Motherhood

A Little Something about Birth Certificates, Choices and Shaun King

Before I begin, I must implore Black people not to allow ourselves to get distracted. We must not be driven by sheep or led by the nose-ringed bull at an agricultural fair by its handler. Make no mistake: when we allow our focus to be lost to petty diversions – of any sort – we are being handled. For whose benefit is only revealed in time, but at the present, we know it is not for our own. In other words, please stay woke.

 

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The most vocal voices of the Black Lives Matter group have found themselves under attack in recent days. The timing couldn’t be more conspicuous, if you ask me. In the wake of the terse encounters with Bernie Sanders and the placing of BLM representatives in “overflow rooms” (read, the Colored Section) at Hilary Clinton’s stops, it would appear that forces and will behind BLM have some folk rattled. There are no clear leaders for the Black Lives Matter movement. As far as I know, no one is on any sort of payroll or has been appointed head. That vacuum is occupied by a cadre of activists who speak with regularity and clarity on the ills of white supremacy and the need for Black liberation. Shaun King is one of those voices.

Shaun King may or may not be white.

Now, why is this important? For the thinking man/woman who has the capacity for foresight, Shaun King’s ethnicity is a nonissue. There is an old adage that says “not all your skin folk is your kin folk.” Indeed, many of the most famous rebellions and great escapes never to have taken place have been thwarted by Black people more beholden to white supremacy than their own freedom. The issue is in the long run, who is our ally? And the fact is, white people have always been an integral part in the struggle for equality and liberation in America. The homes of white Quakers served as stops on the Underground Railroad. White people marched, bled and died during the Civil Rights era. The enemy of Black liberation isn’t whiteness: It’s White Supremacy. This is what gets so many people tripped up when media outlets like breibart.com publish…well, anything. This week, the site just happened to post that Shaun King has deceived Black America and the world by living an impostor’s life as a Black man when he is “in fact” white.

Andrew Breibart. I bet that dude holds morning meetings in full Grand Dragon Klan regalia and lights his cigarettes with a burning cross. Ugh.

Breibart’s report casts suspicion on Shaun King’s credibility by asserting that his birth certificate has the name of a white man listed as his father, therefore not be Black (or bi-racial as he has intimated in the past), therefore he is a fraud and a liar and Black Lives Matter is based – in part – on fraudulent lies! Let me tell you a little something about birth certificates and lies and the American family.

Readers of this blog know that my husband is not my eldest daughter’s biological father. I’ve written extensively about the biological contributions her Douche Bag donor made to her existence while eschewing his fiscal obligations. Douche Bag is and always has been a Black man of the lowest quality…but at one point, I laid down with him and I conceived with him. Two days after my daughter was born, my head still foggy from the near stroke I had suffered, I had a decision to make: Should I put Marshall’s name on the birth certificate or Douche Bag’s?

Douche Bag actually robbed me of that choice (something else I’ve written about) when he slunk into my room after I had been on medication – barely able to make use of my limbs – and refused to leave until I had signed paperwork listing him as the father. He would proudly go on to call it a “pimp move”. When I told Marshall about it later on, he looked crestfallen.

“I thought you were going to put me down as the father,” he said quietly. He implied that it was not too late to ‘fix’ it.

I looked at this man who had just been ordained a deacon in our church, who had lived an upright life for as long as I had known him and yes –had protected and nurtured me during my pregnancy when I most vulnerable. Though I desperately wanted to put his name down as “father” of this child he had helped bring safely into the world, I couldn’t make a liar out of him. The ‘sin’ of having a child out of wedlock was mine to bear and mine alone. And even though I knew it would mean 18+ years of grief, inconvenience and ineptitude, I didn’t alter the document. That’s the only reason Douche Bag’s name is on my daughter’s birth certificate. It would have made life easier to strike him from the paperwork and put the more suitable man’s name on the document, but I decided not to.

Shaun King’s mother did not make that decision. He wrote about his mother’s past and her choices quite eloquently here. Whatever her reasons were, perhaps to save face, perhaps financial, and certainly none of our business, she listed a man who had not sired her son as the father on his birth certificate.

Shaun King’s story is not unique by any stretch of the imagination. There are hundreds of thousands of Americans who do not “belong” to their family in one shape or another. I just recently discovered that one of my most beloved cousins was not related to me at all. Her mother was my great uncle’s step child. When I was 15, it was revealed to me in hushed tones that my older cousin Steven* (on the Ghana side) was a foundling but he didn’t know. His paperwork listed my aunt and uncle as his parents, however. I was instructed not to say anything. I did my best to forget.

And that’s the problem with everyone who takes umbrage with Shaun King’s alleged deceit. There are too many people who are prone to forgetting that the average American family has been infiltrated and happily blended with the presence of people who do not share the same DNA, that every Black funeral features a revelation that the man you just put in the ground wasn’t your daddy after all; that if there were birth certificates issued in his day Thomas Jefferson would not have been listed as the father of Sally Hemings’ six children.

Shaun-King

Shaun King is fighting to preserve and improve Black life. That he may have some ambivalence about his genetic make-up is not the pressing question at hand. We have already put too much stock in his mother’s sexual choices and the morality attached to it, which is ironic given the liberties this generation regularly takes with copulation and sexual exhibitionism. Is he using his voice to ensure that fewer Black people are killed in the street and that more get justice from a system built to stand against them? If the answer is yes, kindly shun the Trump shenanigans and worry less about the birth certificate and more ending the hunt and gradual extermination of our people. Stop giving white supremacy a hand. We’re smarter than this.