MSNBC host Joy Reid used a racial slur when discussing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, referring to him as “Uncle Clarence.”
In a report from the Washington Free Beacon:
“If somehow [the Trump campaign] manage to stumble into the Supreme Court, do any of you guys trust Uncle Clarence and Amy Coney Barrett and those guys to actually follow the letter of the law? No,” she said. “It is a completely politicized Supreme Court that you can’t just trust that they’re going to do the right thing.”
The “Uncle Tom” slur derives from the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and is a derogatory term for an African-American man viewed as overly deferential to whites. The staunchly liberal Reid has also referred to “Uncle Clarence” in a pair of recent tweets.
Reid also came under fire in 2017 and 2018 after homophobic blog posts she wrote from the 2000s came to light. She later denied she had written some of them and blamed hackers for inserting the offensive content onto her blog. But she also admitted there was no proof any hacking occurred.
Her star, however, has since risen at MSNBC. Formerly a weekend host, Reid was promoted to hosting the weekday show The Reidout in July, and she has helped lead MSNBC’s political coverage throughout the year.
And while clearly Alito and Uncle Clarence are such hardcore theocratic ideologues and opponents of voting rights and democracy that they don’t care who sees, the others might occasionally chaffe at looking like wholly bought baubles in Trump’s crooked crown.
— Nope. (@JoyAnnReid) October 29, 2020
Despite Reid openly criticizing the Supreme Court and calling the Justices “politicized” she then noted that “the Court’s have actually been pretty good.”