Nineteen fifty-nine was the year of statehood. The next year, 1960, a Kenyan student met a Kansan one in the Russian class at the University of Hawaii. The two married—an interracial marriage illegal in two dozen states at the time—and had a son, who would grow up partly in Hawai‘i, partly in Indonesia. In typical Hawaiian fashion, his profoundly multiracial extended family would grow by marriage to incorporate African American, British, Lithuanian, Indonesian, Malaysian, and Chinese elements. And in 2009 that son, Barack Obama, would become the first black president of the United States.
