Mixed Race Studies

“As many of you know, I was adopted. As African-Americans in general, it’s often hard to know where our ancestry, where our roots are. As someone that was adopted, for me, it has been even harder. All I ever really knew was that I was from Milwaukee, but recently, I took an Ancestry DNA test and discovered that my ancestors are from Ghana and Nigeria. It changed everything for me. It helped me know that my history did not begin with being adopted. It did not begin with slavery. It’s even part of why I wear this Afro now. I’m not going to hide who I am.” —Colin Kaepernick

Shaun King, “KING: Colin Kaepernick’s ‘I Know My Rights Camp’ cements his status as a cultural superhero in the black community,” The New York Daily News, October 29, 2016. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-kaepernick-camp-cements-status-black-community-article-1.2850326.

KING: Colin Kaepernick’s ‘I Know My Rights Camp’ cements his status as a cultural superhero in the black community

The New York Daily News
2016-10-29

Shaun King

Daily News columnist Shaun King, his son, and Colin Kaepernick pose for picture after Kaepernick’s camp. (Shaun King/New York Daily News)

“Dad. Does Colin still have a game on Sunday?”

The question was a smart one for any football fan to ask – particularly one who’s rooting hard for Colin Kaepernick and the San Francisco 49ers.

It was 12:49 a.m. in Oakland late Friday night. My 10- year-old son, EZ, and I, made the trek there from New York and we were dragging. For our bodies it felt like 4 a.m.

We were invited by Kaepernick to attend a camp on Saturday morning and I had just gotten a text from Colin.

It read, “Hey Shaun. I just wanted to check and make sure you and your son made it safe my brother.”

I replied, “Thanks man. Just now checking in at the hotel. We took a late flight. See you soon bro.”

And his reply was what shocked my son and I both…

Read the entire article here.

Shaun King on Colin Kaepernick: He is Enormously Courageous and Has Sparked a Movement Among Athletes

Democracy Now!
2016-10-21

Amy Goodman, Host and Executive Producer

Shaun King, Black Lives Matter activist and the senior justice writer for the New York Daily News, discusses NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who continued his protest Sunday against racial oppression and police brutality by kneeling on one knee during the pre-game national anthem ahead of his first game of the year for the San Francisco 49ers. His actions have sparked similar protests across the country among professional, college and even high school and middle school athletes.

Read the transcript here.

Shaun King Is Not Rachel Dolezal: What the Media Gets Wrong About Race in America

For Harriet
2015-08-29

Malaika Jabali

As they have in the past, the conservative truth spinners behind the online media outlet Breitbart News Network have initiated an attack against yet another person of color fighting for civil and human rights. The target this time is activist Shaun King, who has been vocal about the police abuse that has permeated our consciousness for over a year. In likening Shaun King to Rachel Dolezal, the network accused King of lying about being half black in order to receive a “Sons of Oprah” scholarship to attend Morehouse College, a historically Black college and university.

There are some obvious logical deficiencies we could point to as to why BNN needs to have a seat. For starters, few Black people could look at Shaun King and identify him as being a completely white man. Race construction involves a composite of man-made ideas, but phenotype is a key feature among them. Plenty of African-Americans and Black people throughout the Diaspora have light-skinned relatives who look like King. While some may have taken a double take, we accepted his identity and let him do him. Even when Rachel Dolezal’s family revealed that she was lying about her race, many Black Americans were more amused than betrayed and took to Twitter to share in a collective laugh…

…Blackness didn’t originate with my ancestors’ feelings about how they wanted to self-identify. It was created over a period of centuries through very specific, deliberate constructions in European and white American schools of biology, phrenology, philosophy, anthropology, and political and legal systems to uphold the intrinsic superiority of whiteness and corresponding black inferiority…

Read the entire article here.

Even though my skin is fair, not once have I considered what it would be like to somehow transform myself into “being white.” I wouldn’t even know where to begin. By the time I was in the seventh grade, I exclusively sat at the “black lunch table,” not as a guest, but as a resident. I’ve been sitting there ever since.

Shaun King, “Shaun King: I’ve been called the N-word since I was 14, but now those same people want me to be white,” The New York Daily News, November 3, 2015. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-people-call-n-word-white-article-1.2421243.

Shaun King: I’ve been called the N-word since I was 14, but now those same people want me to be white

The New York Daily News
2015-11-03

Shaun King
Atlanta, Georgia

Robin Rayne Nelson

EDITOR’S NOTE: Our policy at the Daily News is to censor most racial pejoratives. We have made an exception in the following column because of the personal and historic context of the subject matter:

For the last 22 years of my life, I’ve been called a nigger. And now they want me to be white.

In 1993, I was a freshman at Woodford County High School in rural Versailles, Ky. On a dozen different occasions, white students brazenly used the slur to my face, put it on notes in my locker, and yelled it from passing vehicles. Occasionally some of my friends and I would build up enough courage to report it. The racist students would deny it. Nothing would happen. Eventually, we just stopped reporting it altogether.

Racist graffiti stayed on the walls and stalls of our high school bathrooms for months at a time without being painted over or scrubbed off. It was so commonplace, that we grew used to it. Sadly, my life in 2015 has resembled 1993, far more than I ever imagined possible. Since speaking out against police brutality over the past year, I have been called a nigger and every variation thereof.

