Christopher Schroeder

Category: community and culture

  • Mixed At Most

    I hoped for more from The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family, which is the most recent book from Dorothy Roberts.

    In it, Roberts, who is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, offers an account of the summer she spent in a rented apartment near her Chicago childhood home where she sifted through boxes of her father’s research data, which she was bequeathed after the deaths of both her parents. She reads her father’s interviews of mixed-race married couples and reflects upon discovers about her parents, her younger twin sisters, and herself.

    Roberts’s father, who had been a Roosevelt University anthropology professor, began researching black-and-white marriages as a graduate student, and had seemingly been interested in such relationships even longer. For decades, he interviewed such couples, and was regularly assisted by his Jamaican wife Iris, whom he met when she was a Roosevelt student, and later graduate students.

    Roberts recalls that family discussions often involved her father’s research, and the book he was continually writing. She learns while reviewing these documents that he had two different contracts for this book for example but had to return both advances because he never completed a manuscript.

    Other discoveries seem more significant. For example she hadn’t realized the role that her mother had played in this project or the extent to which her parents’ marriage and even their family could have been part of her father’s research.

    These and others motivate Roberts to reconsider her college choice to identify as a black woman, and deny her white father, which could explain her reluctance to acknowledge her personal experience in her lectures and books. She also realizes that her father’s and her lifelong disagreement about race and relationships has been a persistent them in her own speaking and writing.

    Her father, who she claims never imposed his belief upon her, maintained that interracial intimacy could overcome racism, and consistently tried to convince her of that. She in contrast maintained that racism would end only when people recognize others of different races as equals, which is a prerequisite she believes for love.

    Roberts ultimately reconsiders her perspective, and admits to tempering her resistance to her father’s by the end of the summer. Nonetheless, she is still less hopeful than he, and still convinced of her own account.

    Roberts is right I think insofar that this book demonstrates the damage that race as a social construct can do to relationships and families even across generations. Her father for example waited until his mother had died to marry her mother, which then motivated his brother to disown him, and prevented her from meeting her Chicago cousins.

    I also admire her candor throughout this book, and appreciate the appeal of confronting her past and understanding its impact upon her present. I additionally can understand the way that this book could be considered the completion of the task her father started but never finished.

    Nonetheless, I wonder if Roberts not unlike her father hasn’t quite done so, if she like him still has unfinished business to complete. The reason is that this book seems more like a series of notes about and reflections upon these data and her experiences and less an interpretation and synthesis of these, which are expected of memoirs.

    This book clearly has a narrative frame — the summer Roberts spends near her Chicago childhood him reviewing her father’s research data — and an overarching insight — the complication of her race-and-relationships opinion — but needs more perspective if she intends to offer an account of her intellectual and emotional transformation. Perhaps a different organizing principle, or an additional draft, would enable her to complete the task she gave herself.

    I’m convinced having been married to a Filipina for thirty years that Roberts like her father has a book here and yet needs more sifting, sorting, and synthesizing to complete it.

  • The Rest of Us

    I wonder what Stacy Davis Gates thinks of us.

    Gates, who is president of both the Chicago Teachers Union and the Illinois Federation of Teachers, recently argued that CPS is transforming into a “sustainable community school district” of community “anchors” as a result of the recent Chicago Board of Education approved five-year equity plan and four-year union contract. These will produce “the schools our students deserve” and “true community hubs” that reflect local neighborhoods and are “responsible to students and families” within these.

    The CTU and the Board in rejecting previous privatization of education posit schools as spaces of “stability, access and care” that also address larger social problems, such as food deserts and health care gaps. Such schools both “educate young people” and “reflect and uplift entire communities” by extending support beyond classrooms and integrating local needs with learning.

    This Sustainable Community Schools approach, which according to Gates originated in Chicago, has been embraced by other cities. At its center is a concern for students and their families that supports both “personal agency” and community development.

    I’m not surprised that a teachers union president would advocate for schools as central to society. I sometimes wondered as a professor and a parent why what happened in universities where I worked and schools where my kids learned often seemed separate from what happened beyond these institutions.

    I just never assumed that public schools were the only, or even best, ways to care for Chicago students and their families. I knew that private schools do so too as do other initiatives and institutions, such as After School Matters and the Chicago Park District.

    I realized in other words that schools exist within a larger social context. In other words, education while important isn’t everything, and certainly cannot matter more than reliable roads for example or public safety, which also matter, and must be supported, by those of us who call Chicago home.

