American Dreaming recounts your extraordinary journey through more than four decades of marriage, family life, and encounters with racial discrimination. When did you decide to connect your family’s history with broader questions about race and equality in America?

My first memoir, Another Day in Post-Racial America, had been published two years before. That book centered on the shared grief of experiencing racism in America as a white woman who’d been in an interracial relationship that spanned decades. In this book, American Dreaming, I wanted to share the reality of what the promise of racial integration and equality truly became on a personal level.

In thinking about my approach and the family estrangement I’d endured, I understood my story wasn’t unique in my own family. My parents’ bicultural marriage endured many of the same familial pressures and external judgments my marriage had. Two different eras, two different sets of circumstances, but there were parallels in our relationships. The difference was how each couple responded within the relationships. The outside pressures fractured my parents’ relationship, while those same pressures drove us closer together.

For me, tackling the larger picture of race and equality in America wasn’t an academic exercise; it became part of the story because it played a causative role in our lived experiences. For readers to fully comprehend the sometimes violent attacks on us just for loving one another, they need to understand the foundation upon which those attacks are initiated. Hatred is a learned behavior, and so is the response to racial attributes like skin color and hair texture. Where does that come from? It comes from the larger racial history of our country and who is in power to document that history, including naming the good guys and the bad guys.

What challenges did you and Ronald face in the early years of your relationship, and how did those experiences shape your commitment to one another?

Family estrangement was probably the most painful, and I still feel grief fifty years later and the longing for answers to unresolved and unspoken questions. Loss of close friends. Job loss. The threat of not being able to find housing. And the biggest threat—violence.

Many interracial relationships cannot withstand the isolation that can come with making the choice to love someone who is outside of your racial and ethnic circle. However, it drove us closer together. Through all those trials, we turned to one another for comfort and strength. We made a simple, unyielding pact: no matter how difficult things became, we would always love one another and stay together. Fifty years later, we are still honoring that promise.

How has raising a multiracial family influenced your understanding of identity, belonging, and social expectations?

Let’s just say that I have found the inner strength to disregard social expectations. They exist to control people and force them into boxes—to dictate that you love only this person of this ethnicity and this class, and act this way according to these gender rules.

I’m my own person who loves the person I chose fifty years ago. I love him because he’s his own person and he chose to love me. We’ve been through it all, but one thing is constant in our lives, and that is each other. We imparted that to our daughters, and they are fiercely independent, strong individuals, and we are so proud of them and their accomplishments.

I fully participate in society. I raised two productive citizens; I vote; I dedicated myself to a career I loved; and now, in retirement, I write full-time. My writing is dedicated to seeing this country’s promise of a more perfect union come to fruition.

However, my understanding of belonging may differ from many others, simply because I will not compromise my moral and ethical beliefs in order to be accepted by others. The reason this country is in the straits it finds itself in is that people were willing to throw out decency and civility to be part of a movement. Their drive to belong was stronger than their will to be good, decent people. It’s a wake-up call that we must all be committed to confronting.

How do you hope your family’s story contributes to readers’ understanding of the lasting influence of racial and cultural prejudice?

The hard part for a lot of people is hearing about racism and thinking people are accusing them of being racist. They don’t understand that prejudice on the part of an individual is one thing, but that vast systems and institutions were put in place in this country to ensure white citizens were advantaged over all others. If they don’t understand that, they will forever take the word personally and react defensively, rather than moving past individual guilt toward empathy, active listening, and a willingness to support structural change.

The other important piece to my family’s story is the ability to show the result of racism on a personal level. Instead of watching a two-minute news story about a shooting and thinking, “That kid must have done something bad, or the cop wouldn’t have done that,” the reader is placed right inside the car with us during a police stop. They hear the exact words exchanged, feel the physical tension, and experience the fear. My goal isn’t to tell them what to think, but to immerse them in the experience, so they have a different perspective from which they can draw their own conclusion.

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