First Lady Michelle Obama’s First 100 Days

AP
WASHINGTON – The 21 women nervously mingling at the White House were among the best in their fields.

They had achieved Olympic gold, Grammy awards and four stars in the Army. One had orbited the earth aboard space shuttle Endeavour. Some had reached the highest outposts of corporate America, or had earned kudos on stage or on the big screen.

They were together for one reason: Michelle Obama.

As a candidate’s wife, as it became increasingly clear Barack Obama might win the presidency, she had dreamed about a day like this, when she could bring together such a talented group and send them off to give pep talks to kids in the public schools.

As first lady, she realized she could make it happen.

“I couldn’t have imagined this a year ago,” Mrs. Obama said. She was speaking one morning last month to the other high achievers she had invited to the blue-and-yellow Diplomatic Reception Room in the basement of the White House.

Something else seemed unimaginable a year ago, too.

Who would ever have thought that Michelle Obama would be transformed from a potential campaign liability into America’s newest sweetheart and No. 1 cover girl, every bit as popular as her husband.

Michelle Obama’s first 100 days in the White House really began more than 365 days ago in Wisconsin.

Rallying an audience in Milwaukee, she said: “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country.” She explained that she was proud of the people who’d gotten involved in politics, but that’s not what her critics heard.

They said the comment proved she hated America. They portrayed her as the stereotypical angry black woman. Fox News Channel talked of the “terrorist fist jab” she and her husband shared the night he clinched the Democratic presidential nomination. The New Yorker, making fun of the people making fun of her, sketched Mrs. Obama on its cover in an afro and militant garb.

It was a dark time in the many months she had spent campaigning. Yet it was a teachable moment, too.

Mrs. Obama learned from her mistake.

And in the months since, she has gone from lightning rod to rock star, from the cover of The New Yorker to the cover of Vogue, from just plain fashionable to worldwide fashion icon.

She is popular as the president, maybe more. Depending on the poll, she has approval ratings in the 60s and 70s. Practically the only issue being debated these days, silly as it seems, is whether she goes sleeveless too much and for the wrong occasions.

It’s not unusual for a first lady to be more popular than the president, but that usually happens further along. That it has happened so quickly for Mrs. Obama says a lot about how perceptions of her have changed.

“If you had told me a year ago that she would attain this kind of popularity I would have said, ‘No way,’” said Myra Gutin, a professor at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., who studies first ladies. “She’s really reversed things in a way that no one would ever have expected.”

Maybe it’s the three F’s: family, food and fashion. And a queen.

Americans mostly see their first ladies as wives and mothers, so how could anyone object whenever Mrs. Obama said she wanted to be “mom in chief” to her 10- and 7-year-old daughters, Malia and Sasha?

She worried openly about moving them to the White House. Getting them settled was her top priority.

The public now sees she meant what she said.

The girls got an elaborate swing set, right outside dad’s Oval Office window. A new garden on the South Lawn will supply them with fresh fruit and vegetables. The promised puppy, a Portuguese water dog named Bo, recently arrived. Mrs. Obama returned early from her husband’s first European trip to be home when the girls started a new school week.

In the eyes of many people, the image of an angry woman was transformed into one of a happy, doting mother.

Once in the White House, Mrs. Obama quickly was out the door and running on a bunch of issues, all of them very traditional, first ladylike and unlikely to upset the public.

She dashed around from one government agency to another, thanking often-criticized civil service employees for their work and plugging the president’s $787 billion economic stimulus package.

She got beyond official Washington, too — touring a neighborhood social services center, reading to little kids, serving mushroom risotto at a soup kitchen. She gave pep talks to high school students and dirtied her hands in the garden.

In Europe, she caused a media frenzy, not as much for where she went or with whom she met or for what she said, but for the outfits she wore to meet the British prime minister, the queen of England and the French president and his wife, a former fashion model.

Some of the clothes she wears sell out immediately after aides say where she got them. Numerous Web sites dissect and analyze her style; at least one is posting photos of every outfit she wears in public.

