A narrative, about immigration, social mobility and the desegregation of one of the last divided institutions in American life: the family.
The president’s elderly stepgrandmother brought him an oxtail flywhisk, a mark of power at home in Kenya. Cousins journeyed from theSouth Carolina town where the first lady’s great-great-grandfather wasborn into slavery, while the rabbi in the family came from thesynagogue where he had been commemorating Martin Luther King’sBirthday. The president and first lady’s siblings were there, too, ofcourse: his Indonesian-American half-sister, who brought herChinese-Canadian husband, and her brother, a black man with a whitewife.
When President Barack Obamawas sworn in on Tuesday, he was surrounded by an extended clan thatwould have shocked past generations of Americans and instantly redrewthe image of a first family for future ones.
As they convenedto take their family’s final step in its journey from Africa and intothe White House, the group seemed as if it had stepped out of the pagesof Mr. Obama’s memoir — no longer the disparate kin of a young manwondering how he fit in, but the embodiment of a new president’spromise of change.
For well over two centuries, the United Stateshas been vastly more diverse than its ruling families. Now the Obamafamily has flipped that around, with a Technicolor cast that looksalmost nothing like their overwhelmingly white, overwhelminglyProtestant predecessors in the role. The family that produced Barackand Michelle Obamais black and white and Asian, Christian, Muslim and Jewish. They speakEnglish; Indonesian; French; Cantonese; German; Hebrew; Africanlanguages including Swahili, Luo and Igbo; and even a few phrases ofGullah, the Creole dialect of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Very feware wealthy, and some — like Sarah Obama, the stepgrandmother who onlyrecently 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 theWhite House has always reflected the textures and flavors of thiscountry.”