Abstract
My lecture draws on my forthcoming memoir and archival research uncovering nearly five hundred interviews with Black–white couples in Chicago beginning in the 1930s. Although interracial marriage was legal, these couples’ lives were tightly governed by structural racism embedded in housing, employment, policing, and family regulation. Examining both the limits and possibilities of love across the color line, I interrogate the enduring belief that interracial intimacy signals the triumph of love over racism. I argue that love alone cannot dismantle racism, but that intimacy becomes politically transformative when it confronts—rather than denies—the racist structures that continue to constrain our humanity in and through our relationships.
Speaker Bio
Dorothy Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and George A. Weiss University Professor at University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, and Founding Director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society. She is a MacArthur Fellow, an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Medicine, and recipient of honorary doctorate degrees from Rutgers University and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. An internationally acclaimed scholar, public intellectual, and social justice activist, Roberts has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of race, gender, and class inequities in U.S. institutions and has been a leader in transforming thinking on reproductive justice, child welfare, and bioethics. She is author of the award-winning Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2001); Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011); and Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022), as well as more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters. Her forthcoming memoir, THE MIXED MARRIAGE PROJECT, will be published in February 2026.
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