In London, she alone drew a rare, and much talked about, public display of affection from Queen Elizabeth II.

At a reception for world leaders attending the G-20 economic summit, Her Majesty draped an arm across the first lady’s back. Mrs. Obama returned the gesture, sparking endless discussion about whether it was wrong of her to touch the queen.

But the embrace also was a symbol of just how far Michelle Obama’s transformation had taken her. By getting a touch from the queen, she pulled off something few others have.

Mrs. Obama organized her own kind of G-20 summit at the White House last month, with an all-female cast ranging from singer Alicia Keys to actress Fran Drescher to astronaut Mae Jemison.

The assignment was to go out and inspire young people. Girls, especially.

Getting them to see their potential wasn’t something Mrs. Obama talked about on the campaign trail. The pep talks came after she realized the role model and source of inspiration she had become for so many.

“Nothing in my life’s path would have predicted that I’d be standing here as the first African-American first lady of the United States of America,” she told an audience of schoolgirls in London. “If you want to know the reason why I’m standing here, it’s because of education.”

It’s a simple pitch, and it’s the same whether she is talking to students in D.C. or England.

She was in their shoes once, but she liked going to school, she liked being smart, she liked getting A’s. She worked hard to get ahead and to prove the people who doubted her wrong. She tells students they can do the same.

Laura Bush says she wished she’d realized earlier the power she had as first lady.

Michelle Obama’s journey has already gotten her to that point, and she sees what she can accomplish.

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Ernie Barnes Dies at 70; Pro Football Player, Successful Painter

The official artist of the 1984 Olympics in L.A. created powerful portraits of agility, strength and the emotional costs of fierce competition. He also depicted black culture and daily life.
By Elaine Woo
6:54 PM PDT, April 29, 2009

Ernie Barnes, a former professional football player who became a successful figurative painter, known for depictions of athletes and ordinary people whose muscled, elongated forms express physical and spiritual struggles, died Monday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 70.

His death was caused by complications of a rare blood disorder, according to his longtime assistant, Luz Rodriguez.

Barnes was a child of the segregated South who transcended racial barriers to play for the Denver Broncos and San Diego Chargers before pursuing his real dream: to be an artist. He became the official artist of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, whose insights from his trials on the gridiron resulted in powerful, sometimes haunting portraits of agility, strength and the emotional costs of fierce competition.

His style, which critics have described as neo-Mannerist, became familiar to a prime-time television audience in the mid-1970s when producer Norman Lear hired Barnes to “ghost” the paintings by the Jimmie Walker character “J.J.” in the groundbreaking African American sitcom “Good Times.”

As the backdrop for the show’s closing credits, Lear used Barnes’ 1971 painting “Sugar Shack,” his most famous work. Singer Marvin Gaye later adapted the painting as the cover art for his 1976 album, “I Want You.”

“Sugar Shack” shows a Brueghel-like mass of bodies, writhing and jumping to the rhythms in a black jazz club. There is joy, tension and despair in the canvas, which Barnes once said was inspired by a memory of being barred from attending a dance when he was a child. As in nearly all of his paintings, the subjects’ eyes are closed, a reflection of the artist’s oft-stated belief that “we are blind to each other’s humanity.”

Singer-songwriter Bill Withers, who was close to Barnes during the last decade of his life, said the artist often spoke of wanting to educate people through his art.

“He meant getting people to look past the superficial into the real vulnerable parts of themselves,” said Withers, for whom Barnes completed his last major commission, a painting inspired by Withers’ 1971 hit “Grandma’s Hands.” “He wanted to help people peel away that layer of protection that we all wear to ward off any intrusion into our real private thoughts. He didn’t mind people looking deeper into him. I found that fascinating.”

Barnes was born into a working-class family in Durham, N.C., on July 15, 1938. His father was a shipping clerk for a large tobacco company, and his mother was a domestic for a wealthy attorney. She brought home books and records that her employer no longer wanted and used them to broaden the cultural horizons of her three sons. She encouraged them to draw pictures from their imaginations, instead of using coloring books. The shy and overweight Ernie began drawing to escape from the taunts of his schoolmates.

