Stunning photos of biracial twins reveal the absurdity of racism

by | Mar 10, 2017 | News & Politics | 36 comments

Biracial twins with different skin colors are a rare phenomenon, but when they occur, these non-matched sets generate major news headlines.

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.

36 Comments

  1. dana diaz-campos on March 10, 2017 at 2:22 pm

    It’s not true that in mixed race families, the kids mostly look alike as stated early in the article. My mom is light skinned Caucasian, my dad dark skinned Native American/Mexican. Each of the four kids have a different skin tone, from light, to golden, to olive with freckles, to my own brown. It is common not uncommon so why wouldn’t it occur with twins? Absolutely beautiful and awesome nonetheless! And yes race is unimportant.

    • Rubberman on March 10, 2017 at 9:11 pm

      Well said Dana. Half of my family are Mexican/American. Their complexions range from the brown of their Zapoteco roots to white. Race is an illusion. We are one human family!

    • Ben Anderson on March 11, 2017 at 5:30 am

      Not here to argue. I love the article and it’s point. However, I must point out that early in the article it says they both may have traits that favor the appearance of both parents, not that they look just alike.

    • Elisabeth on March 12, 2017 at 12:58 am

      Thanks, I added a note in my piece to this effect. I guess people see it as unusual or these twins wouldn’t be breaking the Internet, but thank you for the reality check.

    • julia on April 9, 2017 at 6:45 am

      my daughter is one quarter filipino, one quarter mexican and half mixed northern european; her husband is half mexican and half mixed northern european. she definitely looks mexican/american. they have one straight haired strawberry blond with blue eyes and one with dark auburn curls and deep brown eyes. lol. you never know. <3 so race means nothing.

  2. Rubberman on March 10, 2017 at 9:07 pm

    Beautiful! My black granddaughter, married to a white man, has two little girls. One is very white, the other black. Yes, there are two years between them, but they ARE sisters! Not twins, but who is counting? They are both gorgeous!

  3. Leila Kaplan on March 10, 2017 at 10:50 pm

    @kellyvanhemelryck amazing but so cute

  4. Rose Buckner on March 11, 2017 at 12:37 am

    My twins are boy/girl but one has red hair light skin and freckles, and her brother has darker skin like mine. My other 3 children are two red headed boys and a girl with a darker complexion like mine:)
    I’m mixed, white Mom, black dad and my husband is white.

  5. Paige Nelson on March 11, 2017 at 1:26 am

    There is but one race… The human race.

  6. Cheryl Silcox on March 11, 2017 at 1:41 am

    I don’t think we should call people bi-racial. There is only one race. We are all the human race. We can be bi-cultural or have two ethnicities or have different skin color tones but, if we say there’s no sense to racism then we should accept that there is no sense in trying to separate people into all these individual “races”? How about calling these twins just “twins”?
    I love these beautiful photos, the message, and the conversation it allows to open further. Thanks!

    • Madam Butterfly on April 10, 2017 at 9:32 am

      Cheryl .. brilliantly stated

  7. Me on March 11, 2017 at 4:57 am

    I’ve always wondered, even in the black community, there is division with the “light-skinned blacks” and the “dark-skinned blacks”. And they identify themselves as “African-Americans” when neither they, nor their ancestors for at least a hundred years have ever been to Africa. I agree, there is only one HUMAN RACE! The only difference is the amount of melanin in our system. I’m a blonde with blue eyes. I call myself “pigmentally challenged”! My former roommates after college were both different shades of chocolate, one milk and one dark, and I loved them both dearly. (I guess I was the white chocolate) LOL!

  8. Reneda Baer on March 11, 2017 at 6:27 am

    I think all of these sweet babies are beautiful. And I love the comments, especially the comment that we can be bi-cultural, but we’re all one race. I love the way you all think. I only wish the entire world could see life in the same light and stop drawing lines around first one group and then another. Wouldn’t that be incredible!?

  9. Martha on March 11, 2017 at 7:48 am

    The babies are all beautiful, mixed race is the human race and slavery made most black americans are so mixed race. When we have children we never know what our children will look like…throwbacks. Our families are from blue black to passing for white…mixed race has been here for so long…the human race. My mother is a twin lighter complexion with flaming red hair and her twin darker complexion with black hair, black parents nothing new in our community. Just raise them to know both worlds, thats what creates racism not knowing each other and how equal the human race really is.

