Shaun King is one of the more popular activists of his generation, though the attention comes with a mass amount of criticism.
In 2015, King was accused of being a White man and not biracial as he claimed. The claims led to him explaining that his mother had an affair with a light-skinned Black man, and the White man listed as his father on his birth certificate was not his biological father.
“I’m actually not even sure how many siblings I have,” King wrote in a 2015 blog post. “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.”
On April 12, King’s Real Justice PAC reportedly paid $75,000 to the law firm representing Carlos Vega in a defamation settlement after King called Vega a “real-life supervillain” who framed a Black man for a pair of serious crimes. Tamir Rice‘s mother and fellow activist Deray McKesson have also previously accused King of fraud, which he has denied. He also said he was forced to move out of his $842,000 home in 2021 after photos of the lavish property went viral. Many rap fans thought King was one of the activists J. Cole called out in his recent verse on Lil Yachty’s “The Secret Recipe.”
N—- fake-progressive and woke, I started sayin’ less
I had to stop it, peeped how they profit off of racial stress
Some activists got so rich, they prolly wish we stay oppressed
Recently, at Jeezy‘s third annual Sno Ball in Atlanta, rolling out asked King about all the controversy surrounding his name.
What do you think is the biggest misunderstanding of Shaun King?
I don’t even know, man.
I’m at a point in my life where I’m not so concerned about what people think about me from day to day. I know I’m living my best life. I’m trying my best to help people everywhere I go in everything I do. All I can do is make good decisions from day to day. I know I’m an ethical leader, and I feel good about the work I do. If I spent time dispelling rumors, it’d be all I do every day, all day.
There are times when I see stuff that is just wild and outrageous. If I spent all my time doing that, it would literally be what I did day and night. So I’m focused, and I feel good about where I am.
What issue are you focused on now?
My main focus is on Palestine right now.
My heart is breaking for what’s going on there. It’s a genocide, it’s ethnic cleansing. It fits the international definition of war crimes. I feel that Joe Biden is a war criminal. I feel that [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu was a war criminal.
I’m working with the team right now. We’ve already filed a case with the International Criminal Court. This is when you think about what happened in Tulsa, the Tulsa Race Massacre, where a few 100 people were killed. We’re still talking about 100 years later, we’re now at nearly 10,000 Palestinians that have been murdered just in the past two weeks. So I mean, we’re talking about 50 race massacres over and over and over and over again.
There’s so much going on here in the States, but right now, Palestine has my heart for sure.
