Conservative media outlets have convinced themselves that they've found yet another white advocate for racial justice wearing blackface, but unlike Rachel Dolezal, who cut all ties with those she knew growing up, Daily Kos' Shaun King has remained in touch with friends and teachers from high school -- an important fact, because The Blaze and Brietbart's Big Government both use as evidence of his whiteness contradictions between his and the official police account of a "brutal beating" that occurred in 1995.
In his book "The Power of 100," King writes about being "harassed almost daily by a growing group of self-proclaimed rednecks," which culminated in a racially motivated mob-beating that left him "a bloody mess on the floor" and "physically ruined." According to The Blaze's Oliver Darcy, while there was a fight on that day in 1995, and while it did involve King and a trip to the hospital, it was neither racially motivated nor as brutal as King has claimed. As evidence, he provided police reports which downplayed the brutality of the beating, and called into question whether it was racially motivated or the result of a disagreement over an $8 debt.
There could, however, be another reason why the police and school board played down the severity of the incident. As Shea Gold, a witness to it, wrote on Facebook:
When a minority gets almost beaten to death in a small rural town's high school, it is every civic leader's nightmare. In 1995, in Versailles, it could have potentially made national headlines, had the story gotten out. But unfortunately, it did not, and no residents of Versailles, Kentucky should be surprised. By this point in the reading, you should have surmised that any investigating officer would have felt heavy, intense pressure from all sides. The last thing Woodford County High School wanted was for this story to be on the front page of the local paper.
Another witness, Nathanael Carter, a teacher at the time, corroborated Gold's account:
Shea Gold, you are correct. This incident did occur. I was one of the teachers getting students to clear the hallway and get to class. Shaun King was also one of my students at that time. He did spend time in the hospital if I remember correctly. I am proud of you coming forward like this. I am also proud of Shaun King for fighting for what he believes in. The Woodford Co. High School Alumni Band has a lot of great people! Love the WCHS Band!
In his rush to find to the next Rachel Dolezal, Darcy offered the witness statements of the students likely involved in the fight as evidence that it didn't occur as King claimed. However, he neglected to notice how coached the statements sound. "I didn't see what happened," one alleged eyewitness told police, "but I do know that no one else touch the boy but [redacted]. It was one on one." If the usage of the word "boy" by a white Southerner to describe a tenth grader isn't indicative enough of a racial component to this beating, the confession by the alleged "one on one" attacker comes straight from the racist playbook.
"The reason I hit Shawn [sic] is because he pushed my x-girlfriend up against the wall yesterday and threatened to break her neck over $8 dollars she owed him and I care for her and she was scared yesterday because she thought he was going to hurt her and I didn’t want to see her get hurt," the alleged assailant told police. "I know it was wrong but I couldn’t stand him threatening a girl like that."
Putting aside the fact that the a black "boy" talking to the white ex-girlfriend of an older male has been the most common excuse for white-on-black crime in the history of the South, the simple fact is that Darcy's evidence of King's whiteness consists solely of a conflicting accounts of a beating that occurred twenty years ago. As will be demonstrated below, Breitbart's Milo Yiannopoulos fares no better in his attempt to demonstrate that King has lied about being involved in a serious car accident, or about the number of children he has fathered.
The tenacity with which these outlets have attacked King is evidence, if nothing else, that conservative anti-anti-racists have drunk deeply of their own Kool-Aid and believe, firmly, that being black grants social and economic advantages in American society. So strong is their conviction that they are willing to cast it back 20 years and imagine that a child in a predominantly white town of 6,000 in rural Kentucky would survey his available social options and choose to be black in order to get a leg up on his white classmates.
In a long series of tweets, reproduced below, King addresses these and other issues:
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UPDATE: Although the link to the Blaze was correct, the original version of this article indicated that Oliver Darcy wrote for the Daily Caller.
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