"One World"

Last night, I was having coffee with my friend Philip when the talk turned to race. Although the polls had only just closed, it was already pretty clear that Deval Patrick was about become the first black governor of Massachusetts and only the second black governor in American history. Although I was excited for Patrick's landslide victory, I found the slow pace of change – nearly 150 years after Emancipation – more than a little disheartening.

Philip, who is Jamaican, commented that America, for all of its talk of racial equality, actually lags behind the much of the rest of the world in terms of racial progress. "Jamaica," he said, "is much more of a true melting pot than America will ever be. Here, you talk equality, but everyone keeps very much to himself."

Jamaica, he argued, with it's national slogan "One World," was really much more of a true melting pot, as just about everyone there is, to varying degrees, of mixed raced. Philip is part Caucasian, Chinese, African, and about a half a dozen other things. "The Jamaican ideal is to look like me: All the races blended into one." Philip is not modest.

"The funny thing," he said, "is that sometimes the races are imperfectly blended." Apparently, last year there was a new story about a pair of twin girls born to a mixed-race couple, where one sister was black and the other white. The sisters were fraternal twins, of course, and one sister had inherited a gene for dark skin and the other sister had inherited a gene for pale skin.

Although intrigued, I was convinced this had to be some sort photo hoax that had become a well-traveled urban legend. But in fact, Philip was quite right.

Meet twin sisters Kian (left) and Remee (right) Horder:



According to the Daily Mail, the twins were born to a British couple of mixed ancestry: Both parents had white mothers and black fathers. In order for two babies to be born with such dramatically different skin color, a sperm containing all black genes must fuse with an egg containing all black genes, and a sperm with all white genes must fuse with a similar egg. The odds of this occurring, caculates the Daily Mail, are about 100,000,000 to one.

I'm no statistician, but I do know that every year there are more than 1 million live births in the world. So that means …

Yes, there was another set of black-and-white twins born in 2006. Twin sisters Alicia (left) and Jasmin (right) Singerl were born in May to an Australian couple. According to News.com, their mother Natasha Knight, 35, has Jamaican-English heritage, and their father, Michael Singerl, 34, is Caucasian.

Although I tend to agree with Philip that we would become "One World" much faster if we were all a little bit brown, I think having a twin sibling of a different race would be much, much cooler. Variety, they say, is the spice of life.