Black Lives Matter movement This article is more than 8 years old

Black Lives Matter activist refutes allegations that he lied about his race

This article is more than 8 years old

Shaun King confirms he is biracial and was born to a white mother and a black father, after weeks of assertions to the contrary from rightwing writers

Shaun King, a prominent Black Lives Matter activist, has responded to weeks of allegations that he had lied about his racial background with an article confirming he is biracial and was born to a white mother and a black father he does not know.

On Thursday night, King addressed the controversy, primarily instigated by rightwing blogs and news outlets, in a lengthy personal essay posted to Daily Kos, where he is a staff writer.

“The reports about my race, about my past, and about the pain I’ve endured are all lies,” he wrote.

King told the Guardian that he was “deeply exhausted by it all … It has taken a brutal toll on my entire family.”

The controversy gained traction following a series of posts by blogger Vicki Pate comparing King to Rachel Dolezal, the former president of the Spokane NAACP. In June, Dolezal, who self-identifies as black, was “outed” by her parents, who are both white, for misrepresenting her race.

Pate had been assembling what multiple outlets have called “forensic accounts” of King’s background, culminating on 3 July whens she posted his birth certificate, which appears to indicate that both of King’s parents are white.

Pate’s allegations were subsequently picked up by multiple news outlets, and by Wednesday his name was trending on Twitter.

Pate, who wrote that she was “stalking” King and members of his family on social media, is a controversial blogger who devotes much of her attention to questioning and criticising Black Lives Matter activism. Pate was permanently banned from Twitter in 2014 for posting personal information about King, a ban she attributes to King knowing someone at Twitter.

In his essay, King writes that he has “been told for most of my life that the white man on my birth certificate is not my biological father and that my actual biological father is a light-skinned black man.

“My mother and I have discussed her affair. She was a young woman in a bad relationship and I have no judgment. This has been my lived reality for nearly 30 of my 35 years on earth,” King continued.

Another document, first acquired by the Daily Caller, appears to show King’s race checked as “white” on a 1995 police report. The New York Times reported that the officer who authored that report “had not asked Mr King about his race but filled out the form based on the observation of the student’s light skin and white mother”. The report had been filed after King, then in high school, was badly beaten by what he describes as a “racist mob of nearly a dozen students”.

Several of the outlets who picked up the story, including Breitbart, suggested King had lied his way into an Oprah Winfrey scholarship he received to attend Morehouse College.

In an interview with Sky News on Thursday, Milo Yiannopoulos, who wrote the Breitbart story, personally accused King of “deceiving the black community” and said if he had wrongly obtained a scholarship to Morehouse College he had “effectively robbed a young black child” of a place at the university.

Morehouse, one of the most prestigious historically black colleges in the country, does not grant admissions or award scholarships based on race, according to its website.

“This wasn’t me sneaking into Morehouse as an undercover white man,” King wrote. “I was 17 and my racial identity was fully formed. I knew who I was. I wasn’t appropriating or faking, but living out my life … To be clear, I received a full academic and leadership scholarship to attend Morehouse College based on my grades and my leadership skills.”

Additional allegations raised by Yiannopoulos and Pate were also addressed in the essay, including that King exaggerated details about the 1995 attack that left him in need of multiple spinal surgeries. King cites “multiple credible, unbiased eyewitnesses to this traumatic day” who wrote this week to corroborate his account.

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