He was still chubbier than most kids when he reached high school, but a teacher there helped him turn his size into advantage. He started lifting weights, lost his extra pounds and began excelling on the playing field. He became captain of the football team and by graduation had scholarship offers from 26 colleges.

He chose North Carolina College (now North Carolina Central University), a historically black institution in Durham, where he played football and majored in art. He left before graduating in 1960 to turn pro. A 6-foot-3, 250-pound offensive guard, he played for a succession of American Football League teams, including the Chargers and the Broncos, for the next five years.

He had kept up with his art when he was playing football, sketching fellow players, who nicknamed him “Big Rembrandt.” With little money and a family to support when he left the game, he took a gamble and flew to Los Angeles with several of his canvases and carried them on foot several miles to the office of Chargers co-owner Barron Hilton, who paid him $1,000 for a painting.

After a brief stint as the AFL’s official artist, he met with New York Jets owner Sonny Werblin, who offered to pay him $15,500 — $1,000 more than Barnes had earned in his last season in football — to develop his skills as a painter for a year. Werblin was so impressed with Barnes’ work that he arranged a showing for critics at a New York gallery. Some critics compared him to George Bellows, the American painter known for his masterful depictions of boxers in the ring.

Soon Barnes was winning commissions from entertainers such as Harry Belafonte, Flip Wilson and Charlton Heston. His works from this period were often commentaries on the brutality of professional football, depicting players with fangs and other grotesque features. “I was reaching for the absurdity of what men can be turned into with football as an excuse,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1984.

Other paintings captured the powerful grace of youths playing pickup basketball and the exhaustion of a runner after a race. His series of Olympics posters were “the finest, most effective and moving tribute to the Olympics since the Greeks stopped painting their athletes . . . on black or red grounds,” critic Frank Getlein wrote in a 1989 essay.

Barnes began to expand his subject matter in the early 1970s when he moved to the Fairfax district of Los Angeles. Observing the tight-knit Jewish neighborhood provoked in him a new awareness of black culture and everyday life, reflected in “Sugar Shack” and a traveling exhibition called “The Beauty of the Ghetto.” One of the stops on the tour was the North Carolina Museum of Art, where years earlier a museum docent had told Barnes “that black people didn’t express themselves as artists.”

A longtime resident of Studio City, Barnes, who was married three times, is survived by his wife of 25 years, Bernie; five children, Sean, Deidre, Erin and Paige, all of Los Angeles, and Michael of Virginia Beach, Va.; and a brother, James, of Durham.

A private memorial service will be held at a later date. Memorial donations may be sent to Hillsides Home for Children, 940 Avenue 64, Pasadena, CA 91105.

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For Specter, It’s Full Circle

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009

When Arlen Specter ran for Philadelphia district attorney in 1965, he proudly proclaimed himself a “Kennedy Democrat” and said he was running as a Republican to take on what he saw as the corruption of the city’s then-legendary Democratic machine.

Forty-four years later, Arlen Specter has come full circle.

In announcing his switch to the Democratic Party Tuesday, the maverick Pennsylvanian was doing more than trying to save a political career jeopardized by the increasing conservatism of the Republican Party. He was also ratifying a decisive shift in American politics.

The GOP in his home state had once been a bastion of moderates and liberals including William Scranton, Hugh Scott and Richard Schweiker. In the age of Barack Obama, Republicans of that stripe are flooding into the Democratic Party. Specter is not a leading indicator. His conversion is the culmination of an inexorable trend.

In a sense, Specter’s departure is a victory for conservatives who, since the days of Barry Goldwater, have been intent on purging liberals from the GOP. The raw political fact is that Specter was in grave danger of losing a Republican primary to former representative Pat Toomey, an anti-tax activist. One Democratic strategist reported seeing polling that showed Specter less popular among Pennsylvania Republicans than President Obama.

