A dad-of-two has opened up about the rush of emotions he feels when looking at photos of his youngest daughter and her best friend.
American journalist Frank Somerville, often talks on Facebook about his youngest child, who he and his wife adopted when she was a baby.
He shared two photos of his daughter (on the left in the photo below) with her best friend Kendall, explaining that they were born two weeks apart and have been best buds ever since.
“This is the way I want the world to be,” he wrote on 9 May.
Somerville continued: “Every time I see them together I always think of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said: ‘I have a dream that one day little black boys and black girls will he able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.’
“I hope that doesn’t sound sappy. Because it’s really how I feel. And quite honestly it makes me very emotional thinking about it.
“I’m not exactly sure why. But it does.”
“The bottom line is this: We’re all pieces of the same puzzle. We’re all human.
“Who cares what colour we are. It makes no difference.”
Somerville’s post prompted a discussion amongst his followers.
“I have a dream that one day you stop talking about the colour of your daughter,” wrote one commenter.
“She’s so many things but you always have to talk about her colour. Can you forget she’s black? She’s beautiful. Who cares? Gosh!”
To which Somerville responded: “I never said in the post that she’s black. I just quoted Dr King. And the reason I pointed out that’s she’s on the left is because someone who doesn’t know me would probable assume that my daughter is the white one.”
He also added: “Part of who my daughter is... IS her colour and I want to celebrate that.”
Somerville has previously spoken about his experience of the adoption in an extensive interview with Care.
“When we first had a chance to adopt my daughter we were scared because she wasn’t the same race,” he said.
“I remember thinking at first: ‘What’s it like to adopt a black child?’ and then about a month after we adopted her I realised what a silly question that was.
“It’s like having a pink kid, a purple kid, a white kid. A kid is a kid. She happens to look different from me, but she’s just a kid.
“I love that I have an interracial family, and I wouldn’t trade it.”