    Gates in her defense recognized this economic element in acknowledging the need for additional revenue. At the same time, she misrepresents this situation, and denies its difficulty, by describing it as a need for “a fairer tax system” as if such a perception is a citywide consensus even though it clearly is not.

    In fact, the Chicago City Council members (and Illinois legislators) seem unconvinced of the need for a corporate head tax, a property tax increase, and other self-styled “progressive” taxes proposed by the Chicago mayor, a former CPS teacher and CTU-organizer whose election was the result of the CTU support. Moreover, this failure and other challenges to this mayor’s fiscal policies, governing approach, ethical standards, and even political competence could demonstrate the danger of putting educators in charge.

    I would suggest that this this risk can also be seen in Gates herself, and the way she models a progressive hypocrisy that has been convincingly documented by Musa al-Gharbi (2024) among educators and other social elites. For example, Gates has defended her decision to send her son to a private school in what seems like a classic case of public-schools-for-thee-but-not-for-me.

    I’m perhaps as concerned in the end about the effects upon public perceptions of the CTU and unions generally. Gates might be an effective at obtaining results for union members but by overreaching in both this equity plan and union contract risks alienating those who might otherwise be sympathetic to unions.

    The only thing worse than a union, I’ve said, is no union. The better ones I believe recognize their purview and purpose, collaborate with comparable communities, and create coalitions with other constituencies to support shared goals and similar ends, which require a humility that seems scarce in the CTU and its president.

    Reasonable people can disagree on the distribution of funding across public and social services for example or the proper role of schools and education. As a result, these debates need to be ongoing, and relitigated each time budgets are prepared.

    Budgets obviously reflect values, and Chicago, and Illinois, might need to value education more. Neither however can afford to prioritize education over everything else, especially without a citywide consensus, and not just one within CTU.

    These discussions and decisions are difficult, and must be made by those whom all of us have elected, and not educators who have been elected (or bankrolled) by CTU members.

  • The Dope on Kids and Their Parents Today

    Michaeleen Doucleff’s (2026) new book Dopamine Kids offers an alternative account of challenges confronting kids and their parents today.

    Doucleff, who has a physical chemistry PhD, was surprised to learn that dopamine isn’t a pleasure hormone as it is commonly regarded but a wanting hormone, or one that initiates cravings or urges. For her, this insight explained why would feel worse after acting on urges to surf social media for example or indulge in junk food.

    These together form the basis for this book, which is her second one about parenting. In this one, she criticizes the ways digital tech and processed food industries manipulate kids and adults, which she observed in her own home, and offers an account of her efforts, including her research reviews, to change these conditions.

    From these, she outlines a process for other parents and people who also want to disrupt their dependencies upon digital technology and processed foods. This process begins with identifying their values, selecting specific alternatives, and reinforcing these replacements and efforts.

    Central is recognizing the difference, and often the gap, between wanting and liking. The former figures centrally to the development of cell phone apps for example and snack foods, and is why such changes shouldn’t be seen as will-power problems. Regardless, this distinction Doucleff maintains can be hijacked to support such changes by reconfiguring the connection between these.

    Parents in Doucleff’s approach lead these efforts, which requires them to challenge their own choices alongside those of their children. Together, kids and their parents can disrupt their dependencies not by depriving themselves but by replacing these choices with more satisfying ones — closing the gap in other words between wanting and liking — and thus change their homes and their lives.

    This book seems to resonate with many reviewers, who like its mixture of personal anecdote, scientific research, and practical processes and strategies. I too appreciated the insight that kids and their parents aren’t surfing social media or eating junk food because these activities make us happy and the suggestion that these changes needn’t result in additional conflict or herculean sacrifices.

    I also welcome the inherent challenge that parents must confront their own behaviors and model better ones. I no longer have children at home but think this challenge nonetheless applies for anyone who lives with people whom they love and support.

    I struggled with the prominence of the personal experience throughout this book. I can see how it humanizes the author, and could even reduce any sense of superiority or arrogance. Still, I found it excessive at some points and even condescending at others.

    I more disliked its unconventional structure, which intersperses principles and practices. I again understand the argument for such an approach. At the same time, I struggled to rehearse the prior reasoning at the outset of the next theoretical, and research, section.

    Nonetheless, I think this book was well worth the effort. I wondered before I started it whether it would contain enough insights for someone whose children left years ago, and whose challenges reflect a more senior age group, but I can attest that I certainly got more than I needed and and even more than I hoped.