Conservatives had once hoped that creating an ideologically pure party would put them on the path to a majority. But they must now worry that the Republicans’ continued rightward drift is putting the party at odds with a moderate to liberal mood that pervades the country almost everywhere outside the Deep South. And Specter’s switch would give the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, assuming that Minnesota’s Al Franken eventually takes the seat for which he leads after an extended recount.

At the instant of his conversion, Specter transformed himself from a political underdog into a favorite for reelection in 2010. That’s because Pennsylvania became far more Democratic in the final years of George W. Bush’s presidency. In 2004, Democrat John Kerry carried the state by roughly 144,000 votes. Barack Obama’s margin in 2008 was more than 620,000. According to the network exit polls, Democrats went from a two-point advantage in party identification in 2004 to a seven-point lead in 2008.

Reflecting a trend across the Northeast and Midwest, Democrats have posted especially strong gains in the suburbs, particularly in the counties around Philadelphia. Those areas had once provided a base for moderate Republicans — notably Specter himself. They are now helping to pad Democratic margins, and Specter is hoping they will support him in his new political incarnation.

The agony of moderate Republicanism was reflected in Specter’s efforts to appease his party’s primary electorate over the past few months, even as he tried to maintain an independent stance that had served him well in general elections. It was as if he were trying to solve a simultaneous equation for which there was no answer.

At the beginning of the year, for example, he pleased Democrats and angered Republicans by backing a compromise stimulus package sought by Obama. But in the course of the negotiations, he annoyed Democrats by insisting that the package be held below $790 billion.

Specter had long received help from the labor movement. Indeed, the unions encouraged some of their members to switch parties in 2004 when Toomey challenged Specter in a primary the first time. But this year, Specter enraged union leaders when he said he could not support their central legislative goal, the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for labor organizations to sign up new members.

Specter, once a master of the ideological two-step, found himself tripping again and again in the new political environment.

And so he finds himself back where he started his political life. A man always attuned to the direction of the political winds, Specter has signaled that they are clearly blowing the Democrats’ way. A politician always ready to surprise and confound his political adversaries, Specter now finds the party of Obama as appealing as he long ago found the party of John F. Kennedy. And Specter could not resist paraphrasing Kennedy in declaring that “sometimes party asks too much.” His decision reflects his own personal needs, but it also stands as a warning to the party he once embraced and has now abandoned.

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SWINE FLU NOT NEW

The U.S. experienced a swine flu threat in 1976. Fearing that the virus was a direct descendant of the 1918 deadly flu epidemic, the government wanted everyone to get vaccinated. Fortunately, the epidemic never broke out and the threat never materialized.

Unfortunately, cases of a rare side effect thought to be linked to the shot did materialize. Within ten weeks, the unexpected development had ended an unprecedented national vaccination campaign.

The 1976 episode embarrassed the federal government thus costing the director of the then U.S. Center of Disease Control his job. Worst of all it has triggered an enduring public backlash against flu vaccination, which may be fueling some anxiety about the current outbreak.

The swine flu debacle holds crucial lessons for the government and health officials who must decide how to react to the new swine flu threat in the days and weeks ahead.

For starters, officials must keep the public informed. They must admit what they know and don’t know. They must have a plan ready should the health threat become dangerous. And they must reassure everyone that there is no need to worry in the meantime.

It’s a tall order. Doubts about the government’s ability to handle a possible flu pandemic linger, said Dr. Richard P. Wenzel, chairman of internal medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, who diagnosed some of the early cases in 1976.

“I think we’re going to have to be cautious,” Wenzel said. “Hopefully, there will be a lot of good, honest public health discussion about what happened in 1976.”

Officials should be prepared for plenty of second-guessing, especially for any decisions regarding vaccination, which was at the core of the 1976 controversy, said Dr. David J. Sencer, the CDC director who led the government’s response to the threat and was later fired.

“There were good things and bad things about it,” said Sencer, who is retired and lives in the Atlanta area. “People have to make science the priority. They have to rely on science rather than politics.”

The question of whether politics overtook science in 1976 has been the fodder of books, articles and discussions for 33 years.

