Tag: Rachel Dolezal

Key figure from #blacklivesmatter outed as white

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.”

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.

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.

Source: Breitbart

Ilana Mercer: Rachel Dolezal: A Racially Abused Girl—Really

Not so fast, Rachel Dolezal. The country is not finished with you yet. It merely got distracted. We scampered in other directions: onto the “genocidal” Confederate flag and the depraved-heart murders of Freddy Gray (black) and Kathryn Steinle. More “Black Lives Matter” riots took place. Not one “White Lives Matter” march was held. (And as one wag tweeted, Ms. Steinle didn’t sufficiently resemble Barack Obama’s daughters for him to give a damn.)

Since Dolezal dropped-off the radar, a lot has happened. It’s safe to say, however, that everyone is still barking mad, forever poised to heap scorn on her fake Afro.

Dolezal, if you’re from Deep Space, is the lily white woman who dared to “identify” as a black woman. The “Racial Industrial Complex” (a Jack Kerwick coinage) is populated with frauds, shysters, imposters, phonies, morons; black, white and 50 shades of gray.

Ms. Dolezal had been posing as all of these, teaching mambo-jumbo studies at the bush college of Eastern Washington University. Our American Idiocracy confers the respect and the authority of a pedagogue on many like her, allowing them to spread the disease to college kids and beyond.

Why not Rachel?

The Age of the Idiot sees killers exculpated, just because they kill. As the reasoning goes, if an individual has murdered, raped, or is a feckless jailhouse whore—then he or she must have been abused, neglected, racially oppressed (if black or brown); not wealthy enough, mentally ill, lacking in self-esteem. Anything but plain bad, slothful, sociopathic or parasitical. The more aberrant the crime; the more thrill-seeking, vulgar, immoral or wicked the conduct—the more elaborate, fanciful and scientifically baseless the excuse-making.

In fact, around this if B then A, backward, erroneous reasoning, an industry has arisen. It’s called psychiatry. The psychiatric endeavor—voodoo, really—is premised on the medicalization of misconduct. The reason Ms. Dolezal has been denied the benefits of this excuse-making industry is that she has encroached on black supremacy’s turf. This protected turf acts as a medieval guild or a modern trade union. In cahoots with the state, the “Racial-Industrial Complex” protects its members from competition, by limiting entry into the professionally aggrieved class.

To be black, you see, is more than a pigment; it’s an identity, a politics, an entitlement, one-upmanship, a lifetime IOY (I Own You).

Poor Rachel painted her face orange, gave herself a Sideshow Bob hairdo, and adopted the ideology of the eternally oppressed. Big deal. Most of America’s authentic poseurs are phonies who’ve never been oppressed.

Unlike most blacks, Dolezal—by the admission of the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Washington-State chapter—had done “quality work” to “elevate the issues of civil rights.”

“I just want to feel beautiful, and this is how I feel beautiful,” the woman said rather plaintively. Yes, Dolezal is the white face of parental and societal displacement. Why am I the only one to find her pitiful, even deserving of pity?

In America, black is beautiful.

To be black is to be more righteous, nobler; carry the heaviest historic baggage—heavier than the Holocaust—and be encouraged to perpetually and publicly pick at those suppurating sores.

To be black is to have an unwritten, implicit social contract with wider, whiter society.

To be black is to be born with an IOY; it is to be owed apologies, obsequiousness, education, and auto-exculpation for any wrongdoing.

Why can’t Rachel have some of that?

Was not Ms. Dolezal displaced for real in her parents’ affections? Rachel’s story should begin with parents Larry and Ruthanne Dolezal, who adopted four children, “three of whom were African-American while the other was from Haiti.”

Does this fashionable adoption not send a message to a vulnerable girl that she and her biological brother are too pale for their pious parents?

Spokesperson for the quasi-black Brady Bunch is Ezra Dolezal. Ezra grew up in the diversity worshiping, evangelical, Dolezal household. He now lectures his estranged sister about her shenanigans in black-face.

The Chutzpah!

The once anemic-looking, fair-skinned Rachel was raised with a real sense that she was not black enough for her parents. Why do I say “real”? Because, like Angelina Jolie, Larry and Ruthanne Dolezal kept acquiring kids more colorful than their own.

Kids are needy creatures. Parenting is a complex endeavor. However great their reservoirs of love, sense of fair play and goodwill—two parents do not have enough of the good stuff to spread among six kids. Mark my words: Brangelina’s beautiful, biological offspring will also one day display signs of childhood racial abuse.

Lest I be called on the carpet (or the mosaic floor, rather) for deploying the backward reasoning I previously deplored:

I am not here psychologizing Dolezal’s perplexing behavior. No need. By reality’s standards—not those unscientifically set by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–∞/eternity)—Rachel was displaced. Dolezal has thus recreated the primal scene of her childhood by becoming in adulthood—experientially, at least—blacker than her adopted brothers and sisters.

She deserves a break.

**
Ilana Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the U.S. She is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Her latest book is “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com. Follow her on Twitter.“Friend” her on Facebook.

