It’s not just physical; the cultural vertical identity is at stake as well. By adopting children of another race or ethnicity we cut them off from the world they were born in. The National Association of Black Social Workers declared in a resolution in 1972 that transracial adoption was cultural genocide. The wording was, and is, cruel, but it is hard not to see its deeper truth: a Korean or black kid raised in a white world has lost his or her culture. An open adoption, as we have with our children, where we stay in close contact with their first parents, may take away some of that loss, but not all of it.

Black (or Guatemalan or Chinese) kids in transracial families belong to that family and also to the black (or Guatemalan or Chinese) community. Even if the white parents don’t like that idea — and there are too many who don’t — they will be confronted with it anyway.

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.

It was a painful and, for our daughter, a scary situation, but it came out of deep concern. To see a white person boss around a black human being, especially a small black human being, may have triggered a lot of bitter historical and socioeconomic connotations for this woman. I cannot blame her.

Sometimes those claims are friendlier. Advice about hair and skin care is common. And from black friends you get advice about racism. When I heard President Obama talk about his experiences as a black man in his comments on Trayvon Martin, I heard our friends.

It is obvious that race and adoption define transracial adoption. Even if adoptive parents started out naïvely — as we did, more or less — as a white family with kids of color, many of us end as a nonwhite family. Or in the terms of John Raible, one of the leading thinkers in the field of transracial adoption, a transracialized family.

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. And it needs an understanding that one’s family is not only challenged by the centrifugal force of the adoptive identity of the children, but also by the tensions of their broken cultural and racial identity. These fractures cannot be fixed, but need to be addressed with empathy by competent parents. We cannot take away loss, but we can teach our kids and ourselves to learn to live with it, and to live good lives with it.