Suspicions rankle parents of mixed-race children

Attention on issue after Cindy McCain reports family to cops

PHOENIX — Amberkatherine DeCory carried photos of her daughter’s birth certificate in her diaper bag in case she had to prove that the lighter-skinned girl was really hers. Cydnee Rafferty gives her husband a letter explaining that he has permission to travel with their 5-year-old biracial daughter.

Families like theirs were not surprised when they heard that Cindy McCain had reported a woman to police for possible human trafficking because the widow of Sen. John McCain saw her at the airport with a toddler of a different ethnicity. Officers investigated and found no evidence of wrongdoing.

Parents whose children have a different complexion say they regularly face suspicion and the assumption that they must be watching someone else’s kids.

“This is a problem that, to be frank, well-meaning white people get themselves into,” said Rafferty, who is African-American and whose husband is white. “They think, ‘If it doesn’t make sense to me it must not be right.’ ”

After McCain’s report, Rafferty posted to Twitter a selfie of her with her two children, ages 5 and 5 months.

“I know they don’t look like me, but I assure you, I grew them in my belly,” Rafferty wrote to McCain.

Earlier this month, McCain claimed on Phoenix radio station KTAR that the woman was waiting for a man who bought the child to get off a plane and that her Jan. 30 report to police had stopped the trafficking.

She urged people to speak up if they see anything odd.

“I came in from a trip I’d been on,” McCain said. “I spotted — it looked odd — it was a woman of a different ethnicity than the child, this little toddler she had. Something didn’t click with me. I tell people ‘trust your gut.’ ”

She said she spoke about her suspicions with police “and they went over and questioned her. And, by God, she was trafficking that kid.”

Phoenix Police Sgt. Armando Carbajal confirmed that McCain requested a welfare check on a child at the airport, but said officers found “no evidence of criminal conduct or child endangerment.”

McCain has declined interview requests and has not said if anything besides the difference in ethnicity led her to suspect trafficking.

A spokesman for the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University said McCain was “only thinking about the possible ramifications of a criminal act, not the ethnicity of the possible trafficker.”

After police debunked her claim, McCain reiterated the importance of speaking up when something looks wrong.

“I apologize if anything else I have said on this matter distracts from ‘if you see something, say something,’ ” she wrote on Twitter.

For Rafferty, the questions are frustrating and offensive: “Whose baby is that?” from a woman in the grocery store. And “Where’s her beautiful golden skin and curly hair?” from a client at the office, who had a distinct idea of how a biracial child should look.