As sniping over race and identity politics threatens to engulf the U.S. Democratic presidential contest, Senator Barack Obama's multi-ethnic roots and cosmopolitan kin - including his Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law - have become part of his campaign pitch to voters. Konrad Ng, a University of Victoria- and McGill-educated film professor now living in Hawaii, is married to Obama's sister Maya Soetoro-Ng, and is part of what the White House hopeful has described as a "mini-United Nations" of family members who help shape his global perspective.
"If I am the face of American foreign policy and American power," Obama observed in a recent New York Times interview, "I think that if you can tell people, 'We have a president in the White House who still has a grandmother living in a hut on the shores of Lake Victoria and has a sister who's half-Indonesian, married to a Chinese-Canadian,' then they're going to think that he may have a better sense of what's going on in our lives and in our country. And they'd be right."
Fiery arguments over alleged race-based electoral strategies have erupted in Democratic circles after recent comments by Obama's chief rival, Senator Hillary Clinton, were slammed by some critics as giving too much credit to former president Lyndon B. Johnson - and shortchanging Martin Luther King, Jr. - for the triumph of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
Obama is the son of a black Kenyan man, Barack Obama, Sr., and a white woman from Kansas, Ann Dunham, who met at the University of Hawaii. Obama was born in Honolulu in 1961 and largely raised in the American island state.
Obama shot to national political stardom with an electrifying speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention highlighted by the line: "There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. In no other country on earth is my story even possible."
Obama's parents separated when he a boy, and his mother later married an Indonesian man, Lolo Soetoro. The family spent four years in Indonesia - where his sister, Maya Soetoro, was born - before Obama returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents and attend high school.
Obama's sister also later returned to Hawaii, where she works today as a teacher. She met Ng - who studied philosophy at McGill and cultural studies at the University of Victoria - while he was completing his PhD in political science at the University of Hawaii.
He now teaches courses on international cinema and popular culture at the university's Academy for Creative Media, and has organized film festivals and lectures exploring the Asian movie industry.
In an e-mail sent this week to Canwest News Service, Ng politely declined to answer questions about his Canadian background or to comment on Obama's presidential bid: "For now, we (the family) aren't doing international press requests until after the nomination is decided."
But Ng, who has joined his wife at Obama campaign events in Hawaii, has publicly praised his brother-in-law's cross-cultural sensitivities and grasp of international issues.
"There hasn't been a presidential candidate who understands the Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders experience as intuitively as Barack," Ng wrote in one campaign letter urging voters of Asian descent to back Obama. "I hope that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders will recognize this opportunity to support a candidate who can speak to our diverse communities and bring real and beneficial change to our country. It is time that we have someone in the White House who can do it all."
Obama also made note of his Ng's Canadian roots during a 2006 appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
"Michelle (Obama's wife) will tell you that when we get together for Christmas or Thanksgiving, it's like a little mini-United Nations ... I've got relatives that look like Bernie Mac and I've got relatives that look like Margaret Thatcher. We've got it all."