The panic in 1976 was partly because of the erronoeous belief erroneous that the 1918-19 flu pandemic, which killed half a million Americans and as many as 50 million worldwide, was caused by a virus with swine components. Recent research suggests instead that it was avian flu, but that seems unlikely to assuage the current anxiety.

The episode began in New Jersey in February 1976, when an Army recruit at Ft. Dix, fell ill and died from a swine flu virus thought to be similar to the 1918 strain. Several other soldiers at the Ft. Dix base also became ill. Shortly thereafter, Wenzel and his colleagues reported two cases of the flu strain in Virginia.

“That raised the concern that the original cluster at Ft. Dix had spread beyond New Jersey,” said Wenzel, former president of the International Society for Infectious Diseases.

At the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”), Sencer solicited the opinions of infectious disease specialists nationwide and, in March, called on President Ford and Congress to begin a mass inoculation.

The $137-million program began in early October, but within days reports emerged that the vaccine appeared to increase the risk for Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare and possibly fatal neurological condition that causes temporary paralysisl.

Waiting in long lines at schools and clinics, more than 40 million Americans — almost 25% of the population — received the swine flu vaccine before the program was halted in December after 10 weeks.

More than 500 people are thought to have developed Guillain-Barre syndrome after receiving the vaccine; 25 died. No one completely understands the causes of Guillain-Barre, but the condition can develop after a bout with infection or following surgery or vaccination. The federal government paid millions in damages to people or their families.

However, the pandemic, which some experts estimated at the time could infect 50 million to 60 million Americans, never unfolded. Only about 200 cases of swine flu and one death were ultimately reported in the U.S., the CDC said.

The public viewed the entire episode as a political farce, Sencer said. But at the time, he said, the government erred on the side of caution.

“If we had that knowledge then, we might have done things differently,” Sencer said. “We did not know what sort of virus we were dealing with in those days. No one knew we would have Guillain-Barre syndrome. The flu vaccine had been used for many years without that happening.”

Wenzel also recommended vaccination in 1976. “It was a great effort,” he said. “It just had unexpected, unfortunate side effects.”

In Mexico, where 22 people have died from the current swine flu outbreak, government officials are under fire for their handling of the situation. But people fail to understand the challenges faced by health officials with such a mysterious threat, said Dr. Peter Katona, an infectious disease expert at UCLA.

“You have to look at not only 1976 but 1918,” he said. “The pandemic flu that occurred in 1918 lasted a year and a half. In 1976, we didn’t know what was going to happen. The virus might burn out. It might proliferate. These viruses have a mind of their own, and we don’t know how to predict what will happen.”

CDC officials have been wisely circumspect in their comments about the current outbreak, Sencer said.

“I like the fact that they have said, ‘We may change our minds,’ ” he said. “Don’t expect health officials to have the answers overnight. These things need time to be sorted out. We’re still in the learning curve.”

Dr. Richard Krause, who headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1976, has noted drolly that public health officials involved in the next pandemic flu threat “have my best wishes.”

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RAISING KATIE RAISES EYEBROWS EXPOSING RACISM

Posted By: Tony Dokoupil | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Lessons of race learned at the Mason Dixon line by a black family in their adoption of a white girl in the Obama era.

Several pairs of eyes follow the girl as she pedals around the playground in an affluent suburb of Baltimore. But it isn’t the redheaded fourth grader who seems to have moms and dads of the jungle gym nervous on this recent Saturday morning. It’s the African-American man—six feet tall, bearded and wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt—watching the girl’s every move. Approaching from behind, he grabs the back of her bicycle seat as she wobbles to a stop. “Nice riding,” he says, as the fair-skinned girl turns to him, beaming. “Thanks, Daddy,” she replies. The onlookers are clearly flummoxed.

