Photo: Whitney Meyer
In a time when our country has been very racially divided over the last year, one mom hopes her rare biracial twins will teach others to love everyone equally.
Whitney Meyer says her 9-month old fraternal twin girls, Jarani and Kalani, get stares everywhere they go, and are often a topic of conversation among total strangers, because people just can’t believe they are twins. Meyer is white, and Kalani is fair like her, while the twins’ father, Tomas Dean, is black, and Jarani has brown skin like he does. Meyer says she hopes her darling girls will make people think about race and equality when people see them.
“You can’t look at one and not love them both,” she told TODAY. “They’re the same girl, just different colors.”
Dean was completely surprised by the twins’ appearance.
“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,” he said. “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!”
The twins are Dean and Meyer’s 2nd and 3rd children together—sadly, their son Pravyn passed away at age 2 after drowning while in the care of a day care provider. Jarani looks like Pravyn, while Kalani favors Meyer’s older son Talan, 7, who is Caucasian. She said Talan reads to the girls every night and is the “best big brother.”