Twins run for US office – as rivals
Kentwood: Twins Monica Sparks and Jessica Ann Tyson are identical in almost every way.
The African-American sisters running for local office in the US state of Michigan forged an unbreakable bond during a childhood tarred by abuse. They wear the same white dress and even finish each other’s sentences.
But their choice of jewellery – a blue flower pin for Sparks, a red one for Tyson – gives away the one key thing separating the 46-year-old women: their political stripes.
Sparks is a Democrat. Tyson is a Republican.
They say they are proof positive that political differences can be overcome, even in an increasingly polarised America.
“It just baffles our mind why people hate each other,” Tyson said in a joint interview with her sister.
Sparks and Tyson live in neighbouring electoral districts in the Midwestern state – part of the country’s traditionally Democratic Rust Belt that, against all odds, helped Donald Trump win the presidency.
Each is campaigning for a seat on the governing board that oversees Kent County, which is home to 640,000 people and is the state’s second most populous area, after Detroit.
The primary election is on Aug 7. Sparks faces several Democratic rivals, while Tyson is running unopposed for the Republicans.
The twins say they agree on broad ideas: they both want to live a life of service and to reduce political discord. The rest, they say, can be negotiated.
Sparks and Tyson say they have been close all of their lives, relying on each other as children when they couldn’t rely on adults.
Born in 1972 to a heroin-addicted mother in the state capital Lansing, they were sent to a terrible foster home at the age of five.
“We went through a lot of abuse together,” Tyson says. “And together we got through.”
The girls eventually were adopted by loving parents, who instilled in them a sense of civic duty.
Now, they hope to serve in a formal political capacity.
Their bond was tested when Tyson endorsed the Republican running in Sparks’s district, instead of her own sister, but both say family and sisterhood come first.
“I celebrate her as a woman, and all of the accomplishments that she has made,” Tyson says of her sister.
“And no amount of winning or losing, or politics, will stop the love that I have for her.”