Mom of biracial twins and her daughters inspires people to ‘love everyone equal’
Twins Kalani and Jarani Dean are often on the receiving end of second glances when they’re out in public, and it’s not just because they’re so freaking cute.
It turns out that these sisters, who come from a mixed-race family, are quite the biological rarity.
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Although both girls have the same set of parents, their skin color is very different.
Kalani is the lighter-skinned of the two and takes after her white mother, whereas Jarani is brown, exactly like her black father.
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These twins are redefining what it means to be black or white.
Mom Whitney Meyer hopes that others will be encouraged to “love everyone equal.”
One might even view them as a symbol against racism!
“You can’t look at one and not love them both,” she told TODAY. “They’re the same girl, just different colors.”
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Whitney remembers being somewhat in denial when her twins were first born on April 23, 2016, in Quincy, Illinois.
“Kalani was as white as can be. I was just in denial, because you know the odds of this?” she said. “I would never think I would have a black and white twin.”
She even asked the medical staff if Kalani was an albino.
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Tomas Dean, their father, was just as shocked, especially a couple of minutes later when “her sister came out a little darker.”
But he was very much the proud papa.
“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!”
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Everyone has a hard time believing these siblings are actually twins, so they wear matching outfits to remind people they actually do share the same exact genes.
Whitney says that Jarani looks like her 2-year-old brother, Pravyn, who tragically passed in a drowning accident. Kalani, on the other hand, takes after their older half-brother, Talan, who is Caucasian.
Talan, by the way, is an “amazing big brother” and reads to his sisters every night.
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While the phenomenon of biracial twins is rare, it’s far from being a crazy occurrence.
Dr. Bryce Mendelsohn, a medical geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco, explains it like this:
“The physical traits you can see in a person are just a very small sliver of the genetic diversity across human populations.”
What we see is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the genetic diversity we all have within us.
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Now that they’re starting to grow up, there are other differences that are fast becoming apparent.
For starters, Jarani is a few inches taller than her sibling!
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Dad Tomas just wants people to see “that color really isn’t a big thing. What’s important is love.”
If you’d like to know more about these twins, you can follow them on their Instagram page.
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Source: Instagram @thedivadeantwins, TODAY