5 Facts Shaun King, The Man Many Are Painting as a Rachel Dolezal 2.0 [UPDATED]

Oprah Winfrey

He won a full full scholarship from Oprah Winfrey to the historically black Morehouse College. The scholarship is exclusively for black males.

Birth Certificate

On his birth certificate dated Sept. 17, 1979, his mother, Naomi Kay Fleming, and father, Jeffery Wayne King, are both listed as white.

Black Lives Matter

Regardless of race, King who is a blogger on the liberal site Daily Kos, has been a prominent face of the Black Lives Matter movement since the unjust police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

1998. Teenagers. With my wife before she was my wife :-) Been with each other for over half of our lives now! pic.twitter.com/E8qzD15m9X

— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) August 2, 2015

Family

King is the father to many kids with his high school sweetheart turned wife. According to his Twitter:

My wife & I have 3 birth children, we fully adopted our niece in ’03, she’s 15 now, + we have custody of our 2 y/o niece, Zayah.

In addition to the 5 kids we have now, we’ve also had full custody, at one time or another, of 4 other nieces/nephews of ours.

There ya have it!

Update #2. Shaun has penned an open letter, titled Race, love, hate, and me: A distinctly American story, where he provides a detailed account about his background and the controversy that has surrounded him. Peep an excerpt below.

Over the past 72 hours I have been attacked with lies by the conservative media, lies that have been picked up by the traditional media and spread further. I have kept silent at the advice of friends and mentors, but I will do so no longer.

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. I’m actually not even sure how many siblings I have. It is horrifying to me that my most personal information, for the most nefarious reasons, has been forced out into the open and that my private past and pain have been used as jokes and fodder to discredit me and the greater movement for justice in America. I resent that lies have been reported as truth and that the obviously racist intentions of these attacks have been consistently downplayed at my expense and that of my family.

Click here to read the full essay.