Woes for moms of biracial kids

PHOENIX — Amberkatherine DeCory carried photos of her daughter’s birth certificate in her diaper bag in case she had to prove that the lighterskinned 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 (photo) 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’s kids.

“This is a problem that, to be frank, well-meaning white people get themselves into,” said Rafferty, who is AfricanAmerican and whose husband is white.

After McCain’s report, Rafferty posted a selfie on Twitter 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,” she wrote to McCain.

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

“It was a woman of a different ethnicity than the child, this little toddler she had. Something didn’t click with me.’ ”

Phoenix Police found “no evidence of criminal conduct or child endangerment.” A spokesman for the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University said McCain was “only thinking about he possible ramifications of a criminal act, not the ethnicity of the possible trafficker.”

Rafferty, a 38year-old New Yorker, was surprised that McCain, who adopted a daughter from Bangladesh, would make the same something’s-notright assumption that mixedrace families grapple with constantly. It’s not always summoning the police. Other, more common ways of calling out the differences sting, too.

For Rafferty, the questions are offensive: “Whose baby is that?” from a woman in the grocery store. “You’re the ... ?” followed by a pause for her to fill in the blank with “mom.”

And if she pushes a stroller on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, everyone assumes she’s the nanny.