On Saturday morning’s AM Joy, the brilliant host of the MSNBC weekend staple, Joy-Ann Reid, began her segment apologizing for words that may have hurt those in the LGBTQ community, calling the commentary “despicable.”
Over the last week, the MSNBC host had come under fire, especially from conservative outlets, after an Intercept article by founder Glenn Greenwald reported that in the past, Reid has written more than a few posts disparaging those in the LGBTQ community, including transgender folks, going back more than 10 years.
Initially, Reid said she hired a cybersecurity firm to check these blogs and said that she’d been hacked, but after a week of the internet sleuthing, she backed off that claim and simply said that the posts “do not appear to have been the result of hacking or tampering.”
“When a friend found them in December and sent them to me, I was stunned,” she said. “Frankly, I couldn’t imagine where they’d come from or whose voice this was.
“I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things,” she said, noting that they are “completely alien” to her, and also saying that she understands “why people wouldn’t believe me” based on an apology she gave for much of the same in December.
Reid also acknowledged that she grew up in a conservative household and that her thoughts on gay people have evolved (remember, even the Obamas were against gay marriage at one point).
“I have not been exempt from being dumb or cruel or hurtful to the very people I want to advocate for,” she said Saturday. “I own that. For that I am truly, truly sorry.”
The culture in which we now live expects people to know better than to disparage any marginalized group—and though I would always argue that a rich, gay white man like Greenwald is infinitely more privileged than Reid, intersectionality tells us that black women, too, have their own privileges and prejudices, despite our own oppression.
At the end of the day, Reid (kinda) fessed up and apologized. Which is all we can do. The point of a well-lived life is to live and learn.
See her entire mea culpa below: