Family members and childhood friends of Black Lives Matter organiser Shaun King have confirmed to both CNN and Breitbart that King is white and that he has misled people about his race. King has not denied that he is white, and media outlets all over the world have now reported the story.
But a few valiant folk continue to hold out, insisting that King is telling the truth — or, in the case of some hand-wringing millennial outlets, that the concept of race is a “social construct” and it’s therefore impossible to accuse King of lying about his ethnicity, whatever his parents look like.
As the rest of the world starts to analyse why Shaun King behaved as he did, and what that says about America today, these publications and people are becoming increasingly isolated by insisting that King is innocent or that it doesn’t matter anyway.
VOX
An “explainer website” from the parent company of The Verge and Polygon, Vox was supposed to provide an encyclopaedic guide to the news. But the site has metastasised into an error-strewn far-left pseudoacademic blogging network that cooks up bizarre justifications for any liberal caught out by inconvenient facts. About King, Vox had this to say:
A person’s race isn’t derived by biology; it is instead set by society and a person’s own identity. As Jenée Desmond-Harris previously explained for Vox, Americans embraced the concept of race to justify treating some people better than others. And since race is arbitrary, different people can genuinely disagree over who counts as white, black, brown, or any other racial identity.
The case of Rachel Dolezal, the former president of the Spokane, Washington, NAACP chapter, captured this issue. Both of Dolezal’s parents were white, but she self-identified as black. And people around her believed she was black or biracial — until her parents told reporters that Dolezal was white, leading to a media frenzy.
Dolezal accomplished this supposed fraud by changing her hair to a curly afro, and baring what appeared to be a fake tan. That this is all Dolezal had to do to get people around her to believe she’s multiracial speaks to how flimsy perceptions of race can be — a hairstyle and tan are all it takes to convince most people.
BUZZFEED
BuzzFeed did a passable job of reporting on the race scandal but goofed up reporting King’s now soundly debunked account of his “hate crime” experience as though it were fact. Fair play to them, though, for acknowledging the following:
Despite tweeting more than 30 times about the allegations, King never directly addressed the charge that his father is a white man.
SALON
Never knowingly well-adjusted, screechy, and bonkers white liberal organ Salon has, of course, sided firmly with King, calling our reporting a “smear campaign.” (The website had previously warned about this reporter’s mysterious “dark opportunism” — once again, in place of proving facts or reasoning.)
VERONICA WELLS
Blogger Veronica Wells insists that this is really all about The White Man:
We talk about Black Lives mattering and having value. But when it’s our word against a White man’s we discover we’re still less credible, inferior. It’s devastating when people, particularly Black people, are so ready and willing to believe something just because a White man said it.
JESSE SINGAL AT NEW YORK MAGAZINE
Perhaps it’s unfair to single out individual and no doubt well-meaning reporters, but this guy is a science editor, throwing around accusations of “racism” in ever-more hysterical tweets like they were cars on an Oprah special.
Follow Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) on Twitter and Facebook. He’s a hoot! Android users can download Milo Alert! to be notified about new articles when they are published.
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