ON OBAMA'S FAMILY

"So there I was, a couple of weeks back, sitting under a mango tree in western Kenya, when Senator Barack Obama’s half-sister Auma says to me:
'My daughter’s father is British. My mom’s brother is married to a Russian. I have a brother in China engaged to a Chinese woman.'
My understanding is that this half brother living in China is Mark. He’s the son of Obama’s father and an American woman named Ruth, whom Obama Sr. met while at Harvard in the 1960s and brought back to Kenya.
That was after his marriage with Obama’s mother in Hawaii ended. Another son from the union with Ruth, called David, was killed in a motorcycle accident. In all, Obama Sr. fathered eight children by four women.
I’ve been thinking about this because not enough has been written about Obama’s family. As Auma suggested, it’s unusual in the extent of its continent-crossing, religion-melding, color-fusing richness. But the Benetton-ad family is less unusual than it may seem. This is the age of globalized, far-flung families. Remittances make the world go round.
More needs to be written because if Obama gets the Democratic nomination, you know the Republican attack machine, through innuendo and otherwise, will go after his identity, just as it went after Senator John Kerry’s in 2004."

{Keep reading here}

"So there I was, a couple of weeks back, sitting under a mango tree in western Kenya, when Senator Barack Obama’s half-sister Auma says to me:
'My daughter’s father is British. My mom’s brother is married to a Russian. I have a brother in China engaged to a Chinese woman.'
My understanding is that this half brother living in China is Mark. He’s the son of Obama’s father and an American woman named Ruth, whom Obama Sr. met while at Harvard in the 1960s and brought back to Kenya.
That was after his marriage with Obama’s mother in Hawaii ended. Another son from the union with Ruth, called David, was killed in a motorcycle accident. In all, Obama Sr. fathered eight children by four women.
I’ve been thinking about this because not enough has been written about Obama’s family. As Auma suggested, it’s unusual in the extent of its continent-crossing, religion-melding, color-fusing richness. But the Benetton-ad family is less unusual than it may seem. This is the age of globalized, far-flung families. Remittances make the world go round.
More needs to be written because if Obama gets the Democratic nomination, you know the Republican attack machine, through innuendo and otherwise, will go after his identity, just as it went after Senator John Kerry’s in 2004."

{Keep reading here}