Years ago, I read a story about a kid who cleverly gamed the admissions system at Dartmouth, I think, by letting them think he was black. He checked “other” on the race questions and listed on his application that he was a member of the black students union and some other groups that would indicate he was black. Once he got on campus his new adviser was shocked to learn he was white.
This was before the movie Soul Man was released, but close enough to make me think the movie was inspired by the story. The wiki page on the movie does not mention the news story so who can say. The thing is, thirty years ago most people thought it was absurd to have different rules for different races when it comes to admissions. Here we are and nothing much has changed.
That’s probably to be expected given that college is enormously expensive now compared to when these stories were oddities. What no one could have imagined is the sudden rash of white people passing themselves off as black. Two months ago we had the NAACP leader outed as a ginger with a tanning bed addiction and now we have the #blacklivesmatter organizer revealed as a honky!
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 “Oprah scholarship” to historically black Morehouse College. The blogger says King is white and has been lying about his ethnicity for years.
King is a high-profile campaigner against “police brutality” and “justice correspondent” for the liberal Daily Kos website who told Rebel magazine in 2012 that he was biracial, with the magazine reporting that he is the “son of a Caucasian mother and an African-American father.” He has also described himself as “mixed with a black family” on Twitter.
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 “decades old racial tensions.” He claims to have been “the focus of constant abuse of the resident rednecks of my school.”
Yet, in recent weeks, rumours have been circulating about his ethnicity. A 1995 police incident report lists Shaun King’s ethnicity as white. And blogger Vicki Pate, who has been assembling forensic accounts of Shaun King’s background and family tree on her blog, “Re-NewsIt!,” has published her findings.
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.
I think if that guy told me he was black, I’d struggle to keep a straight face. I’d have a much easier time believing he was a member of a white power or skinhead group.
“King, 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,” wrote the Daily Caller‘s Chuck Ross. “While King has said that he was attacked by up to a dozen ‘racist’ and ‘redneck’ students, official records show that the altercation involved only one other student.”
“And while King has claimed that he suffered a ‘brutal’ beating that left him clinging to life, the police report characterized King’s injuries as ‘minor,’” Ross reported.
This month, more details have emerged from King’s account that do not match up with the police report or eyewitness accounts from journalists who noticed that King’s public claims did not square with reality.
For as long as I’ve been alive, black people have hated it when whites act black. Maybe things are different with young people, but I still think blacks look at a guy like this and want to beat his ass. His fraud comes off like mocking of blacks, not imitation. How is this different than black face?
On the other hand, a man can throw on a sundress and the rest of us have to pretend he is a woman. The same people telling us that Bruce Jenner is now a girl are the same people claiming that science says race is not real. That means this cracker is just living the life. If he wants to pass himself off as a Mohawk, he can do that too. Race is just a social concept.
This is always the problem with these crackpot ideas. They never think them through. Defending the dude in a dress because he scandalizes the wreckers from normalville is a knee slapper until Vanilla Ice shows up claiming to be Malcolm X. The old system where everyone accepted biology did not have these problems. Imagination land where you can be anything you want is fine for children, but not so good for adults.
In NYC, he could pass for a Puerto Rican. Closely cropped hair & thin, gay mustache are popular in the Bronx.
White privilege? Doesn’t exist today. If it did you’d have light-skinned blacks and Latinos trying to “pass” for white. Instead you have the verso, because if you know the whole racial identity trope is just horse poopie, you know how to game the system.
“Your Little Known Right to be a Negro” National Lampoon, 1975.
https://archive.org/stream/NationalLampoon1975_09/1975_09#page/n39/mode/2up
If you subsidize behavior, you will get more of it. It is easier to get into better colleges if you are black. Black-owned businesses are, in many industries, guaranteed set-asides. And, of course, blacks are allowed to engage in self-aggrandizing aberrant behavior not only without sanction, but reward for doing so. Etc., etc., etc.
Assuming he dresses for effect I would need, I suppose, to see more pictures of him to make any assessment from the image you posted, but… Having black hair and a (skimpy) black ‘tash and chin stubble of a beard, with the attendant heavy black framed glasses, all helps to ‘darken’ his colour, but the giveaway must be the white shirt: against that his skin tone looks darker. I agree that he seems to have some black ancestry however.
As for his rough time at school, I have to say some kids pick on other kids not because of skin tone but just because they are nerds, bores or simply pathetic. Harsh world, but there we are.
But what intrigues me more is the idea that even a little ‘black’ in a person makes them ‘black.’ So does one eighth black ancestry mean, despite being seven eighths white, that a person is automatically regarded as black? I imagine in the fullness of time there will therefore be very few white people to torment others. Then we can see how much more happy the world will be.
In America, the “one drop rule” was the standard through the middle of the last century. Basically if you had any black ancestors you were black. As a practical matter, that meant one black grand parent as no one was going to research you family tree.
On the other hand, blacks applied a paper bag test. If you were darker than a paper bag then you were “full black” and otherwise you were mixed race. Later, the light skin blacks would use this as a form of discrimination. The “brown paper bag parties” were a way for mixed race, light skinned blacks to separate from other blacks.
I like the brown paper bag test, which I assume is only possible if you have a standard set shade for said bags. Freelance baggers making their own shades would create havoc…
That’s what kills me about all this “race is a social construct” stuff. Ok, sure… but why then are we bringing back degrees of skin tone straight out of the 19th century? If this were 1854, we’d be debating whether King was “high yellow” or an “octoroon.” Seems like a rather odd way to go about building racial harmony.
He’s not 100% white. He looks like he has some black ancestry, although a pretty small amount. I knew a couple southerners in the military who may have been 1/16 black.