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 \u201cOprah scholarship\u201d to historically black Morehouse College. The blogger says King is white and has been lying about his ethnicity for years.<\/p>\n
King is a high-profile campaigner against \u201cpolice brutality\u201d and \u201cjustice correspondent\u201d for the liberal Daily Kos website who told Rebel magazine in 2012 that he was biracial, with the magazine reporting that he is the \u201cson of a Caucasian mother and an African-American father.\u201d He has also described himself as \u201cmixed with a black family\u201d on Twitter.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cdecades old racial tensions.\u201d He claims to have been \u201cthe focus of constant abuse of the resident rednecks of my school.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet, in recent weeks, rumours have been circulating about his ethnicity. A 1995 police incident report lists Shaun King\u2019s ethnicity as white. And blogger Vicki Pate, who has been assembling forensic accounts of Shaun King\u2019s background and family tree on her blog, \u201cRe-NewsIt!,\u201d has published her findings.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
King\u2019s 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 \u201cidentifies as black,\u201d despite her parents revealing that she is entirely white.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In his Daily Kos diary, King refers to himself as a \u201cbrother,\u201d writing: \u201cOprah 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shaun King\u2019s 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 \u201cblack girls,\u201d while, six months earlier, he claimed to be father to four.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cbrutal, racially-motivated beating\u201d in 1995, which at least two reports have described as \u201cKentucky\u2019s first hate crime,\u201d did not match up with a police report from the case.<\/p>\n
\u201cKing, 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,\u201d wrote the Daily Caller\u2018s Chuck Ross. \u201cWhile King has said that he was attacked by up to a dozen \u2018racist\u2019 and \u2018redneck\u2019 students, official records show that the altercation involved only one other student.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd while King has claimed that he suffered a \u2018brutal\u2019 beating that left him clinging to life, the police report characterized King\u2019s injuries as \u2018minor,’\u201d Ross reported.<\/p>\n
This month, more details have emerged from King\u2019s account that do not match up with the police report or eyewitness accounts from journalists who noticed that King\u2019s public claims did not square with reality.<\/p>\n
Remarkably, King\u2019s 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: \u201cIs there something fishy about Shaun King?\u201d The post alleged that people had been asking questions about King for some time and linked to the earlier Daily Caller report.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile I know that it\u2019s in a right-wing publication, there was something that prevented me from instantly dismissing the article \u2026 I\u2019ve seen a number of people on Daily Kos complain that Shaun plays fast and loose with the truth,\u201d wrote contributor Burt Miles. \u201cSo 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.”<\/p>\n
It was around the same time that Breitbart contacted Vicki Pate, who has been investigating King\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
King has always claimed that his father is black. But King\u2019s 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\u2019s birth, the same age given on Shaun\u2019s birth certificate.<\/p>\n
The Jeffery Wayne King whose name and date of birth concord with Shaun King\u2019s birth certificate is pictured below, in a 2007 police mug shot. Various documents give his name as \u201cJeffery\u201d and \u201cJeffrey\u201d Wayne King, names which are common variants of one another, but King Snr\u2019s date of birth and place of residence is the same in all records.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, Pate says she has definitively linked the man pictured in these mugshots to Shaun King via Shaun\u2019s brother, Kentucky Air Guard Russ King, who is also clearly caucasian. Finally, public records show only one J Wayne King in the state.<\/p>\n
By 2015, Shaun King had finessed his account of growing up black and suffering discrimination. \u201cI was raised in rural Kentucky,\u201d he told the blog Generation Progress. \u201cIt 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,\u201d he claimed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was put into a weird position when a huge group of students (who called themselves \u201crednecks\u201d) hated me for no reason.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Neither is true, says Pate. She told Breitbart last night that King has never denied her accusations. \u201cShaun King has not denied the story to me, or anyone else, as far as I know,\u201d she said. \u201cWhenever it is mentioned on Twitter he simply blocks whoever is asking and reports them for \u2018harassment.\u2019 He did reply to one person but only to say, \u2018Haters gonna hate.\u2019 I myself have been suspended from Twitter just for posing the question.\u201d<\/p>\n
King did not return multiple requests for comment via email and social media. He has since blocked us, too.<\/p>\n
Source: Breitbart<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 \u201cOprah scholarship\u201d to historically black Morehouse College. The blogger says King is white and has been lying about his ethnicity for years. … Continue reading “Key figure from #blacklivesmatter outed as white”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":20109,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[11595,3075,12247,501,11930,12245,12246],"class_list":["post-20108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-blacklivesmatter","tag-coloured","tag-frican-american","tag-hate-crime","tag-rachel-dolezal","tag-racial-allegations","tag-shaun-king"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/shaunking.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20108"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20110,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20108\/revisions\/20110"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}