They appeared a little odd when Jade Ball gave birth to her kids, Cole and Klay, in April of last year, just like any other pair of fraternal twins. Their differences were increasingly apparent as the months passed. While Klay had a head of blonde curly hair, blue eyes, and a fair complexion like his white mom, Cole now has brown hair, brown eyes, and light brown skin like his half-Jamaican dad.
“The physical qualities you could notice in a person are only a very small fraction of the genetic variability between populations,” said Bryce Mendelsohn, a medical geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco.” We frequently limit our attention to what our eyes can see, yet what our eyes can actually perceive simply represents the tip of the iceberg in terms of human genetic variation.”
Some people don’t believe they are twins,” she said. “They can’t look around it because they look so different.”
“Klay is an opportunist who adores everything. While Cole has always enjoyed simply sitting back and watching and taking it all in, he enjoys jumping and climbing, Ball noted.
In Ohio, Khristi Cunningham is also raising biracial twins. The kids received a lot of media attention as children, but Cunningham didn’t mind.
The mother in Manchester, England, says she and her partner, Kade, are constantly raising questions about their young son. Mendelsohn likened it to tossing a coin eight times. “Sometimes it will top all eight times. And it’s like that when you have a bunch of genes,” he said. “They are all randomly shuffled and you can get all sorts of results.”
We really believe that telling others about our experiences is our responsibility. To start a dialogue about race in the US and to show the uninitiated that these things are possible, we believe we were gifted these two lovely children.
It is not an achievement or something to be proud of, but you are a gift. Either way we still love our children so much, there is no one on this Earth who can stand in line to choose their skin color. It just so happens that we’re brown, or black, or white
