Lifestyle
A daughter reexamines her own family story in ‘The Mixed Marriage Project’
Dorothy Roberts (left) is the George A. Weiss university professor of law & sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her parents, Robert and Iris, married in the 1950s.
Cris Crisman/Simon & Schuster; Dorothy Roberts
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Cris Crisman/Simon & Schuster; Dorothy Roberts
Almost a decade after her father’s death, legal scholar Dorothy Roberts still had 25 boxes of his research that she had yet to sort through. When she moved from Chicago to Philadelphia, she brought the boxes — and finally opened them.
Roberts’ father, Robert Roberts, was a white anthropologist who spent his career at Roosevelt University in Chicago. The boxes contained transcripts of nearly 500 interviews he had conducted with interracial couples across the city, including interviews with couples who were married in the late 1800s, all the way to couples who are married in the 1960s.
“They were absolutely fascinating,” Roberts says of the transcripts. “I learned so much about the racial caste system in Chicago, the Color Line, the Black Belt.”
Initially, Roberts saw the project as a chance to finish her father’s work, but as she examined the documents, she learned more about her own family — including the fact that her mother, Iris, a Black Jamaican immigrant, had assisted in her husband’s research.
“When I got to the 1950s interviews, I discovered that my mother was conducting all the interviews of the wives, while my father conducted the interviews for the husbands,” Roberts says. “Finding out that my mother was involved … created curiosity I had about my family, about their marriage, and then I began to think about how it related to me and my identity as a Black girl with a white father.”
In her new book, The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family, Roberts dives into her parents’ research and her surprise at learning that she was included as participant number 224 in the files. She also shares her own thoughts on interracial relationships.
“My father thought that interracial intimacy was the instrument to end racism, and I think it’s really flipped the other way,” she says. “We end racism when we will see the possibility of truly being able to love each other as equal human beings.”
Interview highlights
The Mixed Marriage Project, by Dorothy Roberts
Simon & Schuster
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Simon & Schuster
On white European immigrant women marrying Black men in the early 20th century
These were immigrant women coming from Europe who had no familiarity at all with the racial caste system in Chicago. … So when they marry Black men, in fact, they thought that marrying an American citizen would help them assimilate into American culture. So they had no idea … that if they married a Black man, it would do the opposite to them. They would be lower in their status than they were as white immigrants. And so many of them would say, “I found out that I had to live in a colored neighborhood. I had to leave my white neighbors. I had left my family in order to marry this Black man and move into the Black Belt. I now couldn’t even tell my employer my address, because if they found out my address, they’d know I must be living with a Black man.” Why else would a white woman be living in the Black Belt?
They were afraid they would lose their jobs, and many reported that they were fired as a result of their employer finding out that they were married to a Black man. They were met with stares when they got on the streetcar. Many said that if they were going on a streetcar in Chicago, they would go on separately and pretend they didn’t know each other so that no one would know that they were married.
On the difference between her father’s and mother’s notes in the project
My father, much to my horror, was very anthropological in terms of the physical traits of the people he interviewed. He wrote about the “Negroid traits” and whether the child had any trace of “Negroid blood” and that sort of thing. Again, remembering he was doing this in the 1930s.
My mother was much more interested in the personality traits of the people she interviewed and what their furniture looked like and her own emotions. And there’s just so many delightful things. The way in which she interacts with the children when she’s interviewing the wives — there’s a lot more attention to what the children are doing. I can’t remember a single interview where my father really describes the children’s behavior. He describes their physical appearance, but my mother would describe their behavior and their interaction with the mother. All of that is part of the interview and her notes, and she writes it almost like a screenplay. It’s really, really wonderful to read.
On the fetishization of interracial intimacy and biracial children
There was this visceral feeling I felt whenever a Black man, a Black husband, would talk about his preference for being with white women. These ideas that interracial intimacy has an extra excitement to it. It has an extra titillation to it — that kind of idea came up in many of the interviews — and I just have a very visceral revulsion at that kind idea, a sort of a fetishization of interracial intimacy and also of biracial children. The idea that whitening children makes them more attractive or makes them more intelligent or more appealing, more lovable. And whenever that came up, I just, sometimes I had to just throw the interview down because I couldn’t stand that kind of thinking.