Rachel Dolezal is right: White self-hate is only logical, says US ‘academic’

Writing in the Huffington Post, a US author and “Director of P-12 Consulting and Professional Development at the Center for the Study of Race Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania”, Ali Michael, argues that she dan identify with Rachel Dolezal’s attempt to disguise herself as a black and renounce her white identity. Below, Michael says:

“I definitely experienced this. There was a time in my 20s when everything I learned about the history of racism made me hate myself, my Whiteness, my ancestors… and my descendants. I remember deciding that I couldn’t have biological children because I didn’t want to propagate my privilege biologically.”

Here is a slightly shortened version of Ali Michael’s column, originally entitled, I sometimes don’t want to be white either.

Rachel Dolezal is a fascinating case study in White racial identity development.* She is stuck in the immersion/emersion stage, in which White people, having learned extensively about the realities of racism, and the ugly history of White supremacy in the U.S., “immerse” themselves in trying to figure out how to be White in our society, and “emerge” with a new relationship to Whiteness. Only in the case of Dolezal, her way of dealing with the pain of the reality of racism, was to deny her own Whiteness and to become Black.

She is an extreme example of a common phenomenon. The “immersion” stage is typified by White people taking more responsibility for racism and privilege and often experiencing high levels of anger and embarrassment for racism and privilege, which they sometimes direct towards other Whites. They sometimes try to immerse themselves in communities of color, as Dolezal did. She’s not alone.

I definitely experienced this. There was a time in my 20s when everything I learned about the history of racism made me hate myself, my Whiteness, my ancestors… and my descendants. I remember deciding that I couldn’t have biological children because I didn’t want to propagate my privilege biologically.

If I was going to pass on my privilege, I wanted to pass it on to someone who doesn’t have racial privilege; so I planned to adopt. I disliked my Whiteness, but I disliked the Whiteness of other White people more. I felt like the way to really end racism was to feel guilty for it, and to make other White people feel guilty for it too. And then, like Dolezal, I wanted to take on Africanness. Living in South Africa during my junior year abroad, I lived with a Black family, wore my hair in head wraps, shaved my head. I didn’t want to be White, but if I had to be, I wanted to be White in a way that was different from other White people I knew. I wanted to be a special, different White person. The one and only. How very White of me…

Beverly Daniel Tatum has written that White people don’t choose to identify as White because the categories to choose from are loaded from the start. Traditionally, one can identify as a colorblind White person, a racist White person or an ignorant White person: those are the three ways White people get talked about as White. If those are the options, who would choose to identify as White? And so White people identify as “normal” and “Irish” and “just American” and do not self-identify racially. And that leaves us with a society in which only people of color have a race, where only people of color seem to be responsible for racialized problems. It makes it hard for all of us to know and tell our racial stories — because White people think we don’t have any. And it makes it hard for us to own our history, because we don’t see it as ours.

Many White people also feel like we don’t have culture, and this isn’t a coincidence.

Throughout the 20th century, countless immigrant groups abandoned the artifacts of cultures that racialized them as immigrants (language, religion, food, styles of speaking, gesticulations, family structures, traditions, etc.) in order to become White. And this was not just a matter of fitting in; it was about accessing rights that were reserved for White people: citizenship, land ownership, police protection, legal rights, etc.

The more one could cast off the markers of otherness, the more likely it was that one could become White. And so while the desire to become White is really the opposite of what Rachel Dolezal had, the process of becoming White that her ancestors undoubtedly went through in the great American star-off machine, may be connected to her desire to un-become White, to lose that feeling of being cultureless, of being part of an unidentified group, and to leave behind that identity that has no positive way to be. And lots of White people — myself included — do this in thousands of tiny ways as we appropriate the cultures of others (from Africa, India, Compton, Guatemala, Harlem, Mexico…) to fill in the blanks in our own.

Daniel Tatum said we need to change this. We need to give White people new ways to identify as White. Because at the end of the day, we need White people to see that we are White. When we recognize and own our Whiteness, we can account for our own portion, our one 1/billionth of responsibility for what White people have done throughout history. We can work with other White people to begin to challenge bias, ignorance and colorblindness. We can use our privilege to confront the sources of that unfair favoring.

I was lucky. The Black family I embedded myself in during my “Rachel Dolezal phase” insisted on my inherent goodness, and that of my family and even — I thought this was a stretch — of my ancestors. They helped me focus on my capacity to make change as a White person. They appreciated my desire to be Black, they teased me, they let me know in no uncertain terms that I would never be Black. I read James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Steve Biko. I swore off White authors. But the Black authors I read saw the immersion stage coming, and they reminded me that Black people don’t need White people to help them pursue liberation, that the job of White people lies with teaching other White people, seeing ourselves clearly, owning our role in oppression.

I’m not sure what happened with Rachel Dolezal. Maybe it was mental illness. Maybe it was a desire to connect to her adopted brothers. Maybe she felt safer and more loved in Black communities. Maybe it felt good to distance herself from the overwhelming oppressiveness of Whiteness — her own and that of her country and of her ancestors. But the lesson for me is remembering how deep the pain is, the pain of realizing I’m White, and that I and my ancestors are responsible for the incredible racialized mess we find ourselves in today. The pain of facing that honestly is blinding. It’s not worse than being on the receiving end of that oppression. – Ali Michael

 

*White racial identity development was first theorized and written about by Dr. Janet Helms.

