13 May 2026
41 minutes
Available for over a year
Following her parents’ deaths, Dorothy Roberts became the custodian of her father’s huge archive of documents from his career as an anthropologist. It seemed natural that Dorothy took care of the hoard as she's the academic among her sisters. After over a decade of procrastination, Dorothy finally decided to explore the files and realised they contained her father’s essays, diaries, and transcripts of hundreds of interviews he conducted with interracial couples in the 20th century.
Dorothy had always known that her white father was interested in the topic and believed it stemmed from his relationship with her black mother. But the transcripts revealed that his fascination with black-white unions began nearly two decades before he met her mother. She wondered, was her family an experiment to test her father’s theory that interracial unions could solve racism?
Entranced by this discovery, Dorothy took herself and the files back to her childhood neighbourhood of Kenwood on the south side of Chicago. She spent an entire summer going through the transcripts, which illuminated the harsh realities of being in a mixed relationship in mid-century Chicago. Along the way, she found out about what she believed could be the origins of her father’s views on race – a transformative trip he took to India as a teenager.
There was a final, startling realisation: that her father had kept a file on her too. In it was an essay Dorothy had written in college about hiding the fact that her father was white to emphasise her black identity. Through the archive Dorothy has been able to reconcile with what it means to be a black woman with a white father and how his ideals about a common humanity that transcends race have inspired her own perspective and work. Dorothy has written a memoir called The Mixed Marriage Project.
A warning that in this episode there is historical archive that contains an outdated racial term that may cause offence.
Presenter: Jo Fidgen
Producer: Saskia Collette
Get in touch: outlook@bbc.com or WhatsApp +44 330 678 2707
(Photo: The Roberts family at their home in Chicago, 1960. Credit: Courtesy of Dorothy Roberts )
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