NYT on Mrs. Obama's genealogy
This is American history. This is the history that gets left in the dusty and dingy rooms of courthouses all around the country. I learned more--or at least I learned to ask more-- about this country because I've seen the U.S. Census schedules, deeds, wills, order books, chancery orders and a sundry of other records. I learned more--and still have much much more to learn--than I did in text books or sitting in classrooms. I learned the unofficial history of this country through its people and the records that their lives and deaths created.
Advertisement
delightful, just delightful
October 8, 2009 12:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
I just read it before seeing your blog! How amazing...the great, great, great granddaughter of a slave is now the First Lady of the United States.
It gives me chills.
October 8, 2009 12:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
When the president and not the first lady is the descendant of slaves, that will be the day we can say there has really been change.
October 8, 2009 4:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks 1849! Great stuff as usual!
This demonstrates the power of ancestry and knowing one's genealogy.
October 8, 2009 1:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
This story really is empowering.
October 8, 2009 12:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Terrific. Thanks for posting!
Rec'd!
October 8, 2009 2:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
Anything can happen in this country of ours.
October 8, 2009 2:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
As Mrs. Holt says, "Praise God, we’ve come a long way."
I wonder if she and Mrs. Obama will meet? I hope so.
October 8, 2009 6:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
Joe Johns did a similar report for CNN in July 2009.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/07/16/michelle.obama.slaveroots/index.html?iref=newssearch
October 8, 2009 9:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I do have one pretty big objection to this, though:
"the complicated history of racial intermingling, sometimes born of violence or coercion, that lingers in the bloodlines of many African-Americans"
Newsflash NYTimes: it ain't just African-American bloodlines that are "intermingled" due to "violence and coercion." This just perpetuates the myth that whites have somehow managed not to pollute their "pure" white blood with black and Native American blood over our history.
October 8, 2009 12:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
That is a very good point. I tried with subtlest stroke to illuminate this point in a blog that I wrote this past September.
October 8, 2009 1:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
When is one pure white?
According to the Nazis, the Slavs were an inferior race, yet racism runs rampant in Eastern Europe. They go to great lengths to identify the characteristics of every ethnic variable and vigorously question whether one is true to the ethnicity to which one espouses themselves to be part. This is not unlike the current suggestion that questions who are real Americans. When all is said and done, there is no standard, only the fabrication of argument from nothing that attempts to put one person above another.
October 8, 2009 1:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Another interesting story about family history.
October 8, 2009 4:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
What I found fascinating about the NYT article is discovering that the first lady's family has been iron disciplined, "middle class" since the very moment they stopped being slaves (maybe even before). I find her "story" infinitely more interesting then her husband's.
October 8, 2009 4:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
"I find her "story" infinitely more interesting then her husband's."
You cannot be serious. Unless you find the mere existence of a stable, middle class black family to be remarkable.
October 8, 2009 6:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
More great family history items from you, 1849. Don't ever stop. I don't know why, but even though I love history generally, family histories are really compelling to me. Perhaps it's because family histories filter the past with different sieves than does academic history. Thus is it always fresh and anti-ideological.
But here is what I remembered while reading your blog. On November 17, 1962 I was living in SF - corner of Page & Schrader in the Hashbury, when the New Yorker issue hit the stands that contained James Baldwin's milestone essay "Letter from a Region of My Mind." Word travels fast in the City, and by 9:00 am you couldn't find a copy of that issue anywhere - sold out. I got word of it via my roommate's mom, who was running the Minorities Employment Division of the CA Department of Employment at the time. She knew it was sold out, so she had photocopied it for us, and ordered us down to her office to pick it up. She said every civil servant in the State went ape-shit over the essay...it was that important. The New Yorker web site has it on-line for subscribers only - imagine, they're still making bucks on it after all these years.
I think it was a milestone of US literature - nothing like that had ever been written like that before - at least in the msm. I haven't read it in years, but one passage that stands out in my memory was Baldwin's treatment of "sentimentalism." I was an art student at City College at the time, so sentimental art was a topic of keen interest to me. I knew I hate it, but I didn't have the vocabulary to understand why. Baldwin approached to topic in the context of a critique of Harriet Beecher Stowe - specifically "Uncle Tom's Cabin." In so many words, much more eloquent than I could ever write, he said that the "sentimental" is always an alibi for something deeply evil - a cover up - a way of making the unacceptable acceptable. Powerful stuff, and very timely. At that point in the history of the Civil Rights movement, at least in California, many young Black intellectuals were growing suspicious of the motives of the very large support squadrons of non-black liberals. I wouldn't call it "deeply evil" but rather that it was the implicit message iberals projected that "yes, we'll have equal rights, and you can be just like me." James Baldwin certainly wasn't sweeping the path for that kind of a program.
October 8, 2009 6:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
A follow-up in the New York Times column, Room for Debate:
October 8, 2009 10:13 PM | Reply | Permalink