Wait. Did progressives sneak in a white dude in #blacklivesmatter in order to control it?

Because that would be hysterical.  See, there’s this guy called Shaun King, who is – or at least was – fairly well involved with #blacklivesmatter, or BLM.  He apparently gives good copy, too: always ready to give the media the quotes they need. …You know where this is going ,right?

[Shaun] 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.

Essentially, a blogger tracked down King’s birth certificate – Shaun King, by the way, is a diarist for Daily Kos, which I note largely for character assassination purposes – and noted that King’s birth certificate’s dad is listed elsewhere as being white (King claims that his father is black).  And, looking at the pictures of Shaun King… dude looks pretty danged white. Which is not actually uncommon: it’s not something that’s discussed much these days, but under the old rules* anybody with any African-American ancestry at all was habitually cataloged as ‘black.’ So African-Americans in our genuinely more enlightened times get justifiably touchy on the subject; and I don’t blame them for it.  But if there’s a white dude out there trying to pass himself off as black, the better to better insinuate himself into #blacklivesmatter [BLM] – well.  That’s just our culture in a nutshell, isn’t it?

One final note: my RedState colleague and friend Leon Wolf wrote an article for the Washington Post where he argued that people in BLM who are legitimately concerned about problems in the African-American community were wasting their times with engaging with Democrats, seeing as the Democratic establishment’s big government policies were what caused most of these policies in the first place and nobody in that party sees any pressing need to change gears.  Leon thinks that legitimate BLM activists could find that starting to honestly talk to Republican candidates** would be fruitful, and I would agree… as long as we’re talking to legitimate BLM activists. I don’t think that we have anything in particular to say to any random white progressive interlopers who might be currently busy gelding BLM, just like they’ve gelded every other potentially destabilizing movement on the Left.

So, you know: clean house, and all that.

Moe Lane

[Pre-publication UPDATE: I held off on posting my reaction because the story sounded a little too good to be true. And it still could be – only, the guy’s having the kind of meltdown that you associate with getting caught, not getting smeared. So, sure, let’s put this up now.]

*Essentially, the ones that the Democrats set up and kept running for a century and a half.

**Republican candidates actually have quite a lot to say about criminal justice and prison reform.