President Barack Obama remembered his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, as “the most generous spirit I have ever known.” In a touching article in The New York Times, we get a view of this remarkable woman who understood the beauty and strength of diversity. Having been raised in Kansas, her first husband was from Kenya and the second one from Indonesia.
Multicultural marriages are in many respects the pacesetters and molders of new cultures. It was no easy matter for a woman from Kansas to be wed to a black man in the 1960s. In many states, marriages between blacks and whites where forbidden until these laws were overturned in 1967. She died of ovarian cancer in 1995 at the age of 53.
From the article I would like to share a quote by Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, about her mother:
She felt that somehow, wandering through uncharted territory, we might stumble upon something that will, in an instant, seem to represent who we are at the core. That was very much her philosophy of life – to not be limited by fear or narrow definitions, to not build walls around ourselves and to do our best to find kinship and beauty in unexpected places.