On her decision to identify as Black in college and hide her dad’s whiteness
I now regret that I hid the fact that my father was white, that I denied him that part of my identity or denied the reality that he was part of my identity. … I think I very wrongly believed that if they knew my father was white, I somehow wouldn’t be as much an integral part of these groups, that they might feel differently about me. …
I realized by the end of working on the memoir that I am a Black woman with a white father [and] I should not deny all that my father contributed to my identity. I would not be the Black woman I am today, I probably would not have done the work against racism and against the demeaning of Black women, I would have not done the [work] to uplift Black women if it weren’t for my father and all that he taught me. And I need to appreciate and acknowledge all that my father contributed to the Black woman I am today.
On what this project has taught her about love and race
It showed me more powerfully than anything I’d ever read before how the invention of race, the lie that human beings are naturally divided into races, can erase the very ties of family. … In my own case, my father’s younger brother, my uncle Edward, disowned him when he married my mother. And even though he lived in the Chicago area and I had cousins who lived there, I never met them because of this rift, this divide between my father and his brother.
Working on the memoir also made me realize that all the work I’ve been doing throughout my career was trying to answer this question of, what does it take to love across the chasm of race? That’s what these couples are telling us, even the ones who were still racist. … They’re telling us what it takes to challenge and dismantle structural racism in America. And so, to me, these interviews persuaded me even more that we can believe in our common humanity. We can overcome the seemingly unbreakable, unshakable shackles of structural racism. But it can’t be simply by pretending that the sentiment of love or even loving someone across the racial lines will do it. We have to see the work that it’s going to take to do that.
Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
Correspondents of CBS’ 60 Minutes pose for a portrait in 2023. From left to right, they are Sharyn Alfonsi, L. Jon Wertheim, Bill Whitaker, Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley, Cecilia Vega, and Anderson Cooper. Former Executive Producer Bill Owens sits on the far right. Only Wertheim, Whitaker and Stahl remain at the program.
CBS Photo Archive/CBS via Getty Images/CBS
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When CBS fired Scott Pelley on Tuesday night, the new 60 Minutes executive producer, Nick Bilton, told Pelley it was for insubordination at a staff meeting the day before.
The veteran correspondent argues he was defending the DNA of 60 Minutes and the integrity of its journalism.
The battle royale over the network’s most prestigious and profitable news program is part of a broader fight over the direction of CBS News.
And given CBS’s acquisition by a billionaire family whose business interests have become intertwined with the political interests of President Trump, it reflects a larger war over control of the media in the current moment.
That father and son, Larry and David Ellison, bought CBS’ parent company, Paramount, last summer. In January, they became co-owners of TikTok’s U.S. operations. Now they’re seeking approval from Trump’s regulators to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN.
A glamorous show shorn, for now, of most its stars
CBS fired Cecilia Vega, a correspondent, and Tanya Simon, the executive producer, from 60 Minutes last week. They are shown in this photo at the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on April 25, 2026 in Washington, D.C.
Kristina Bumphrey/Variety via Getty Images/Variety
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Kristina Bumphrey/Variety via Getty Images/Variety
But the specifics of this individual episode matter — for 60 Minutes, CBS, its audience of millions, and even the news business itself.
The program has been the most glamorous post in broadcast news. The correspondents are the stars of the show. And now, there are just three of them.
Anderson Cooper left last month, concerned over the direction of the network’s coverage. Last week was a virtual bloodbath: correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi were fired. So were a producer and two show executives — including Tanya Simon, a longtime staffer who had stepped up as executive producer when her predecessor resigned in protest before the Ellisons’ takeover.
With Pelley’s ouster, only correspondents Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim remain. Now they are considering whether to resign, according to two associates with knowledge.
Their brand-new boss, Bilton, was previously a tech reporter for The New York Times and an investigative reporter for Vanity Fair. He executive-produced a documentary for Netflix about a couple accused of laundering Bitcoin and has been a producer on several other films.
Notably, he has no experience in television news.
Neither does Bari Weiss, whom David Ellison installed as the network’s editor in chief last October. The Ellisons also bought her center-right views-and-news site, The Free Press.
She has maintained that the network of Walter Cronkite needs a makeover for the digital moment. She has also contended for years that CBS, along with the rest of mainstream media, is too reflexively anti-Trump, anti-Israel, and too woke.
A rejection of CBS News executives’ overtures
The new executive producer of 60 Minutes, Nick Bilton, has been a tech journalist and documentary filmmaker, but lacks experience in broadcast news.
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
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Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
Bilton attempted to set a conciliatory tone at Monday’s meeting — his first with the show. Pelley, a formidable veteran correspondent and former CBS Evening News anchor, wasn’t having it.
