Modeling for my children how to be a minority has a bigger purpose than merely learning how to have dark skin in a white world. My lessons are about how to wear Christ’s skin. How to conduct yourself among a majority people who are instinctively prejudiced against you for who you are, and for who you look like.

In the photograph, a little girl—5 years old, her blonde hair in two braids—sits between a man and a woman who look markedly different from her. And that’s where the trouble started.

A few weeks ago, CNN reported, “Authorities asked questions about Maria because she has fair skin and blonde hair while her parents have darker complexions typical of Roma, also known as gypsies.” Eventually, the girl’s biological parents came forward and her adoptive parents were cleared of abduction, but while the news of this little girl (and two others in Ireland) played out across my screen, I couldn’t help but see my own family’s reflection.

When I step out in public with my two black sons and one white son, we turn heads. Like those European families, mine is subject to scrutiny because the color of our skin does not match.

Strangers suggest skin and hair-care products. They ask if I’m babysitting. They ask if my kids are triplets. I’ve been told I’m an angel. I’ve been told I’m a racist. Everywhere we go, people of all colors make judgments about me simply because of how we look.

This is especially common for white parents of black children. When I posted a question about families’ experiences on an adoption Facebook page, the stories poured in. “An AA [African-American] woman stopped me at the local library,” wrote one mother, “wanting to know where we got our daughter. She then looked my daughter right in the face, and asked, ‘Are you happy with them? Do you want to come home with me?'”

The stories ranged from harmless (“I have had people ask ‘Where are his parents?’ when I’m standing right there,” a woman wrote) to frightening. Several parents told of bystanders threatening to call the police when their child began screaming while being buckled into a car seat.

In a recent essay for The New York Times, adoptive father Frank Ligtvoet wrote:

Our daughter once threw a tantrum on a crowded street on the way to school, and the only way to move forward involved dragging. It was not a pretty sight, and a black woman who had witnessed the scene came up and, bypassing my partner, who was doing the dragging, addressed our child: “Is this your father? Is this your father?” She was claiming our daughter as part of the black community.

Mostly, people are trying to make sure our kids are okay. I can appreciate that. But sometimes, as in Ligtvoet’s story, there’s a subtext to the questions. A disapproval of trans-racial families. A long look of skepticism over whether we white parents are really what’s best for these kids.

I live in Mississippi. This is a place where, with frightening shades of Trayvon Martin, a nearby neighborhood’s Facebook page gives detailed descriptions of each black man whom residents have seen walking through the area. It’s a place that has made some progress, but race is undoubtedly an issue here.

But it’s not just an issue in the South. Ligtvoet lives in New York City, and even he writes, “Raising kids of color by white parents is not just a matter of love; it requires a racial consciousness that is common in families of color, but rarely developed in white families.”

I’m not happy about the people who stop me in the grocery store to question my fitness to be a mother to my kids. Not happy about the double- and triple-takes everywhere. But, as a parent, I’ve learned to be almost thankful for it. This scrutiny enables me to enter into my kids’ experience of a racially conscious world and to set for them an example of how to navigate it.

Someday (sooner than I’d like to imagine), my kids won’t be with me every time they go out in public. People’s nosy questions and unfriendly looks right now are the best chance I have to sympathize with my kids’ minority experience, the best chance I have to model for them how to act in the face of prejudice or false assumptions.

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