My wife and I just adopted our first child. We have learned a lot about ourselves and God and the Christian community through this journey. But one lesson that has been driven home time and again is how deeply entrenched racial prejudice is in the United States.

This fact was reinforced in our adoption training. Because we pursued a domestic adoption (i.e., a child from the United States) and were happy to adopt a child of any ethnicity, our licensing and preparation involved learning to be a "conspicuous" family: one that can't hide the fact that a child is adopted because he or she is ethnically different than the adoptive parents. We've taken classes on how to respond to insensitive comments from strangers and family, such as: "Is that your real baby?" or "Does he speak English?" or "She's so lucky to have you," which implies that the child would be less fortunate to be raised by parents of her own ethnic background. We've even learned to anticipate the question "Is that one of those ...