As a black father and adopted white daughter, Mark Riding and Katie O’Dea-Smith are a sight at best surprising, and at worst so perplexing that people feel compelled to respond. Like the time at a Pocono Mountains flea market when Riding scolded Katie, attracting so many sharp glares that he and his wife, Terri, 37, and also African-American, thought “we might be lynched.” And the time when well-intentioned shoppers followed Mark and Katie out of the mall to make sure she wasn’t being kidnapped. Or when would-be heroes come up to Katie in the cereal aisle and ask, “Are you OK?”—even though Terri is standing right there.

Is it racism? The Ridings tend to think so, and it’s hard to blame them. To shadow them for a day, as I recently did, is to feel the unease, notice the negative attention and realize that the same note of fear isn’t in the air when they attend to their two biological children, who are 2 and 5 years old. It’s fashionable to say that the election of Barack Obama has brought the dawn of a post-racial America. In the past few months alone, The Atlantic Monthly has declared “the end of white America,” The Washington Post has profiled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s struggle for relevance in a changing world, and National Public Radio has led discussions questioning the necessity of the annual Black History Month. Perhaps not surprising, most white and black Americans no longer cite racism as a major social problem, according to recent polls.

But the Ridings’ experience runs counter to these popular notions of harmony. And adoption between races is particularly fraught. So-called transracial adoptions have surged since 1994, when the Multiethnic Placement Act reversed decades of outright racial matching by banning discrimination against adoptive families on the basis of race. But the growth has been all one-sided. The number of white families adopting outside their race is growing and is now in the thousands, while cases like Katie’s—of a black family adopting a nonblack child—remain frozen at near zero.

Decades after the racial integration of offices, buses and water fountains, persistent double standards mean that African-American parents are still largely viewed with unease as caretakers of any children other than their own—or those they are paid to look after. As Yale historian Matthew Frye Jacobson has asked: “Why is it that in the United States, a white woman can have black children but a black woman cannot have white children?”

That question hit home for the Ridings in 2003, when Terri’s mother, Phyllis Smith, agreed to take in Katie, then 3, on a temporary basis. A retired social worker, Phyllis had long been giving needy children a home—and Katie was one of the hardest cases. The child of a local prostitute, her toddler tantrums were so disturbing that foster families simply refused to keep her. Twelve homes later, Katie was still being passed around. Phyllis was in many ways an unlikely savior. The former president of the Baltimore chapter of the National Association of Black Social Workers, she joined her colleagues in condemning the adoption of black children by white families as “cultural genocide”—a position she still holds in theory, if not in practice. She couldn’t say no to the “charming, energetic” girl who ended up on her front doorstep.

Last November, after a grueling adoption process—”[adoption officials] pushed the envelope on every issue,” says Mark—little Irish-Catholic Katie O’Dea, as pale as a communion wafer, became Katie O’Dea-Smith: a formally adopted member of the African-American Riding-Smith family. (Phyllis is her legal guardian, but Mark and Terri were also vetted as legal surrogates for Phyllis.)

To be sure, it’s an unconventional arrangement. Katie spends weekdays with Phyllis, her legal guardian. But Mark and Terri, who live around the corner, are her de facto parents, too. They help out during the week, and welcome Katie over on weekends and holidays. As for titles: Katie calls Phyllis “Mommy” and Terri “Sister,” since technically it’s true. Mark has always been “Daddy” or “Mark.”

Let me just put it out there,” says Mark, a 38-year-old private-school admissions director with an appealing blend of megaphone voice and fearless opinion, especially when it comes to his family. “I’ve never felt more self-consciously black than while holding our little white girl’s hand in public.” He used to write off the negative attention as innocent curiosity. But after a half-decade of rude comments and revealing faux pas—like the time his school’s guidance counselor called Katie a “foster child” in her presence—he now fights the ignorance with a question of his own: why didn’t a white family step up to take Katie?

Riding’s challenge hints at a persistent social problem. “No country in the world has made more progress toward combating overt racism than [the United States],” says David Schneider, a Rice University psychologist and the author of “The Psychology of Stereotyping.” “But the most popular stereotype of black people is still that they’re violent. And for a lot of people, not even racist people, the sight of a white child with a black parent just sets off alarm signals.”

