Two of the cutest then 5-year-old friends posed for a photo at school, complete with their coordinating outfits and adorable smiles. However, an awestruck mother couldn’t believe what she saw when she looked at the picture.
Being a parent is a full-time job. That’s why, in 2019, when Britney Tankersley’s son Myles suddenly told her at 8:00 PM that he needed matching clothes for him and his “twin” the next day, it was not surprising.
“Twin Day” was coming up, and the kindergartener was excited to look the part. Luckily, in true supermom style, Tankersley managed to find identical clothes for her then 5-year-old son and his unknown twin at the last moment.
This was no easy feat as she knew nothing about Myles’s long-lost ‘sibling.’ Nevertheless, she eventually managed to get hold of the mysterious boy’s mom Lakendra Watts, recollecting:
“I finally got her [the mom’s] number about 8:30 PM and asked if she was OK with the boys being twins the next day. She didn’t mind.”
It was 9:00 PM when she picked out matching shirts in Walmart. The next day, she asked the teacher to send her a photo of her son with his doppelganger named Tanner. What Tankersley received shocked her.
Expecting to see a high level of resemblance, when this mother received the photo, she was taken aback and yet touched: Tanner was African-American. Tankersley expressed:
“I expect to get a picture of another white child… but I didn’t get that at all. And I said, ‘That is the sweetest thing in the whole world.'”
The mom stated that she found it so moving that it brought her to tears. Deeply affected by the photo, Tankersley took to social media, sharing the picture with all her online friends.
Posting the snapshot on Facebook, she told the story of what happened, tagging Tanner’s mother Watts in the post. Tankersley partially penned:
“Wouldn’t the world be such a better place if we could all view it through the eyes of a couple 5yr olds. [sic]”
The picture went completely viral. Since it was shared on October 29, 2019, the photo has received more than 508,000 reactions, 277,000 shares, and 50,000 comments
Nobody could find a negative remark in the comment section, with many commenting on how much they loved the story. One fellow Facebooker wrote:
“That brought tears to my eyes how angels see no color but just a friend God’s good all the time Amen 💗💗💗 🎉 🎉 🥳🥳 👍 👍 [sic].”
Twins or not, it looks like these two little boys made an impact that many of us can only dream of in a whole lifetime.
Myles and Tanner, their mothers, and many online individuals embraced the 5-year-olds’ different races. However, there are those who, still to this day, express and enact bigoted views.
One woman Rhonda Lux, now Rhonda Fils-Aimé, was a victim of this. She was raised as “white,” forced to straighten her hair and wear sunscreen.
Although she was of German, French, and Indian descent, Fils-Aimé was treated differently from her other siblings.
At 49 years old, she did some digging and found that while her mother was white, her father was black. More specifically, Haitian.
Let’s hope that as society moves forward, these instances will fade away and truly become dark stories of the past.
