Academic

An Interracial Presidential Family

By Kevin Maillard

 From today's NY Times--wonderfully written:

In First Family, a Nation's Many Faces

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.

?Our family is new in terms of the White House, but I don?t think it?s new in terms of the country,? Maya Soetoro-Ng, the president?s younger half-sister, said last week. ?I don?t think the White House has always reflected the textures and flavors of this country.?

...

Now the Obama-Robinson family?s move to the White House seems like a symbolic end point for the once-firm idea that people of different backgrounds should not date, marry or bear children. In Mr. Obama?s lifetime, racial intermarriage not only became legal everywhere in the United States, but has started to flourish. As many as a quarter of white Americans and nearly half of black Americans belong to a multiracial family, estimates Joshua R. Goldstein of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on January 20, 2009 (boomark / email).