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It's a "skin tone modifier". It's designed to be used in combination with a "proper" emoji to change its skin tone.
The vendor (whoever is turning the unicode character sequences into actual emojis) should combine the two, but if the vendor hasn't done this yet - and some of them haven't, notably Chrome - you will see the skin tone modifier and the emoji together in sequence.
Technical spec is here: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/tr51-2.html#Diversity
A less dry description of the concept is here: http://mashable.com/2015/02/26/diverse-emoji-explainer/#tmwO8bkYzsqC
Vendor support levels here: http://caniemoji.com/