Why Do People Imitate Oppressed Groups?
How Do They Manage to Get Into Positions of Power Among Them?
Did
Black Lives Matter Organizer Shaun King
Mislead Oprah Winfrey By Pretending To
Be Biracial?
Source: 19 Aug 2015
An
investigative blogger has accused Shaun King, a
key figure in the Black Lives Matter movement, of misleading media icon
Oprah Winfrey by pretending to be biracial in order to qualify for an
“Oprah scholarship” to historically black Morehouse College. The blogger
says King is white and has been lying about his ethnicity for years.
King is a
high-profile campaigner
against “police brutality” and “justice correspondent” for
the liberal Daily Kos website who told Rebel magazine in 2012 that he was biracial,
with the magazine reporting that he is the “son of a Caucasian mother and an
African-American father.” He has also described himself as “mixed with a black
family” on Twitter.
King has been
lionised by the press, praised as hero of civil rights and social activism. He
has written extensively about a childhood in which he was terrorised by
“decades old racial tensions.” He claims to have been “the
focus of constant abuse of the resident rednecks of my school.”
Yet, in recent
weeks, rumours have been circulating about his ethnicity. A
1995 police incident report lists Shaun King’s ethnicity as white. And
blogger Vicki Pate, who has been assembling forensic
accounts of Shaun
King’s background and family tree on her blog, “Re-NewsIt!,” has published
her findings.
She claims
that King is entirely white and says a birth certificate, which Breitbart has since independently
acquired from the
Kentucky Office of Vital Statistics, names a white man as his father.
King’s case echoes
that of Rachel Dolezal, a civil rights activist from Washington who claimed
to be biracial while in fact being of caucasian origin. Dolezal continues
to insist she “identifies as black,” despite her parents revealing that
she is entirely white.
If Pate is right,
Shaun King, who often uses black and white photographs of himself online
rather than colour images, may have misled African-American
hero Winfrey by applying for and accepting an Oprah Scholarship to the
historically black Morehouse College. Oprah Scholarships are given exclusively to black men.
In his Daily Kos diary, King refers to himself as a
“brother,” writing: “Oprah Winfrey paid my way through Morehouse. The
leadership scholarship that I received from her is why I have a college degree
today. Five hundred other brothers have the exact same story.”
Shaun King’s
biography has attracted the attention of bloggers and journalists thanks
to several bizarre inconsistencies in his public claims. He often struggles
when asked to recall basic facts about his own life. For instance, in
August 2014, King wrote on Twitter
that he was father to three “black girls,” while, six months earlier, he claimed
to be father to four.
It is of course
possible that a family tragedy is responsible for the inconsistency, but
the unexplained change in biographical details is not a one-off. In
October 2009, King claimed to have
endured four spinal surgeries. By February 2010, the number of surgeries had shrunk to three.
There is also some confusion about when an alleged car crash may or may not have
happened.
As it turns out,
these explosive new racial allegations are just the latest in a string of
controversies surrounding Shaun King: on July 21, a conservative blog reported
that his account of a “brutal, racially-motivated beating” in 1995, which at
least two reports have described as “Kentucky’s first hate crime,” did
not match up with a police report from the case.
“King, 35, has
related the story of the hate crime on his blogs and in his recent self-help
book, seemingly to bolster his credibility as an activist and as a self-help
guru,” wrote
the Daily Caller‘s Chuck Ross.
“While King has said that he was attacked by up to a dozen ‘racist’ and
‘redneck’ students, official records show that the altercation involved only
one other student.”
“And while King has
claimed that he
suffered a ‘brutal’ beating that left him clinging to life, the police
report characterized King’s injuries as ‘minor,'” Ross reported.
This month, more
details have emerged from King’s account that do not match up with the police
report or eyewitness accounts from journalists who noticed that King’s
public claims did not square with reality.
Remarkably, King’s own
publication the Daily Kos, at
which he is listed as a
staff writer, ran a provocatively titled blog post in July of this
year: “Is
there something fishy about Shaun King?” The post alleged that people
had been asking questions about King for
some time and linked to the earlier Daily
Caller report.
“While I know that
it’s in a right-wing publication, there was something that prevented me from
instantly dismissing the article … I’ve seen a number of people on Daily Kos complain that Shaun plays fast and
loose with the truth,” wrote
contributor Burt Miles. “So I started to do some digging on the
Internet and found a lot of information which, if true, makes me very
concerned about Shaun, his motives, and how his actions could reflect badly on
this site and be used to smear the Black Lives Matter movement.”
Miles continued:
“Is there anything to all this, or is it some kind of organized smear
campaign? And, if it is a smear campaign, how does it involve so many
different sites, publications and individuals?”
It was around the
same time that Breitbart contacted
Vicki Pate, who has been investigating King’s claims for several years.
Pate provided key documents that appear to show that King has two white
parents and that he has been lying to the public about his race.
One of them is his
birth certificate, listing his parents as Naomi Kay Fleming and Jeffery Wayne
King and a birth date of September 17, 1979 in Versailles, Kentucky. King
had already told
journalists his mother was white. So all that remained for Pate to
determine was whether his father was white too.
King has always
claimed that his father is black. But King’s father, Jeffery, is white, says
Pate. She points to a man born 11
November 1955 in Campbell, Kentucky who has been the subject of multiple arrests, including
for motoring and drug offences. That birth date would make him 23 at the
time of Shaun King’s birth, the same age given on Shaun’s birth certificate.
The Jeffery Wayne
King whose name and date of birth concord with Shaun King’s birth
certificate is pictured below, in a 2007 police mug shot. Various documents
give his name as “Jeffery” and “Jeffrey” Wayne King, names which are common
variants of one another, but King Snr’s date of birth and place of residence
is the same in all records.
 |
| Jeffery Wayne King in 2007 |
What’s more, Pate says
she has definitively linked the man pictured in these mugshots to Shaun King
via Shaun’s brother, Kentucky Air Guard Russ King, who is also clearly
caucasian. Finally, public
records show only one J Wayne King in the state.
By 2015,
Shaun King had finessed his account of growing up black and suffering
discrimination. “I was raised in rural Kentucky,” he told the blog Generation Progress. “It was actually
pretty rough. African Americans faced a lot of racism and discrimination
growing up. I never really experienced overt racism myself until high school,”
he
claimed.
“I was put into a
weird position when a huge group of students (who called themselves
“rednecks”) hated me for no reason.”
King must have
known while giving interviews as late as 2015 that Vicki Pate was tracking
down his family history. But he continued to deliver craftily-worded answers
to interview questions that gave the impression he was a person of color
and that he had been the victim of hate crimes.
Neither is
true, says Pate. She told Breitbart last
night that King has never denied her accusations. “Shaun King has
not denied the story to me, or anyone else, as far as I know,” she said.
“Whenever it is mentioned on Twitter he simply blocks whoever is asking and
reports them for ‘harassment.’ He did reply to one person but only to say,
‘Haters gonna hate.’ I myself have been suspended from Twitter just for posing
the question.”
King did not
return multiple requests for
comment via email and social media. He has since blocked us, too.
Follow Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) on Twitter
or write to him at milo@breitbart.com.
