A rare phenomenon happened when Kalani and Jarani, two beautiful twins who were born looking slightly different from one another. While Kalani was born with light skin, Jarani was born with darker skin.
Their mother, Whitney, now hopes that they will be a symbol against racism and the idea that human beings should in any way be divided by their race. Whitney herself is white, whereas the father of the twins, Tomas, is black. Children with parents of different races are usually born with a skin-tone that is somewhere in the middle between both partners. In some cases however, a child can be born with a skin tone much more similar to just one of their parents. But it is incredibly rare that in the case of twins, each would independently take on the skin tone of just one of their parents.
Whitney recounted when the twins were born in 2016, saying:
“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.”
Tomas added:
“I was like, ‘Yeah, she’s a little light,’ but I thought maybe babies are that way when they’re first born. 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! I hope that a lot of people can see that colour really isn’t a big thing. What’s important is love. Mysterious things can happen and life is a blessing.”
Genetics is such a complex matter and involves so many thousands of genes interacting in different ways that even scientists are not fully certain as to what causes human beings to be born with certain traits.
Dr. Bryce Mendelsohn, of the University of California, San Francisco, said:
“The physical traits you can see in a person are just a very small sliver of the genetic diversity across human populations. A lot of times we only focus on the things our eyes can see, but what we see is a tiny tip of the iceberg of the actual genetic diversity in everyone… When you flip a coin eight times, sometimes it’s going to be heads all eight times. And it’s kind of like that when you have a bunch of genes. They’re all randomly shuffling, and you can get all kinds of outcomes.”
