This may be overkill for some people, but there still seem to be people who are uncertain whether to trust Shaun King's testimony on Twitter about the fact that he's black, and the fact that he was the victim of a racially motivated beating about 20 years ago, when he was in high school.
I was able to verify his story because I went to his high school and I know some of the people who have offered testimony in support of his statements.
I'm older than Shaun King, so I never knew him, but if we got talking we would quickly find that we know dozens, maybe hundreds of the same people, because we grew up in the same little town, and went to the same high school.
I'm not going to link to or say much about right-wing sites that have published stories making accusations against Shaun King. They got a lot of mileage out of the Rachel Dolezal story, which apparently functioned as something analogous to what we know as "humor" in their universe. They jumped all over the Shaun King story after a brief burst of what is analogous to "research" in their universe.
What really happened is they just wanted Shaun King to be the male Rachel Dolezal so bad, it seemed to fit so well (and was a chance to discredit a major pain in their capacious asses) that they just couldn't resist. I trust that this community knows how to punish their excessive haste and I hope they will do so.
First off, in case any particular set of photographs has people doubting Shaun King's African-American ancestry, just put "Shaun King" into Bing (or Google, but Bing is better for this). Shaun is light-skinned, but looking at the image results is quite convincing.
Second, this story not only attracted the likes of the Daily Mail and Michelle Malkin, but conservative sites I never heard of came slithering out - eurweb.com, Uproxx, carbonated.tv, twitchy.com. Even allenbwest.com heavily slammed Shaun - but the story wasn't written by West, and because Shaun is telling the truth, I'm thinking Allen West will have to publish a retraction pretty soon or be marked as a racist.
The one article to date that shrewdly defended Shaun King was this one, which I linked to in an earlier comment: http://madamenoire.com/... This article also includes some of the most important quotes from Shaun King's Twitter self-defense (@ShaunKing) - particularly the testimony of a friend who went through every grade with Shaun beginning with third grade. https://t.co/... (@DeacTheVillain) This person was with Shaun when he was beaten up in 1995 and visited him throughout a long recovery.
Breitbart came up with most of the "damning evidence". It was eerily parallel to the Dolezal stonewall. They found a picture of his mother - a white woman, obviously enough. Naomi Kay Fleming, later the wife of Jeffrey King, who went by the name Kay King when she worked at the Sylvania fluorescent lamp factory, where my stepmother worked for a long time. They found his birth certificate, which lists him as white - but in the light of all the personal testimony, it's understandable that this designation might have been made. Shaun as a baby was undoubtedly light-skinned enough to "pass for white", and his legal parents may have wanted it that way. But Breitbart also came up with photographs of Shaun King's white father, listed on the birth certificate, and at least one sibling, a brother named Russ, also obviously white. The parallel with the Dolezal case continued, and the conservative attackers probably had no more doubt at this point.
Breitbart, via a right-wing blogger named Vicki Pate, found some other evidence. They produced a police report of the incident in which Shaun was beaten up in 1995. The police report notes Shaun's race as white, and says that his injuries were minor. They also produced a couple of handwritten notes purporting to be testimony from witnesses to Shaun's beating.
That's a lot of smoke. But is there fire? Well, a policeman who didn't know Shaun might have mistaken him for white, that's obvious. As for the "minor injuries", eventually we will be able to obtain hospital records showing that he was admitted, and that his injuries were more severe than they appeared to the police.
It hasn't been 24 hours - so rapid is the news cycle - since Shaun published this: https://www.facebook.com/... A friend of Shaun's who was present when the beating occurred, Shea Gold, published this: https://www.facebook.com/...
It's nauseating to see how the insect-like trolls start crawling over these Facebook pages with facile condemnations. But I have personally spoken to one of the teachers who was present when the beating occurred - someone who I have known for a very long time, and whose testimony really is unimpeachable. This teacher told me that white boys, members of the FFA, blocked a hallway at the school for a few minutes - just long enough for Shaun King to be badly beaten up. The teacher saw Shaun picked up off the floor and carried away to receive treatment.