Pelley called Bilton unwelcome and unqualified. And Pelley said that Weiss was attempting to “murder” the program.
In firing Pelley on Tuesday, Bilton said the journalist had hijacked the meeting and rejected overtures to work constructively through their differences. (NPR obtained a copy of the firing notice.) Bilton wrote that Pelley’s “antipathy to the future of the show came through loud and clear.”
In his own statement late Tuesday evening, shared with NPR, Pelley accused CBS’s new news leadership of killing 60 Minutes‘ DNA and pushing him “to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story” and “to include assertions that are unverified.”
The accusations, to which CBS has not yet responded, echo those made by Alfonsi and Vega, the two correspondents fired last week.
Earlier this year, Alfonsi publicly complained after Weiss held one of her stories at the last minute, and kept it frozen for weeks, demanding an on-camera interview with a Trump White House official that never played out. It ran, unchanged from the intended version, with additional statements from the administration tacked on to the end.
After being fired, Vega said in a statement obtained by NPR that her team had “experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories.”
“Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both censorship and self-driven” Vega continued. “It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.”
Weiss previously rejected Alfonsi’s and Vega’s allegations. (CBS said Vega’s claims, for example, were “not based in reality” while expressing appreciation for her work.)
Weiss and Bilton say digital threat requires a 60 Minutes overhaul now
In a meeting this morning, Weiss said that Pelley chose his own path — that is, to be fired rather than to find a way to work through his concerns, according to attendees. The network and Weiss have not yet publicly addressed Pelley’s accusations of interference.
Bilton and Weiss say they respect the show’s traditions, its accomplishments and its legacy of enterprise reporting, extended interviews and visual storytelling. It rose in the ratings 9% over the past season under Simon.
The two news leaders say, however, 60 Minutes needs to be overhauled before it becomes increasingly irrelevant in the era of streamers and other sources of news, information and entertainment in the digital age.
Interviews with 12 current and former CBS News staffers, from producers to executives, suggest great reservations and suspicions remain about Weiss’ judgment and her ability to handle the prominent and even famous journalists on whom her division relies.
Weiss had initially sought to reinvent the CBS Evening News, dropping a two-anchor format that had sagged in the ratings. Cooper turned down Weiss’ overtures to anchor it and left the network altogether, concerned about her approach, according to associates. (They spoke on condition of anonymity because Cooper has not chosen to speak publicly on the matter.)
David Ellison became chairman and CEO of CBS’ parent company, Paramount, after buying it last year.
Noam Galai/Getty Images for Paramount/Getty Images North America
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Noam Galai/Getty Images for Paramount/Getty Images North America
The ratings have continued to sag under new anchor Tony Dokoupil. And some CBS journalists, including producers who have left the Evening News, have publicly accused Weiss of making editorial decisions driven by politics. She has rejected those claims.
The decision to take on overhauling two key shows — one listing, one highly profitable, both high profile — carries significant risks for Weiss and the network, even apart from other considerations.
But the Ellisons’ presence cannot be ignored.
When Shari Redstone was negotiating the sale of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, to the Ellisons’ Skydance Media last year, the network announced the end of Stephen Colbert’s late night show. He had been one of the president’s most biting and acerbic critics.
David Ellison also made a series of concessions directly to Trump’s chief broadcast regulator, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, gutting CBS’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and appointing a conservative ombudsman to field complaints of bias against its news reporting.
Carr and other regulators approved the Paramount deal last summer.
The accommodations echo those made by other media titans.
Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos remade the editorial pages of the Washington Post, which he owns, into a far more hospitable zone for Trump at the outset of his second term. So did Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a noted medical device inventor. Amazon and Blue Origin have multi-billion dollar contracts with the federal government. Soon-Shiong’s medical research firm routinely has patent applications up for review with federal regulators. One was approved Tuesday.
The Ellisons are hoping to win approval from federal regulators next month for their purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal valued at more than $110 billion. It would include Warner Bros. Studio, HBO and CNN, among other properties.
As Weiss routs CBS News’ old guard, the question of what role she might play at CNN — and what changes that portends at CBS — hangs over journalists at the two networks. The fate of 60 Minutes serves as a high-stakes case study for both.
