Two Colors, One Race

Twins Hayleigh and Lauren Durrant were newsworthy from their birth in 2001: Hayleigh’s skin and hair is dark brown like her dad, while Lauren has light skin, blue eyes, and red hair like her mom.

Their parents are described by the Sun as “mixed race,” which is misleading: the girls and their parents are all part of the human race, with the most noticeable (but superficial) difference being different amounts of skin pigment. That’s why Hayleigh and her dad have darker brown skin, while Lauren and her mom have lighter brown skin. It is a powerful reminder of the Bible’s teaching that we are all equally human, descendants of the same ancestors (through Noah), with “race” an artificial human construct.

Mother Alison has now “repeated the two-tone miracle.”

If that story’s not powerful enough, mother Alison has now “repeated the two-tone miracle,” the Sun reports. The family’s newest additions, twins Leah and Miya, are likewise not the same skin shade. Leah’s skin, like Lauren’s and their mother’s, is light brown, while Miya’s, like Hayleigh’s and their father’s, is dark brown.

Alison reports that “Lauren and Hayleigh think the new arrivals are fantastic,” and the Sun story includes several photographs of the now six-member family.

Thankfully, father Dean says that while “some people have looked at us a little bit funny . . . [l]ooking so different has never caused them any problems.” Nonetheless, schoolmates of Hayleigh and Lauren have erroneously said, “You can’t be twins because you’re different colors.”

Of course, it’s sad that this story has to be any more surprising than twins born with different hair color. In reality, siblings—or a couple—with different skin color is essentially as genetically trivial as siblings or a couple with different hair or eye color. Only about one hundredth of a percent of human biological variation concerns “racial” characteristics—so two people of different races can actually be more similar, genetically, than two people of the same race.

But the schoolmates’ comments reveal how society’s imposed construct of “race” is distorted—even to the point of not recognizing others as fully human. How tragic the crimes that have been committed in the name of “races”!

We also covered mixed-color twins born in Germany in July 2008, so the situation is not completely uncommon and is likely becoming more common as the stigma against interracial marriage collapses. In fact, in 2006 the Sun tracked down four other such sets of mixed-color twins, and Answers in Genesis has reported on others over the years. Make sure others know how erroneous the idea of “races” really is—and stories like this are a great place to start. Genesis gives us the true background of the human race, and when we hold a biblical worldview, news like this isn’t so surprising (nor in any way unsettling).