Teen people August 2003

Sister Act: Cheryl Grant looks white. Karen Grant looks black. For these twins, race relations is a family affair.(Real Life/Get Personal)
by Butler, Juliet

It has pictures of the father, mother and daughters.

Teen People; 8/1/2003; Butler, Juliet

Byline: Juliet Butler

One day, when they were 10 years old, twin sisters Cheryl and Karen Grant were crossing the street when a boy pointed at Karen and started shouting: “N*gger!” Cheryl took off after him, angrily chasing him all the way home. “I was so furious,” Cheryl, now 19, recalls. “Especially when I banged on the door and his grandfather came out and didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. I got even madder when he refused to believe we were twins and called me a liar….”

That kind of ugly racism was rare in Chelmsford, England, where the girls grew up, but strangers’ looks of disbelief were more common. Even their parents–Linda, a white Englishwoman who works in a fabric shop, and Carl, a Jamaican bricklayer–were shocked when the nurse directed them to the different-color babies in the hospital. After all, doctors call the odds of such a pair a major long shot. “It’s a million-to-one chance,” says Karen, adding with a laugh: “As far as the whole science thing goes, I’m normal and Cheryl’s the freak of nature!”

So what happened? Every child receives half her genes from her mother and half from her father. Karen’s skin is darker because black pigmentation genes, which are usually dominant, masked most of her mother’s recessive white ones. In Cheryl’s case, though, it appears no black genes at all were handed down. “It is likely that their father has white genes in his ancestry and those were the ones he passed on to her,” says Anand Saggar, M.D., a clinical genetics expert in London. (Karen and Cheryl’s siblings–Leanne, 18, and Wayne, 17–look like a blend of their parents’ skin tones.)

Face-to-face with such rarities, people are far more likely to presume dark-haired Karen and ash-blonde Cheryl are friends rather than sisters. And people who saw them out with their parents often assumed Mom and Dad must be their baby-sitters. “It drove my mom up the wall,” says Karen.

It got to the girls sometimes too. “I still remember getting odd looks from passersby as I walked along holding Dad’s hand,” says Cheryl. “They were obviously thinking, `What’s that black guy doing with that little blonde girl?’ It was weird.”

Sometimes, other people’s reactions even triggered doubts in the girls themselves. “It got me and Cheryl worried that [we weren’t] really their daughters,” says Karen. “So we asked my mother if I was adopted. She got out our birth certificates and showed us photos of when we were newborns.”

Without the stares, the girls might not have even considered themselves unusual. “Because we’ve always been this way, we don’t really think about it unless someone points it out,” says Cheryl. They were treated the same as their siblings by their parents (who separated eight years ago), and, as girls, they were always dressed in similar clothes and received the same birthday presents. As they got older, they both participated in local beauty contests and competed in figure skating. In school no one seemed to notice anything unusual, either. “The other kids thought it was cool we were twins,” says Karen, “but they didn’t make a big deal about us being black and white and never treated us differently.”

Still, there were times when the twins’ color did seem to complicate things. While Karen says she never wanted to be white, Cheryl often wished she resembled Karen and her other siblings more: “I’d love to have a bit of color like my brother and sisters.” She also would get confused about her heritage. Once, she ticked off a box on a school form identifying herself as white. “I just presumed `white’ meant `English,’ and since all my friends ticked that box, I did too,” Cheryl says. Her dad, who always encouraged her to be proud of her black roots, told her to tick the “black” one in the future, which she did. “But you know,” she says, “if I ticked that now and then turned up for an interview, they’d think: `Er, who’s this?’”

These days Cheryl and Karen feel it’s easier to let people assume they’re friends. “I like that we don’t have to stop and explain our story for hours,” says Karen. Cheryl attends Leeds University, where she is studying fashion design, and Karen is majoring in accounting at Anglia Polytechnic University. They still share clothes, but now when they get dressed up, it’s to go listen to garage bands and R&B. “We’re closer than ever!” says Karen.

They also share the same philosophy about dating: “When it comes to choosing boyfriends,” says Cheryl, “we both go for personality, regardless of skin color.” Karen is currently dating a guy from Nigeria, and she told him that if they had a baby, it could be white. “He was like, `No way!’” she says. The chances are very slim, but if it happened, it certainly wouldn’t bother the twins. Says Cheryl: “We’re happy being who we are.”

[QUOTE:]

“I STILL REMEMBER GETTING ODD LOOKS FROM PASSERSBY AS I WALKED ALONG HOLDING DAD’S HAND. THEY WERE OBVIOUSLY THINKING, `WHAT’S THAT BLACK GUY DOING WITH THAT LITTLE BLONDE GIRL?’”

WOW! Is this a Grown up making this statment *sigh*……

Lyonside your on point Two thumbs up!!!! *smiles*

I just meant that its origins are European (it used to be the English word/slur for Anglo-Indians) - and that it’s not one that you’d particularly hear in SA.

It is? My European roommates and college friends didn’t. The term still irks me - implying color and social status in the negative. And I didn’t find the term used in either of the linked articles.

No offense, but what’s this supposed to mean? “half-caste” is a European term, leave Jo’berg out of it! Of course there *are* plenty of other racially insensitve names, but please!

Morgan Says: Dutch people and people in Europe in general are much more colorblind and tolerant than Americans.

I have to disagree with you there - I know plenty of Indian-Brits and African-Belgians who have been shat on by society to agree with that!