Unveiling Hidden Truths: How Dorothy Roberts’ Memoir Challenges Everything We Think About Race and Family
As Roberts reads through her father’s papers, the reader begins to detect a shift in her thinking. She starts out pondering uncomfortable questions such as what are the ethics of her father pursuing a relationship with her mother when she was a student of his? Did he marry her mother because he fetishized Black women, was obsessed with mixed-race marriages, or because her mother’s refinement allowed her to travel in white academic circles? Did her father use her and her sisters as guinea pigs in his research? Roberts’ father died in 2002 so he’s unable to answer her questions but it seems the questions themselves are enough to unlock new ideas about race, prejudice, her family, and ultimately herself.
