Michelle Obama and How Genealogy Tells Us Who We Really Are

The revelation that First Lady Michelle Obama’s family history extends back to a white Georgian slaveowner and a slave returned the national spotlight to genealogy. Indeed, it casts a spotlight on the fact that underneath every celebrity, politician, and average joe is a rich story, a family history. 

 

So often we like to define ourselves and others by occupation. We introduce ourselves, "I’m a banker" or "I’m a soccer mom." Others prefer to define themselves by ethnicity. "I am Korean." "I am a Hungarian Jew." Still others pick neighborhood or socio-economic status as their identifier. But are any of these what really define us? At best, they represent a very short-term, rootless worldview. At worst, they represent a forgetting of our true roots.

 

Study after study has shown that family history has a stronger bearing on one’s development and personality than occupation, location, economic status, or even ethnicity. Not too long ago, people identified themselves as the son or daughter of their father or of the house of a certain family. They understood the link from them back to their ancestors and the value that created. It was social capital, as long as your family was respectable. In our individualist society, however, all traces of this practice are being wiped away and with it our conscious ties to the past.

 

Michelle Obama was known as the First Lady, a fierce legal practitioner, and a community organizer. Thanks to genealogy she is also now known as the successful daughter of black slaves, a symbol of the slow redemption of African Americans from the blight of slavery. What do you think drives her more or shapes her character? I’m willing to bet it’s the latter.