You know, and 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 Woolmer's 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 Woolmer's. 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 and what he called the racial caste system in America, 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 very friendly, gregarious person, very put people at ease. And my mother just had this sparkle about her.
- [15:31]
Danny Writer (Host of Family Secrets)
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.
- [15:59]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
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 escaped. 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, hear him talking about Accidental 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 and Schuster in 1968, 1969, just before we were moving to. 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 that it was going to be made into a motion picture because they're another anthropologist whose book had turned into a motion picture. And he'd written to the. To his editor to make sure there was a clause in the contract about motion picture rights.
- [17:53]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
So he was. He was dreaming big.
- [17:55]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
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 it 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 it, 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't 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.
- [19:09]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
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.
- [19:21]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
So I knew, we all knew. The whole family knew when he got the advance, right?
- [19:26]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
You celebrated, celebrated.
- [19:28]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
But it was not so much that he had gotten 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 Contigui 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 US Citizen. I don't remember going out to celebrate that, but we definitely, I mean, 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.
- [20:30]
Danny Writer (Host of Family Secrets)
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
- [20:34]
Ebglis Medication Ad Voice
Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from EBGLIS. After an initial dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking EVGLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintained skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.
- [20:52]
Ebglis Medication Detailed Info Voice
Ebglis Lebricizumab LBKZ, a 250mg injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EBGLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to ebglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBGLIS or before starting epglis. Tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection searching for real relief?
- [21:26]
Ebglis Medication Ad Voice
Ask your doctor about epglis and visit epgliss.lily.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-5979.
- [21:34]
Grainger Ad Voice
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- [22:04]
OnDeck/Other Ads Voice
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- [22:10]
Danny Writer (Host of Family Secrets)
I can't stop scratching my downtown.
- [22:12]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
Mm, yeah, but I'm not itching to go downtown and tell a receptionist I'm here to talk about my downtown. Some things you'd rather type than say out loud.
- [22:24]
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- [22:34]
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- [23:10]
Danny Writer (Host of Family Secrets)
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.
- [24:17]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
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 finish the milk, 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. I thought I was very mild mannered. And I heard them arguing, which was so unusual for them to be arguing back and forth, 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 he just. The family couldn't afford it. And I just will never forget the end of the argument. My mother said, bob, 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.
- [26:06]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
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? And at this point in your life, how are you identifying and how are you experiencing yourself?
- [26:22]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
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 if 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. And I went to an international school, and I think the only black students there were the children of the Liberian ambassadors. 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 went on 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, you know,
- [29:43]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
no pressure or anything.
- [29:45]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
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. See my father in the mirror, that in the dress in his. In the bedroom where we had taken the photos. And as soon as I saw his image, I freaked out. I can remember the stents I had my sledging and my stomach, oh, my goodness, Bobby is going to see that my father's white. And I immediately snatched the photo from him and put it down, 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. 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, 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 was true.
- [32:20]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
Just not the whole truth.
- [32:22]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
Just not the whole truth. I left out the part about my father.
- [32:28]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
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 identify to be the way that it just really was?
- [32:43]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
Yeah, I think it was. Well, 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 very African features. I know it seems strange, but 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.
- [35:00]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
Well, and it's almost like a, you know, possibly an indication of how she saw you and your sisters.
- [35:08]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
Maybe then. 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 that the idea of black people who have lighter skin being, you know, any better than anybody else or even, 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.
- [35:44]
Danny Writer (Host of Family Secrets)
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
- [35:49]
Ebglis Medication Ad Voice
Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real, and so is the relief from Ebglis. After an initial dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking EVGLIS achieved itch relief and could clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks, and most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.
- [36:09]
Ebglis Medication Detailed Info Voice
A 250mg per 2ml injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. Epglis can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to Epglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Epglis. Before starting Epglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection searching for real relief?
- [36:42]
Ebglis Medication Ad Voice
Ask your doctor about eglis and visit epgliss.lilly.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-5979.
- [36:49]
OnDeck/Other Ads Voice
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- [37:25]
Danny Writer (Host of Family Secrets)
did I search the Internet for answers to my cold sore problem? Now I'm stuck down a rabbit hole filled with images of alarmingly graphic sores in various stages of ooz. I can clear my search history, but I can never unsee that.
- [37:42]
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- [37:50]
Sean Duffy (U.S. Transportation Secretary)
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- [38:25]
Danny Writer (Host of Family Secrets)
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.
- [38:51]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
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.
- [39:33]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting. It's like, you know, your Kenwood experience was this idyllic bubble.
- [39:42]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
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.
- [40:14]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
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.
- [40:29]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
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 Shoes Smith 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 we thought 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.
- [42:16]
Danny Writer (Host of Family Secrets)
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 JD 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 Darcy, 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.
- [44:35]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
The first moment of revelation shock was when I pulled out that very first Document from the boxes. And it was this yellowed, crumbling, the edges were literally crumbling. Rusty, stapled several pages. And I looked at the top of it and it said February 19, 1937. And I thought to myself, okay, 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, 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 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 then 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 to meet black women in his 20s, you know, that 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 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. Five 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 interview. 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 couple 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 is he Talk about that? And the first place I see my mother mentioned this is after discovering him mentioning other black women he's dating, which, you know, I can figure out were 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 was daddy's project. And now I just. It was Mommy's, too.
- [51:55]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
That also throws into a new light the, you know, bob, when are you gonna finish the book?
- [52:02]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
Exactly. Exactly. I realized mommy wasn't 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 Sinclair Drake to Stanford or Yale or Harvard or something. 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 partly 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. 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. Achieve. And it would be one thing if she hadn't contributed to it, but she did.
- [54:15]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
And she never said a word.
- [54:16]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
Never said a word about her actually. Participating interviews. Exactly.
- [54:22]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
It's interesting because they stayed together the whole of their shared lives. 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.
- [54:33]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
Yes.
- [54:34]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
And your father maybe not so much. And she wanted this certain kind of.
- [54:40]
Danny Writer (Host of Family Secrets)
Well, the same thing that she wanted
- [54:42]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
for you girls, right?
- [54:43]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
Yeah.
- [54:44]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
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.
- [54:55]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
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 gonna let you do that to Dorothy, too.
- [55:48]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
And at the same time, she also was 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 that was. Maybe she just wanted to keep things, because there was a lot of. There was a lot of beauty in all that.
- [56:21]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
Yes, there was. And we had a very happy family. We did a lot together. We went on so many excursions together, road trips and travel and going to the Field Museum on Saturdays to watch movies about people's adventures and just 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.
- [57:11]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
So, Darcy, what was it like for you being holed up in this apartment
- [57:16]
Danny Writer (Host of Family Secrets)
in your childhood neighborhood?
- [57:18]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
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.
- [57:41]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
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. I realized that by then, after. 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 a almost indescribable experience because of this combination of the history that I uncovered in the interviews, that 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 insight that were so, so pathbreaking that 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 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. Just 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.
- [61:11]
Interviewer (Danny Writer)
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.
- [61:49]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
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. 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 my. The way I think about my life and about society and what I think that my mission in life should be. Also, I. 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. 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 transformation, formative 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've 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 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.
- [65:56]
Danny Writer (Host of Family Secrets)
Here's Darcy reading a passage from her powerful memoir.
- [66:05]
Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
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.
- [67:14]
Danny Writer (Host of Family Secrets)
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartradio. Molly Zakur 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, Danny Writer and if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir, Inheritance.
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Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
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Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
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Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
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Dorothy Roberts (Guest, Author and Professor)
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