This teacher was also able to explain the situation. Shaun King always carried a lot of music CD's - no iPods in 1995! - and he was a kind of walking lending library. Now, at no time have we denied that 15-year-old Shaun King - whom the teacher knew as a black male, accepted as such by other black students and constantly in their company - was a kid with a big mouth. Shaun had loaned a CD to a certain white girl. Exactly what was said we'll never know, but Shaun asked for the CD to be returned. The girl was insulted, and she told her white boyfriend, and the result was what Shaun has called a "conspiracy". I would simply say that he was set up to get a beating.
Back then, people didn't talk about hate crimes, or this would have been called a hate crime. But Shaun wasn't beaten up solely because he was black - it just made it easier. He was also not big and muscular, which a fairly large percentage of black male students were.
And it needs to be said, Shaun, along with other light-skinned, mixed-race young people, experienced a certain amount of disconnect from some black people as well. In that place at that time, black people were far from intimidated and far from helpless. if you ask black people who were around then, if a white man could beat up any black man with impunity, they would say hell, no! There were some white "rednecks" who went over the line, and some of them woke up with their heads broken. White males and black males mostly kept apart (unless they were friends), probably because it would have been easy to get caught up in little wars, like the ones that take place in many, many urban high schools, where there's a lot more ammunition.
There was no payback for Shaun. The police report didn't lead to any charges. The notes that right-wing bloggers came up with (very conveniently!) notes supposedly written by eyewitnesses stating that Shaun had been in a one-on-one fight. But these notes are rather too convenient. Instead of describing at some length a complex incident with a beginning, middle and end, they are written by people who couldn't write very well. This makes it all the more surprising that they go directly to the point - Shaun was in a one-on-one fight (and so could be held partly responsible). These notes, today, don't change the fact that eyewitnesses remember the number of people involved in beating Shaun. What they accomplished back then was to make the case unprosecutable. It may very well have been that the police, or someone from the city attorney's office, took good care to get statements from people who would swear that Shaun just got into a fight.
But the main takeaway is that everyone in the high school except the policeman who filled out the report knew Shaun King as a black man, a black male.
As for the photos of Shaun's relatives, as I have noted in comments, Shaun has explained on Twitter that he is the product of a blended family. What he has said makes it easy to figure out the truth. Shaun's father was an African-American man who was not married to his mother, and who probably had pretty light-toned brown skin himself. But the white man who did marry Kay Fleming, Jeffery King, gave his own name to a child who was not his biological son - first and last name. That's a very sweet gesture, and I think it sufficiently explains not only the confusion regarding Shaun's siblings, but also his reluctance to do what Kossacks would consider proper damage control.
That's all there is. Since Ferguson, Shaun King has worked under intense pressure. This media shit-storm will only make it worse. I hope that people who support Shaun's larger goals and work will tweet or write to him and encourage him to stay strong. In only a few days he will be publicizing a new campaign to obtain justice and human policing in this country.
Just so we're clear, the photographs and the certificate and the police report have all been explained. Shaun's light complexion has been examined. He's black, the way Americans figure it. If he was in Brazil he'd be white; but we're not in Brazil.
As for the circumstances of his being beaten up, I can't emphasize enough that my sources are on-the-scene and unimpeachable. These are people personally known to me. Rachel Dolezal was raised by her legal parents - also her biological ones - as a white girl. She managed to fool a bunch of adults who had no reason to doubt her. Shaun King was recognized by his home town people as an African-American child from the age of eight. Teachers and students at his high school knew him as African-American. Shaun has been asked to produce a picture of his biological father. This is in no way necessary at this point. But his reluctance to do so not only does him credit, in terms of loyalty to two fathers. It also shows that Shaun King, although he has come a long way from Versailles, Kentucky, still cares about his hometown and the people in it. 175,000 Twitter followers and a standard-type slime job from wingers weren't enough to make him roll over completely. That's why I'm making a little effort to help him clear his name here. One, he deserves it; two, he's got more important things to worry about; and three, unless somebody wants to fight over it, he's my homeboy and I claim him as such.
Shaun King is black, and in 1995 he was the victim of a racially-motivated attack by white men at his high school, in which he was seriously injured. Anybody saying different is just standing in line waiting to be proven wrong.