At the time at he was trending on Twitter, King tweeted:

33. Not only that, but the truth is that @GlennBeck & @TheBlaze & Breitbart DON'T GIVE A SHIT about my race. They just want me to shut up. — Shaun King (@ShaunKing) August 19, 2015

If he’s right that conservatives think taking out King will deflate Black Lives Matter and other movements against police brutality, then perhaps they don’t actually understand these movements at all. It is a grassroots movement. It has no leader. The removal of a popular champion won’t necessarily impede its progress.

Some conservatives have used the questions surrounding Shaun King’s race and his retelling of experiences as a victim of racial attacks to expand on their beliefs about the Black Lives Matter movement as a whole. It wouldn’t be the first time that civil-rights leaders have been targeted as proxies for the movements to which they give voice.

Black leaders, from Angela Davis to Martin Luther King Jr. to Assata Shakur, have long been subject to surveillance and to assaults on their personal integrity. Innovations in social media make it ever easier to have voyeuristic access to someone’s past. This is not the first time outlets, like those that have singled out Shaun King as the “Rachel Dolezal 2.0”, have focused their attention on the leaders of racial movements as a means of trying to dismantle the movements at large. Last week, King tweeted a picture of an Assata Shakur quote that read, “the first thing the enemy tries to do is isolate revolutionaries from the people, making us horrible and hideous monsters so that our people will hate us”:

Truth bomb. This is what's happening right now. Not just with me, but with many of us. Seems coordinated for sure. pic.twitter.com/nl40nXEni2 — Shaun King (@ShaunKing) August 19, 2015

In analysis of King’s response to his article, Breitbart’s Jerome Hudson wrote that “it was convenient for King to identify as black. I don’t know why, but there is something especially alluring about seeing oneself as a victim.” Conservatives like Glenn Beck and sites like Breitbart apparently believe that leaders like King are fabricating lived experiences as people of color to secure platforms they shouldn’t hold, just as they believe that people of color commonly use race as an excuse or a means to procure unmerited advantage. Acknowledging the struggles attached to blackness, in that way, is equivalent to telling black people that they are playing the victim.

The original reporting about Shaun King’s race, and subsequent coverage of his reaction and his family history, almost always identified him by his connection to the Black Lives Matter movement. Vox’s German Lopez wrote that there is little doubt that King’s race matters to the movement: “If King isn't black or biracial, the movement may have a harder time accepting him as a leader of a cause that is inherently about how black people are treated.” But there is little evidence to support that.

(Courtesy of Shaun King)

Some see protestors like Shaun King as outside agitators, and seek to expose them as fraudulent. Discrediting the leaders—who believe that Michael Brown and countless others were killed because they are black and that race is intimately connected to the problems in the criminal-justice system—would impact how effective the Black Lives Matter ideals could be going forward.