Lifestyle
Vintage-obsessed millennial parents are driving L.A.’s booming kids’ clothing resale market
Kids’ vintage clothing sales are experiencing a remarkable boom at in-person markets and online, where prices for clothes for little ones have shot up on websites including Depop and Poshmark. Millennial parents are looking to outfit their kids in the clothes and TV and film characters they loved (or coveted) when they were kids.
The result? There’s a new generation of kiddos hitting the playground looking incredibly cool. Take Amari Case, a SoCal toddler who spent a Sunday afternoon this spring ambling around a vintage market in a West Hollywood warehouse clad in baggy jeans and a ’90s-era tee emblazoned with the “Dragon Ball Z” character Son Goku.
When she wasn’t scribbling on a Lorax coloring sheet, she’d been cruising around the market with her dad, Aaron Munoz Case, snapping up new pieces destined to make her the flyest kid at the preschool playground.
Neil Wright, from left, Kristine Nite Scalzo and Brandon Rosenblatt, co-founders of Elemeno Kids Vintage Market.
Showing off Amari’s new vintage satin L.A. Raiders jacket and tiny teal Grant Hill Detroit Pistons jersey, Munoz Case, who was also impeccably dressed, noted that while Amari went through a phase at about 18 months where she wanted to dress herself, eventually she gave up and went back to letting her dripped-out dad dictate her wardrobe.
Munoz Case found Amari’s first vintage piece at the Rose Bowl Flea Market and got the bug, going back every month to pick up something to add to his little’s wardrobe.
Trendspotters and researchers say Munoz Case isn’t alone in his quest. The market for kids’ vintage clothing has heated up precipitously over the last few years, perhaps hitting a boiling point in January when an Eeyore romper from the ’90s sold for over $3,000 on EBay. (It was new with tags, but one without tags still went for almost a grand about a month later.)
The thirst for tiny throwbacks is so popular that first-ever, all-kids market Elemeno — named after the “L-M-N-O” bit of “The Alphabet Song” and where Amari was toddling and shopping — drew 17 vendors and over 2,000 attendees over a single weekend in March. (There are plans for another Elemeno Kids Vintage Market pop-up later this year in New York, as well as plans to bring the event back to L.A. sometime next year.)
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1. Cameron Scalzo, wearing a vintage McDonald’s T-shirt from the ‘90s, and mom Kristine Nite Scalzo. 2. Cameron Scalzo rocks an Avirex jacket from the ‘90s.
Eye Speak Vintage’s Kristine Nite Scalzo, who co-organized the event and is opening an all-kids vintage store in Pasadena this month, says she fell under the kids vintage spell in 2020 when she was pregnant with her son. She’d always been a vintage shopper for herself, so she knew she wanted to pass the passion down to the next generation. She started filling up her son’s closet, and soon enough, she found herself selling her other finds out of a bodega in her garage.
She has a by-appointment space in Pasadena now, where she draws everyone from Rihanna’s stylist to out-of-town moms who make a point to stop by on their way to Disneyland. “The community around kids vintage has really skyrocketed on Instagram over the past six years,” Scalzo says. “We want to know who we’re buying from. We want to know that we’re doing good with buying secondhand. And it’s a hobby for people that can turn into a possible business on the side. Because knowing there’s a big group that’s interested in vintage kids clothes, you can always pass an item [your kid outgrows] to someone else or resell it.”
Scalzo says some parents are out digging through bins at the Goodwill Outlet looking for the perfect piece, while others are content to pay up for, say, a ’90s Simpsons T-shirt or a mini-size Harley-Davidson jacket. Scouring the racks at the Elemeno market, most pieces cost $15 to $40, though there were special pieces pulled to the side in some booths with price tags that could make a parent’s eyes pop. (Think $275 for a set of well-worn Spider-Man overalls from the ’00s or $150 for a pair of Cross Colours denim shorts from the ’90s.)
In kids and adult vintage alike, mint condition is highly valued. No matter the era in which they were raised, kids tend to be messy. They get strawberry juice on their shirts or scuff up the knees on their Bugle Boy jeans. Vintage kids clothes that look pristine are more expensive, and while plain kids clothes do sell, items with characters on them or cool prints tend to draw more attention and dollars.
Brandon Rosenblatt, another of the Elemeno organizers, says he’s had his eye on a specific kids “Back to the Future” shirt for some time, but notes that it typically sells for about $1,000. He’s partial to McKids clothes for his daughter, from McDonald’s short-lived kids clothing brand, noting that he’s even snagged her a vintage official McDonald’s-themed aloha shirt from Hawaii, something he says he’s never seen anywhere else.
