A PORTRAIT OF CHANGE
First family reflects a nation's diversity
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WASHINGTON: 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 slavery to the slave-built White House, the group seemed as if it had stepped out of the pages of Barack 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 Low Country. 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," said Maya Soetoro-Ng, the president's younger half-sister, in an interview last week. "I don't think the White House has always reflected the textures and flavors of this country."
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Though the world is recognizing the inauguration of the first African-American president, the story is a more complex narrative, about immigration, social mobility and the desegregation of one of the last divided institutions in American life: the family. It is a tale of self-determination, full of refusals to follow the tracks laid by history or religion or parentage.
Obama follows the second President George W. Bush, who had a presidential son's self-assured grip on power. 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 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.
"It is so mind-boggling that there is a black president," Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama's brother, said in an interview. "Then you layer on top of it that I am related to him? And then you layer on top of that that it's my brother-in-law? That is so overwhelming, I can't hardly think about it."
Though Barack Obama is the son of a black Kenyan father, he has some conventionally presidential roots on his white mother's side: abolitionists who, according to family legend, were chased out of Missouri, a slave state; Midwesterners who weathered the Depression; even a handful of distant ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War. (Ever since he became a United States senator, the Sons of the American Revolution has tried to recruit him. )
But far less has been known about his wife's roots — even by the first lady herself. Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, "it was sort of passed-down folklore that so-and-so was related to so-and-so and their mother and father was a slave," Robinson said.
Drawing on old census data, family records and interviews, it is clear that Michelle Obama is indeed the descendant of slaves and a daughter of the Great Migration, the mass movement of African-Americans northward in the first half of the 20th century in search of opportunity. Her family found it, but not without outsize measures of adversity and disappointment along the way.
Only five generations ago, the first lady's great-great-grandfather, Jim Robinson, was born a slave on Friendfield Plantation in Georgetown, South Carolina, where he almost certainly drained swamps, harvested rice and was buried in an unmarked grave. As a child, Michelle Obama used to visit her Georgetown relatives, but it was only during the campaign that she learned that her forebears had been enslaved in the same town where she and her cousins had played.
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