The president’s elderly stepgrandmother brought him an oxtail fly whisk, a mark of power at home in Kenya. Cousins journeyed from the South Carolina town where the first lady’s great-great-grandfather was born into slavery, while the rabbi in the family came from the synagogue where he had been commemorating Martin Luther King’s Birthday. The president and first lady’s siblings were there, too, of course: his Indonesian-American half-sister, who brought her Chinese-Canadian husband, and her brother, a black man with a white wife.
When President Barack Obama was sworn in on Tuesday, he was surrounded by an extended clan that would have shocked past generations of Americans and instantly redrew the image of a first family for future ones.
As they convened to take their family’s final step in its journey from Africa and into the White House, the group seemed as if it had stepped out of the pages of Mr. Obama’s memoir ”” no longer the disparate kin of a young man wondering how he fit in, but the embodiment of a new president’s promise of change.
For well over two centuries, the United States has been vastly more diverse than its ruling families. Now the Obama family has flipped that around, with a Technicolor cast that looks almost nothing like their overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Protestant predecessors in the role. The family that produced Barack and Michelle Obama is black and white and Asian, Christian, Muslim and Jewish. They speak English; Indonesian; French; Cantonese; German; Hebrew; African languages including Swahili, Luo and Igbo; and even a few phrases of Gullah, the Creole dialect of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Very few are wealthy, and some ”” like Sarah Obama, the stepgrandmother who only recently got electricity and running water in her metal-roofed shack ”” are quite poor.
[i]and the desegregation of one of the last divided institutions in American life: the family.[/i]
There oughta be a law.
In fact, I predict at some point that there will be a law.
[blockquote]For well over two centuries, the United States has been vastly more diverse than its ruling families.[/blockquote]
I see that the NYT has grown quite fond of hyperbole.
“Aside from a top-quality education, the new president came to politics with none of his predecessor’s advantages: no famous last name, no deep-pocketed parents to finance early forays into politics and, in fact, not much of a father at all. So Mr. Obama built his political career from scratch, with best-selling books and long-shot runs for office, leaving his relatives astonished at where he has brought them.”
For well over two centuries, the United States has been vastly more diverse than its ruling families.
Not at the state and local level. It’s been plenty diverse in major cities for quite some time.
Wonderful article!!!!
I just love what Obama’s presidency will do for the country!
I only voted for Obama because of the diversity and educational opportunities it will bring the country. In actually, Obama and I are political opposites. I am very happy about the image of the black man that he will bring the country on a daily basis. Also, the Obama family life will bring in positive black family images that will challenge white stereotypes and give direction to black families as well.
There is a point of disagreement about white ‘ruling families.’ While not diverse as Obama’s family, blacks, Hispanics and Asians have married into some of those families. Of course, those families tend to be Northeastern and Western families. Southern ruling families are probably the least diverse. However, one could make the argument that southern ruling families are the most diverse because of all the mixing that occurred in the antebellum period. The family members don’t claim each other. My father’s family is from Charleston, SC. Everyone in that city that has ancestry back into the antebellum period are all related regardless of race.
Vincent
Byzantine:
I’m sorry, but I’m confused by your comment. Surely you are not suggesting that inter-racial marriage should be outlawed?
Fr. Greg,
No I’m not. Rather, the article’s tone suggests that family is another institution in need of desegregation. I find this attitude appalling and totalitarian. That is the perverse goal of “diversity”: human bio-diversity–real diversity–is to be eliminated.
More to the point, my post is predicting that one day people will be able to file grievances against those who decline dates or marriage on racial grounds.
This article simply increased my confusion about what exactly President Obama is supposed to be symbolic of. I posted elsewhere: “OK – which is it? Are [the Obamas] ‘black Americans’ or are they ‘multi-racial’ – or are they to be all things to most people? (except perhaps to objectionable ‘white’ families, the backbone of much of American society and business for over 300 years.)
One of the many fine things about the Bushes, all of them, was that they didn’t obscure who they are, nor pretend to be anything they actually weren’t. Frankly, it seemed to me that the McCains with I-forget-how-many-total children in a blended family, their own offspring and adopted daughter represented an intentional multi-racial [b]American[/b] family firmly grounded in Christian religious values more successfully than do a gaggle of intermarried folks who call several different countries including Canada, Indonesia and Kenya their ‘homes’. Which will it be, now?”
TACit,
To be ‘Black’ in America [i]is[/i] to be multi-racial. That’s just how history worked.
#7 – I admit, I’m not sure what you are afraid of. We have far more choices about marriage than we ever have. Tribalism was the rule for most of human history. The state has minimum requirements.
[i]Tribalism was the rule for most of human history. The state has minimum requirements.[/i]
Indeed. And the easy step from there is that the backwards tribalism of the pre-State institution of Family must be replaced by the uber-tolerant multicultural State. The pre-State institutions represent a tremendous obstacle to the social engineering envisioned by the Left, and hence they have been quietly tiptoeing away from the cause of ethnic pride for some time now.
Come to think of it, this is all a bit ironic, because President Obama once broke up with a girl because she was white.
Byzantine, The nuclear family was, by and large, a construction OF the state. Families throughout history were large and more complex – and there was plenty of violence.
When the state got into the marriage business, it was to protect women and women from being abandoned. Marriage is also a cheap form of social welfare. Without the STATE enforcing the promises between two people, or the tribe enforcing it locally, marriage can be shaky.
It is, of course, the best institution for the transmission of culture and the health of children. But your instinctive bias against the state doesn’t reflect the very real involvement the state had in creating the institution itself.
The “social engineering” you speak of i more of a result of capitalism. Women an have jobs as single women, without the pressure of having to find a mate who will take care of them. They can have sex before marriage with the technology made by corporations, and sold over the market.
Although there are plenty of fringe groups that promote polyamory and the like (mormons, I guess, once did), your pedestrian leftist is agnostic about sex outside of marriage, but insists that children are had within a marriage. They prioritize marriage over, for example, abortion. They prioritize finding a good partner rather than marrying any partner. And there is an ethic of always using protection in sex outside of marriage, because they do not want to have abortions.
These are all contestable beliefs, of course, but one framework of general liberal ethics about the family and sex. And the reason for it has more to do with an openness toward technology and the market and its consequences for relationships, than any particular view of the state.