Last year, after months of watching — and re-watching — the movie Frozen, my daughter Selma, who is 6, announced she didn't want to be brown. "I wish my skin was white," she told me one day in our living room, where we were hanging out after school.

I knew ...

Alex Landau, who is black, was raised by his adoptive white parents to believe that skin color didn't matter. But when Alex was pulled over by Denver police officers one night in 2009, he lost his belief in a color-blind world — and nearly lost his life.

In an animation ...