  10. John Rager on March 11, 2017 at 12:02 pm

    I agree that we simply should not use the word race or racial since we are merely talking about diverse population characteristics. If someone from Eastern Europe married someone from Ireland, there children would also display the variations of their two populations.

  11. Les Castle on March 11, 2017 at 12:40 pm

    Fraternal twins are just like other siblings and don’t surprise me. But the nail in the coffin of the idea of race are the identical twins who have exactly the same DNA and yet are different colors.

  12. Janice Tucker on March 11, 2017 at 1:30 pm

    Paige, you could not have said it any better than that!

  13. Diane on March 11, 2017 at 3:10 pm

    We are one human race, I agree. Color and culture differentiates us, but doesn’t separate us unless we, as a people, willingly allow it.

  14. Christy Wilson on March 11, 2017 at 7:42 pm

    My husband is native American, I am Caucasian. Out of our four children, two look very native ( In skin tone) one is very light skinned but looks native, the fourth looks like me with darker skin tone

    • Elisabeth on March 12, 2017 at 5:01 am

      Thank you, I noted in my post that others have also pointed out that this kind of diversity of skin tones within one family is not as rare as the sources I used were saying.

  15. Dayna on March 11, 2017 at 8:07 pm

    All the children are BEAUTIFUL! This is so cool!

  16. Eva Scherb on March 11, 2017 at 8:18 pm

    They’re all beautiful – the babies, the children and the parents. In the case of some of them, one is more so than another. It’s often a case of his or her mood at the time the picture was taken.

  17. Rita K. WAgener on March 11, 2017 at 11:34 pm

    IT is called the human race, where humans are leaves of one tree, and waves one ocean. No leaves are exactly alike even though they are from one tree, waves comes in different ways and so does mankind.

  18. Donalda on March 12, 2017 at 12:00 am

    Did you see on the news the two little boys at school one dark and one white? The white boy wanted his hair cut just like his friend’s so that the teacher would not know which child was which. Just to show that children do not see the colour of skin in others. We have to be very carefully taught to do so.

    • Elisabeth on March 12, 2017 at 4:59 am

      I did, it was so adorable!

    • Audrey Ercolini on March 24, 2017 at 4:16 pm

      We had 2 women in my church named Mrs. Oleson. One of my children said that Mrs. Oleson scolded him for something. I asked which Mrs. Oleson & he hesitated a while. Then he said “The short one.” One was black & one white. My white son is now married to a black woman.

  19. Eric Altman on March 12, 2017 at 9:54 am

    I agree! But why not go even more technical if this is the message you’re trying to go for?

    There is no race or subrace classification for humans. We are a species: Homo sapiens. Of a family: Hominidae.

    We are one people.

  20. Nancy on March 13, 2017 at 12:50 am

    I love these comments that state, there is only one race, the human race. It is the most important thing for us to recognize. We are all one. I love the variety, like a garden with different flowers. The different appearances are so enjoyable, not something to divide us.

  21. anthony mendoza on March 13, 2017 at 1:10 am

    Great article and great pictures. This is soooo true.

  22. Fatima on March 13, 2017 at 12:31 pm

    I think all mankind is beautiful in its own way but really hit were the twins with the same dna thats really amazing. My brorher and i are always mistaken for mixed or mexican my dad is very light skined my mom very dark skinned but my mom mom is black n indian my dad family has indian german irish dutch cerole down the lines of his family so we all have different blkod and come out different shades

  23. Mrs. C on March 13, 2017 at 6:30 pm

    What a rich experience to share with a sibling. Twins have their experiences and they will have a unique perspective too.

  24. LiliMommi on March 13, 2017 at 11:37 pm

    I’m more amazed that there is a white dude out there named Malcolm.

  25. Jeannie McCall on March 15, 2017 at 3:14 pm

    Such a beautiful story about this remarkable twins and families. It is true: there is ONLY one race: the HUMAN RACE. We should ENJOY our color diversity, not let it divide us!! We are all beautiful in our own ways!!

    • Ann on March 16, 2017 at 8:46 am

      The outside SHOULDN’T really matter – the inside ‘the soul’ SHOULD. We are ONE anyway.

  26. Asad on March 18, 2017 at 7:30 pm

    There is NO SUCH THING as “bi racial” or “multi racial”. Different “races” of living being can not interbreed. There is only one race of human.

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