 

Fake black Dolezal accuses brother of sexual abuse

Even as Rachel Dolezal, the Spokane NAACP president whose parents outed her as white, resigned from the organization on Monday ahead of a “Today” show interview, another Dolezal was thrust into the spotlight.

It was revealed Monday that Dolezal’s older brother Joshua Dolezal is awaiting trial on charges he sexually abused a black child — charges that the Dolezal family, in their own television appearance, implied Rachel Dolezal may have helped orchestrate. Joshua Dolezal is contesting the charges and is free on $15,000 bail while awaiting trial, according to the Denver Post.

Joshua Dolezal’s troubles could explain at least one piece of the complicated puzzle behind this saga, the question of why Rachel Dolezal’s parents would expose their daughter to such public humiliation and perhaps legal jeopardy.

Joshua Dolezal, 39, is the eldest child of the Dolezal clan. Rachel is his only biological sibling — Lawrence and Ruthanne Dolezal have four adopted children, some of whom are black. Joshua now faces four felony counts of sexual assault in Colorado, according to reports in the New York Daily News, the Denver Post and other local outlets that have been confirmed by The Washington Post.

The alleged incidents of sexual assault, according to a Clear Creek County affidavit in support of an arrest warrant obtained by the Daily News and reviewed by The Post, occurred at Lawrence and Ruthanne’s house in Colorado “in 2001 or 2002.” The victim, whose name was redacted in the affidavit, “was 6 or 7 years old,” and Joshua Dolezal was “19 years older.”

Among other accusations: On two occasions, according to the affidavit, Joshua Dolezal allegedly forced the victim to perform oral sex on him. On “7 or 8″ other occasions, Dolezal performed oral sex on the victim.

“Don’t tell anyone or I’ll hurt you,” Joshua allegedly said.

The affidavit included claims that an older incident of alleged abuse of another victim in 1991 had a racial element.

“The family had a subscription to National Geographic magazine,” it read. “… Joshua Dolezal showed [redacted] his collection of photos of topless and naked African women.”

It continued: “Joshua Dolezal was turned on by the black body and was curious about black women sexually.”

The abuse was reported in 2013, and Joshua Dolezal was arrested last year. The victim, according to the affidavit, “wanted to report the incident now because Joshua Dolezal has a one year old daughter and [redacted] does not want the daughter to be victimized.”

Dolezal will be tried in August, as ABC 7 Denver reported.

The allegations against Joshua Dolezal are significant because, in interviews with The Post and other outlets, the Dolezals alleged Rachel orchestrated them to win custody of her brother Izaiah. Izaiah, who is black, lives with Rachel Dolezal in Spokane — and Rachel says he is her son, the family alleged.

The parents of Rachel Dolezal, the civil rights activist under fire for her disputed racial identity, say they don’t know what caused their biological daughter to call herself African American.

Lawrence and Ruthanne Dolezal, without specifically addressing the charges against their son, broadly denied such behavior as well as Rachel Dolezal’s allegations that she was physically abused as a child.

“If she’s alleging there was abuse in our family from years past, then it’s false and there’s no need to comment on anything of that nature,” Lawrence Dolezal told The Post last week. “That’s just utter falsehood.”

“The allegations are totally false and malicious,” Ruthanne Dolezal told Megyn Kelly of Fox News when she asked about them Monday. “They’re fabricated.”

“Rachel Dolezal dismisses the controversy as little more than an ugly byproduct of contentious litigation between other family members over allegations of past abuse that has divided the family,” the paper said. “She’s particularly suspicious of the timing, noting that the allegations broke on her son’s birthday and come as the Colorado lawsuit … nears a key juncture.” While she referred to a lawsuit, the charges in Colorado are criminal.

Though it’s not clear when and how the Dolezals became so divided, insight into the warring family comes from an unlikely source: the published writing of Joshua Dolezal, the accused.

Joshua Dolezal is an English professor at Central College, a private liberal arts college in Pella, Iowa. His work, much of it nonfiction, has appeared in respected publications such as the Kenyon Review, and the University of Iowa Press published his memoir — which includes many references to his sister Rachel.

“Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging” offers the most complete picture heretofore of Rachel Dolezal’s broken marriage. According to Lawrence Dolezal, she was married to a black man, Kevin Moore, and the couple divorced in 2004.

Joshua Dolezal saw signs of trouble. In many passages, Rachel Dolezal is portrayed as the victim of an unhappy marriage whose husband won’t let her and their young child leave the house — a woman who does what her spouse says when he says it.

Joshua Dolezal was angry. “I murdered him hundreds of times in my sleep,” he wrote of his former black brother-in-law. Eventually, the couple separated.

Of course, a memoir isn’t a fact-checked, reported news story and the ex-husband has been unavailable for comment and has not responded to numerous published accounts of her claims. But Joshua Dolezal said he did his best.

“To remember is to reconstruct and interpret,” he wrote in an author’s note, “and this is as truthful a story as my memory can tell.”

Source: Washington Post