Activist Shaun King pens blistering essay defending his racial background
Activist Shaun King penned a personal essay about his past after conservative bloggers attacked his racial background.
Activist Shaun King took to social media earlier this week to denounce conservative bloggers who claimed that he had faked his race and had lied about the story of his racially motivated assault, and released a personal essay Thursday detailing his heritage.
In King’s personal essay published on Daily Kos, he describes his personal background and details events that have come under fire.
The reports about my race, about my past, and about the pain I’ve endured are all lies. My mother is a senior citizen. I refuse to speak in detail about the nature of my mother’s past, or her sexual partners, and I am gravely embarrassed to even be saying this now, but I have 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. I am not ashamed of it, or of who I am—never that—but I was advised by my pastor nearly 20 years ago that this was not a mess of my doing and it was not my responsibility to fix it. All of my siblings and I have different parents.
Before King published the essay, MSNBC national correspondent Joy-Ann Reid joined Live with Thomas Roberts to defect King and offer an explanation he later reiterated within his essay.
Reid explained to host Richard Lui:
I did talk to Shaun. I can tell you that Shaun King is biracial. There is no reason to doubt that he is biracial. The stories about what he said regarding getting his scholarship, etc, I think you have to consider the source. I don’t think they’re credible absent any actual reporting.
The story essentially is that the two people who are listed on Shaun King’s birth certificate, his mom and his dad, his mother is his biological mother, the man listed on his birth certificate is not his biological father.
I think getting into further details about who his biological father is, unfairly drags his mother into a story and she is not a public figure. This is a very private story between his mom, dad, and the person who is his biological father. But Shaun King, since he was about 8 or 9 years old, has known that his dad is not his biological father.
