Winsome Sears Calls Out Joy Reid Over MSNBC Analyst’s Rant

Winsome Sears, the black female Republican candidate elected on Tuesday as the next lieutenant governor of Virginia, has responded to a rant on MSNBC that portrayed her as a dummy being used to spout “white supremacy by ventriloquist effect.”

Frequent MSNBC and CNN contributor Michael Eric Dyson made an incendiary attack on Sears, the first black woman elected to a statewide office in Virginia history, on “The ReidOut” with Joy Reid.

Reid attempted to enroll Dyson in an attack on Republicans, who boasted that two of the three successful GOP candidates in Virginia’s statewide election were minorities. Reid responded that Republicans could not shake accusations of racism by pointing to Sears since her Democratic opponent, Hala Ayala, is afro-Latina and part Lebanese. “You had a choice of two brown/black people, and you picked one of them. Do you get credit?” she asked Dyson. Reid ignored the role of the Virginia Republican Party in selecting Sears for the nomination over 5 other candidates at the state’s Republican Convention, including white male Delegate Glenn Davis.

Dyson proved all-too-willing to oblige in the verbal assault, taking a swipe at Sears’ integrity. Republicans, he said, want to use Sears as a dummy through which to filter “a white idea,” because Sears “legitimates the white supremacist practices”:

[Republicans] want white supremacy by ventriloquist effect. There is a black mouth moving, but a white idea through the, running on the runway of the tongue of a figure who justifies and legitimates the white supremacist practices. We know that we can internalize in our own minds, in our own subconscious, and in our own bodies, the very principles that are undoing us. So, to have a black face, speaking in behalf of a white supremacist legacy is nothing new. … [I]f you tell black people, ‘Look, I support a Negro! Look, there is a person of color that I am in favor of!’ and that person of color happens to undermine, and undercut, and subvert the very principles about which we are concerned, you do yourself no service by pointing to them as an example of your racial progressivism.

On Friday morning, Sears’ campaign tweeted a clip of Dyson’s fulminations with the message, “Still waiting for my invite @JoyAnnReid.”

Still waiting for my invite @JoyAnnReid 🤔 pic.twitter.com/qe3C5YlDmZ

— Team Winsome (@WinWithWinsome) November 5, 2021

It is Sears’ second challenge for Reid to speak to her face-to-face after Reid’s producers apparently left her previous interview request unrequited.

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