A Beautiful First Family: Our New Inspiration, By Alexis Garrett Stodghill

I grew up in a single-parent home as a small child, then with a step-father, who I did not like, as a youth. My role model all my life has really been my mother, and more recently my grandmother. The more I get to know both women, the more I admire their pride, their beauty, their tenacity, their intelligence and their class.

The wonderful love we receive from our everyday heroes is great. Yet, we will always need those higher stars and figures in our lives that deeply move us in our souls to really be great. In this new first family, we will finally have living superheroes who look like us, act like us, have been us and understand us.

Historically, young black people have rarely had these types of higher role models to look up to. We have had to create our own hero images for ourselves, to inspire us in unique ways that the mainstream could not have imagined. The TV show 'Perry Mason' inspired my mother to become a lawyer, at a time when her own relatives thought this was impossible. Many aspects of hip hop culture are inspired by, of all things, old cowboy flicks. These films taught troubled youths tough masculine values that, for all their flawed interpretation, gave them the self-esteem to survive in broken environments.

In the absence of idols who looked like us, we did like our people always did, and got "real" creative. We had to make heroes, or adopt strange ones, to wrap our minds in imaginary armor that shielded us from the stereotypes society sought to project onto us. Remaking mainstream hero images into our own worked well for many. In some instances, this necessity became a wellspring of amazing creativity.

Now, in the new millennium, the Obama family represents a plethora of positive images that teach, inspire and give us something to aspire to -- without this mental wrangling. There are almost too many positive role models to choose from:

-A happy black family.
-A loving black relationship.
-Beautiful, respectful and protected young women.
-A strong black woman who knows how to be feminine, and trusts her man.
-And a black man who is compassionate, cultured, intelligent, accomplished, responsible, but still as cool as hell.

No longer will we have to twist and turn cultural images that are inconceivably unlike us into new forms that can inspire us to do well. When I look at this picture I automatically see all the gorgeous grace that a black family can be.

May this new, real and true image inspire you.