His family has a multicultural and diverse background.

One of the interesting facts about Barack Obama is that his family is multicultural and diverse. Barack Obama is African-American, but his family has other characteristics as well. His parents were a Kenyan father and an American mother. His mother, Ann Dunham (1942-1995), was mostly of English ancestry and was born in Wichita, Kansas. The likelihood that Dunham was descended from John Punch, an African man who was held as a slave in the Virginia Colony during the seventeenth century, was determined to be very high in July 2012. Barack Obama Sr. (1934–1982), the father of Barack Obama, wed Luo Kenya of Nyang'oma Kogelo. In 1960, while his father was a foreign scholarship student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Obama's parents met in a Russian language class. Six months before the birth of Barack Obama, on February 2, 1961, the couple wed in Wailuku, Hawaii.

Obama's mother and stepfather went to Indonesia when he was six years old. He attended local Indonesian schools from the age of six to ten, spending two years at the St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Primary School and one and a half years at the State Primary School in Menteng 01, with English classes from the Calvert School supplemented by instruction in his mother's home. He was able to speak Indonesian fluently as a child because he spent four years of his childhood in Jakarta.

His father, who is also married, relocated back to Kenya. His father had seven more kids in addition to him. Obama also has Native American ancestry and Irish cousins.