Unveiling Hidden Truths: How Dorothy Roberts’ Memoir Challenges Everything We Think About Race and Family
The boxes of his interviews with mixed race couples collect dust over the years until the author finally decides to take an entire summer to herself — living in a rented condo near her childhood haunts on the South Side of Chicago — to read through them. A metaphorical Pandora’s-box tale ensues, as what she discovers alters her understanding of her family and herself.
Roberts had always assumed that her father’s obsession with mixed race marriages was motivated by falling in love with her Black Jamaican mother. As she begins to sort through his papers, she realizes her father began his research a decade before meeting her mother. This revelation shakes her to the core for reasons that unfold over the course of Roberts’ hybrid memoir.
