Biracial twins with dramatically different skin colors are a rare phenomenon, but when they occur, these unmatched sets get lots of attention.

While the world abounds with multi-racial families with a range of skin tones, it’s rare to have sets of twins with one presenting as black and the other as white.

Meanwhile, as the new post-post racial America rears its ugly head, you have to wonder: When it’s even remotely possible for one of your kids to come out “white” and the other to come out “black,” what the heck does “race” even mean?

No wonder Today gushed over the latest pair of biracial twins with different skin colors who came to light back in January. Nine-month-old Kalani and Jarani Dean look adorable, but that’s not the only reason why passersby gawk at them during family outings.

The [then] 9-month-old infants reflect their parents in the most remarkable way: Kalani has fair skin like her mother, who is white, and Jarani has brown skin like her dad, who is black.

Here are a couple of the winsome photos that are making the rounds on Twitter.

And here are the girls’ proud parents.

Whitney Meyer and her boyfriend Tomas Dean live in Quincy, Illinois. When the folks from Today asked Meyer about her biracial twins, she declared:

“Kalani was as white as can be. I was just in denial, because you know the odds of this? I would never think I would have a black and white twin. That’s why I asked if she was albino, because she was just so white.”

Dean added, “I was like, ‘Yeah, she’s a little light,’ but I thought maybe babies are that way when they’re first born.” He then marveled, “But then a couple of minutes later, her sister came out a little darker. In a million years, I never thought I’d have a girl with blue eyes. I didn’t think I could pull that one off!”

Here are Kalani and Jarani Dean about nine months later in October, 2017.

The odds of having a set of biracial twins with different skin colors is around one in 350 to one in 400, and the odds that any pair of twins will have different skin colors is one in 500. In the U.S. — as of 2013 — twins accounted for around three out of 100 births.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: As pointed out by many readers, “race” itself is an artificial construct that has no basis in science. While visual markers may tell us something about our ancestry, the genes that determine our appearance are just .01 percent of our total genetic makeup.]

In April 2015, Hanna Yarker and Kyle Armstrong also gave birth to biracial twins with different skin colors … But they didn’t know it at first. Yarker told The Sun Anaya and Myla both looked darker than her when they were born, “so I assumed they’d both taken after Kyle.”

But after two weeks, she adds, “it was clear Myla takes after her dad with dark skin, brown eyes and brunette locks, while Anaya is more of a mummy’s girl with a pale complexion, fair hair and light eyes.” She added that they can’t even go to the grocery store without turning heads.

Back in 2015, the internet was all abuzz over Lucy and Maria Aylmer, a lovely pair of biracial twins from across the pond in the U.K. They say no one believes they’re sisters, and we can certainly see why. Their dad Vince is white and their mom Donna is black. But instead of their coloring being a blend from both parents — as happens with many mixed-race children — Lucy has fair skin and cinnamon hair while Maria has a café au lait complexion and abundant black curls.

Aylmer Twins -- as little kids

Biracial twins with different skin colors show how ridiculous racism really is.

When you’ve got two siblings with the same parents, calling one “white” and the other “black” seems rather absurd. Where does “white” end, and where does “black” begin? There are also many more of us who present as one ethnicity or another, but have mixed ancestry.

Craig Cobb — the neo-Nazi who tried to take over a small town in North Dakota and turn it into a whites-only “haven” for White supremacists — learned this the hard way when he took a DNA test and learned that 14 percent of his genes come from sub-Saharan Africa.

He called it “short science” and “statistical noise,” but the rest of us called it “karma.”




Kian and Remee Hodgson also turned heads as biracial twins with different skin colors when they were born in 2005 — just minutes apart — to Kylee Hodgson and Remi Horder. The Daily Mail reports both parents have white mothers and black fathers.

Here they are a few years later, in 2014.

The phenomenon of biracial twins with different skin colors is rare, yet it happens more often than we think.

Sometimes this even happens twice in the same family. Alison Spooner and Dean Durrant caused quite the sensation when their second set of mixed race twins with different skin colors arrived.

And these mixed race sisters — Sharon Brown and Sonia Harris — each wound up with a set of biracial twins with different skin colors. Sharon’s partner Malcolm Holloway and Sonia’s husband Phillip Bradley are both white.

In some cases, the biracial twins have different skin colors but otherwise look very much alike.

And no matter what, the kids are always danged adorable.

Featured image: Collage/composite of the above photos via Twitter.

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