But it never got me down…

…Generally, if you are Asian and white, you are considered Asian. If you are Latino and white, you are considered Latino. If you are black and anything else, you are black. Halle Berry, Alicia Keys, Drake, and President Obama are all seen by the world as being black—even though we all know their story is much more nuanced than that. In fact, the entire world is much more biologically and genetically nuanced than hegemonic power structures will ever concede.

Even though my skin is fair, not once have I considered what it would be like to somehow transform myself into “being white.” I wouldn’t even know where to begin. By the time I was in the seventh grade, I exclusively sat at the “black lunch table,” not as a guest, but as a resident. I’ve been sitting there ever since.

With each year that passed, it was increasingly clear that I wasn’t truly welcomed anywhere else…

Read the entire article here.

Conservatives Are Missing the Point of Black Lives Matter

The Atlantic
2015-08-26

Adrienne Green, Editorial Fellow

Courtesy of Shaun King

Those that questioned Shaun King about his race think that it’s relevant to the movement. They’re wrong.

Shaun King, a prominent figure in the Black Lives Matter movement, responded last week to accusations published by some conservative websites that he has lied about being biracial, and about being the victim of racially-motivated attacks.

“The reports about my race, about my past, and about the pain I’ve endured are all lies,” he wrote on Thursday in [an] article for Daily Kos, the liberal news site where he works.

Both The Daily Caller—which referred to King as “the facebook pastor”—and Breitbart.com cited a police report from 1995, which listed King’s identity as white. King, who claims the incident that resulted in the police report was an example of racial tensions that had surfaced at his school, offered harrowing details about the brutality he says he faced.

“In March of 1995, it all boiled over and a racist mob of nearly a dozen students beat me severely, first punching me from all sides,” King wrote. “When I cradled into a fetal position on the ground they stomped me mercilessly, some with steel-toed boots, for about 20 seconds. That day changed the entire trajectory of my life.”

In an attempt to defend his identity and silence his critics, King offered up a complicated family history, identifying his biological parents as a white mother and “light skinned black man,” who, The Washington Post reports, is not the man listed on his birth certificate…

Read the entire article here.

White on Paper

Those People
2015-08-20

John Metta

My sister opening presents while I try to steal the show. Just ordinary Black children having a birthday party, unconscionably ignoring dominant stereotypes.

In June, Rachel Dolezal, an activist and former president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, was outed by her parents as being a white woman. She later left the organization. And just yesterday, Shaun King, an activist affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement, was “outed” by Vicki Pate as being white on Re-NewsIt!, her blog.

Now, let me be clear: This essay is not about Rachel Dolezal pretending to be Black, nor is it about whether Shaun King is Black. This essay is about being Black, in a white world, under a white media lens.

So there are questions about Shaun King’s race based on a police report that lists him as white. This has little to do with his race, and everything to do with institutionalized racism. It’s most likely that an officer was filling out a form, and decided he was white because it wasn’t worth it to actually ask the question.

I know that can happen because it has happened to me many times…

Read the entire article here.

Outside of my mother’s home, as a kid I lived a deeply black experience. Black families invited me to attend vacation Bible school. I attended black family reunions where old people would come up and pinch my cheeks and tell me who I looked like in their family. I went to black skate parties, black block parties/festivals, and did so not as a white intruder, but as a Karl Kani wearing, widely welcomed, light-skinned black kid. I soaked up every moment I had as I was fully, unabashedly loved, even doted upon, by black families throughout central Kentucky. It was a refuge for me and also a rite of passage of sorts. In high school I joined exclusively black achievers groups. With scholars I love and respect to this day at the University of Kentucky, I attended and helped plan King Day events, and just lived my life.

Shaun King, “Race, love, hate, and me: A distinctly American story,” Daily Kos, August 20, 2015. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/08/20/1413881/-Race-love-hate-and-me-A-distinctly-American-story.

Why Right-Wing Bloggers Are Desperate To Prove Biracial People Aren’t Black

Think Progress
2015-08-21

Aviva Shen, Senior Editor

Shaun King, right, addresses the controversy over his racial identity.

Right-wing media has been abuzz over the past few weeks with rumors that Black Lives Matter activist and writer Shaun King is not actually black. Breitbart and other more mainstream outlets like the Daily Beast compared King to Rachel Dolezal, the Spokane NAACP leader whose parents revealed she was white earlier this year. The harassment escalated so much that King finally published an emotional personal account Thursday evening, explaining that his biological father is an unknown black man who had an affair with his mother.

Some of the same bloggers have apparently also “investigated” the parentage of Wesley Lowery, a biracial Washington Post reporter who covers the Black Lives Matter movement.

The harassment of King recalls a long American tradition of telling multiracial people what their identities can and cannot contain. The notorious “one drop rule” — which legally declared anyone with black ancestry, no matter how light-skinned or blue-eyed they were, as mulatto or colored — was central to maintaining a white supremacist hierarchy in the South well into the 20th century. Many people who could get away with it “passed” as white so as to enjoy the privileges of segregated services closed off to black people…

Read the entire article here.