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1. Siblings Amora and Milo Castilo wear vintage cowboy hats, jackets and chaps. 2. Thalia Castilo and her kids Amora and Milo.
Other collectors, he says, might be a little less obscure, leaning into mainstream characters such as Strawberry Shortcake or from ’80s and ’90s properties including “The Land Before Time” and “Rugrats.”
“A lot of millennials are having kids — like everyone who’s in their 30s and 40s — and they all want to put their kids in the same IP they grew up in,” Rosenblatt says.
“It’s the thrill of the hunt that gets everyone so excited,” Scalzo says. “Once you find that perfect nostalgic piece, you’re like ‘Holy s—,’ and you just want to chase that feeling again and again.”
Mia De La Rosa, a reseller who was at the Elemeno market, says that like Scalzo, she started buying kids vintage clothes when she was pregnant with her daughter, Liv, who’s 6 now, very into everything on PBS Kids and has a closet full of thrifted vintage garb covered in characters such as D.W., the annoying little sister from the ’90s show “Arthur.”
Everything Liv wears is “completely her style,” De La Rosa says. “She dresses herself every day and she gets compliments on what she’s wearing at school all the time.”
Other vintage-wearing kids — and in particular younger ones — might simply be sporting what their parents like or might just like the look of the shirt even if they don’t know what it’s advertising. (An 8-year-old boy at the Elemeno market, for instance, chose to wear a pristine T-shirt highlighting the ’90s Jim Carrey movie “The Mask” because it featured his favorite color: green.)
Derrick Broaster, a vintage enthusiast turned full-time reseller, says that while he chooses to put himself in clothes from the ’60s and ’70s, he outfits his two sons in clothes from the 2000s. (“How Bow Wow used to dress when he was a kid,” he says.)
Although his younger son tends to rebel against Broaster’s vintage picks, opting for whatever Spider-Man shoes happen to be in his eyeline, his older son has leaned in, letting his dad advise him on what vintage pieces could work and what would be the most stylish.
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1. Julian, left, and Javier Gutierrez show off their vintage clothing. Javier says his mom always tells him to keep his vintage outfits clean. 2. Mom Priscilla Guzman, clockwise, Dad Javier Gutierrez and sons Julian and Javier Gutierrez enjoy the vibe of vintage clothing. Guzman says she’s been buying and selling kids’ vintage since her oldest son was born eight years ago.
Rosenblatt says a good portion of what vintage finds he sees in the market now has returned to the U.S. from places in Central America and South America or Asia where those pieces were likely sent decades ago after they were donated or given away.
“There’s a real underbelly of this vintage game with rag houses getting access to bulk product overseas and letting people sort through it,” he says. “There are companies now that rip through 20, 30 or 40,000 pieces of vintage clothing a week. It’s a really interesting ecosystem.”
For many kids vintage sellers, finding their stock is just as fun and interesting as getting it back into consumers’ hands. “Anywhere we can find clothes, we’re there,” says Matthew Carlos, owner of Long Gone Youth. He started selling vintage clothes 11 years ago, when he was 15, switched to kids vintage at 20 and has spent the last six years scouring flea markets, websites and swap meets.
“The kids market is definitely growing,” he says, “but I still feel like we haven’t even gotten close to where we can go. It’s just getting popular now, but the more events [like Elemeno] we can do, the more it’ll go mainstream.” Even now, some major brands like Gap and OshKosh B’gosh have recognized the interest in some of their styles from the ’80s and ’90s, moving to re-release the looks in limited runs.
Jackie and Frank Oropeza with daughter Rumi Mae shop at Elemeno Kids Vintage Market.
Kids resale is also leaning into streetwear culture. Rosenblatt, who worked in the streetwear industry, says that he’s noticed that a good portion of those interested in kids vintage — particularly, male shoppers — tend to be fans of streetwear brands like Supreme, Fear of God Essentials and Bape. At Elemeno, for instance, a good portion of the parents we saw pushing strollers were well-dressed dads seemingly on solo missions, something you don’t always see at kid-centric events.
“I just want my son to feel like I did as a kid,” said Justin Nguyen, while watching his toddler, Jayden, play with bubbles. “I want him to be happy, carefree and joyful, and I want to be able to spend time with him. My mom and dad were always working, even on the weekends. Now that I’m a dad, taking my son out on weekends to do stuff like this just seems like a blessing.”
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