The difference is that being "colored" is neither a charade nor an elaborate pretension--it's an actual fact of nature.
I also don't think it is right for these children to be involved and this nonsense about "everybody's Mom", and they don't realize how screwed up that sounds. I'm not advocating the kids be taken away, but it does bother me that they tell us it is like any normal family when it obviously is not. Actually, I do have kind of a corallary to a situation. My sister-in-law is raising her granddaughter, more or less, and the grandchild started calling her grandmother "Mom". Well, she put a stop to that as kindly and gently and it took a little while, but she realized that was not right, and she should only call her mother (who is involved and there--not absent) "Mom".