Part of the reason for the adoptive imbalance comes down to numbers, and the fact that people tend to want children of their own race. African-Americans represent almost one third of the 510,000 children in foster care, so black parents have a relatively high chance of ending up with a same-race child. (Not so for would-be adoptive white parents who prefer the rarest thing of all in the foster-care system: a healthy white baby.) But the dearth of black families with nonblack children also has painful historical roots. Economic hardship and centuries of poisonous belief in the so-called civilizing effects of white culture upon other races have familiarized Americans with the concept of white stewardship of other ethnicities, rather than the reverse.

The result is not only discomfort among whites at the thought of nonwhites raising their offspring; African-Americans can also be wary when one of their own is a parent to a child outside their race. Just ask Dallas Cowboys All-Pro linebacker DeMarcus Ware and his wife, Taniqua, who faced a barrage of criticism after adopting a nonblack baby last February. When The New York Times sports page ran a photo of the shirtless new father with what appeared to be a white baby in his arms (and didn’t mention race in the accompanying story), it sent a slow shock wave through the African-American community, pitting supporters who celebrated the couple’s joy after three painful miscarriages against critics who branded the Wares “self-race-hating individuals” for ignoring the disproportionate number of blacks in foster care. The baby, now their daughter, Marley, is in fact Hispanic. “Do you mean to tell me that the Wares couldn’t have found a little black baby to adopt?” snarled one blogger on the Daily Voice, an online African-American newspaper.

For the relatively few black families that do adopt non-African-American children, and the adoptive children themselves, the experience can be confusing. “I hadn’t realized how often we talked about white people at home,” says Mark. “I hadn’t realized that dinnertime stories were often told with reference to the race of the players, or that I often used racial stereotypes, as in the news only cares about some missing spring-break girl because she is blonde.’”

Katie, too, has sometimes struggled with her unusual situation, and how outsiders perceive it. When she’s not drawing, swimming or pining after teen heartthrob Zac Efron, she’s often dealing with normal kid teasing with a nasty edge. “They’ll ignore me or yell at me because I have a black family,” she says. Most of her friends are black, although her school is primarily white. And Terri has noticed something else: Katie is uncomfortable identifying people by their race.

Is she racially confused? Should her parents be worried? Opinions vary in the larger debate about whether race is a legitimate consideration in adoption. At present, agencies that receive public funding are forbidden from taking race into account when screening potential parents. They are also banned from asking parents to reflect on their readiness to deal with race-related issues, or from requiring them to undergo sensitivity training. But a well-meaning policy intended to ensure colorblindness appears to be backfiring. According to a study published last year by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, transracial parents are often ill equipped to raise children who are themselves unprepared for the world’s racial realities.

Now lawmakers may rejoin the charged race-adoption debate. Later this year the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, an independent federal think tank, is expected to publish a summary of expert testimony on adoption law—much of which will ask Congress to reinstate race as a salient consideration in all cases. The testimony, from the Evan B. Donaldson institute and others, will also suggest initiatives currently banned or poorly executed under existing policies, including racial training for parents and intensifying efforts to recruit more black adoptive families.

Would such measures be a step back for Obama’s post-racial America? It’s hard to tell. The Ridings, for their part, are taking Katie’s racial training into their own hands. They send her to a mixed-race school, and mixed-race summer camps, celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with gusto and buy Irish knickknacks, like a “Kiss Me I’m Irish” T shirt and a mug with Katie’s O’Dea family crest emblazoned on it. But they worry it won’t be enough. “All else being equal, I think she should be with people who look like her,” says Mark. “It’s not fair that she’s got to grow up feeling different when she’s going to feel different anyway. She wears glasses, her voice is a bit squeaky, and on top of that she has to deal with the fact that her mother is 70 and black.”

But even if Katie feels different now, the Riding-Smiths have given her both a stable home and a familiarity with two ethnic worlds that will surely serve her well as she grows up in a country that is increasingly blended. And it may be that hers will be the first truly post-racial generation.

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