Winsome Sears: The latest Black conservative to make liberals nervous

If there’s anything that liberal elites, especially Black liberal elites, hate more than white rednecks, it’s Black conservatives. Elites see them as sellouts, or “Uncle Toms.” MSNBC host Joy Reid once referred to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as “Uncle Clarence.” And since they’re not related, it was simply a cheap shot at a man whose conservative worldview makes him, in Reid’s view, a traitor to his race.

In 1991, then-Rep. Major Owens (D-N.Y.), a Black liberal, testified against Thomas’s confirmation, comparing him to Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian military officer who collaborated with the Nazis. Three years later, on PBS, political commentator Julianne Malveaux, another Black liberal, said: “I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early, like many Black men do, of heart disease.” Now a dean at Cal State University Los Angeles, Malveaux has apologized for the remark, calling it a “wisecrack.” 

You’d think Thomas was a grand wizard in the Ku Klux Klan, the way elites attacked him. And, of course, he’s not the only Black conservative who drives liberals up the wall.

When radio talk show host Larry Elder, a Black conservative, was running this year to unseat California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a progressive Democrat, the Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece with the headline, “Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy.” The author, Erika D. Smith, is a Black woman of the left.

But for liberal elites, there’s no shortage of Black conservative targets. So now we have Winsome Sears, the Black conservative who was just elected lieutenant governor of Virginia, who is the latest Black voice of supposed white supremacy. No fooling. 

Professor Michael Eric Dyson, a Black intellectual who teaches at Vanderbilt University, was a guest on MSNBC the other day and said Sears is a “ventriloquist” for white bigots. “There is a Black mouth moving but a white idea running on the runway of the tongue of a figure who justifies and legitimates the white supremacist practices,” he said. 

But, of course, Dyson wasn’t surprised — he expects nothing good coming out of the mouth of a Black conservative. “So, to have a Black face speaking on behalf of a white supremacist legacy is nothing new,” he said.

As for Reid, who smeared Thomas as an Uncle Tom, on election night last week she said, “You have to be willing to vocalize that these Republicans are dangerous, that this isn’t a party that’s just another political party that disagrees with us on tax policy, that at this point, they’re dangerous. They’re dangerous to our national security, because stoking that kind of soft, white nationalism eventually leads to the hardcore stuff.”

But Sears — a former Marine and the first Black woman to be elected to a statewide office in Virginia — was having none of it. “I wish Joy Reid would invite me on her show — let’s see if she’s woman enough to do that,” she said on Fox News the day after she won. “I’d go in a heartbeat and we’d have a real discussion without Joy speaking about me behind my back, if you will.”

“I am a heartbeat away from the governorship, in case anything happens to the governor. How are you going to tell me I am a victim?” she said. “And I didn’t do anything special to get here, except stay in school and study. I took advantage of the opportunities available here in America.”

“We can do better — it’s not 1963,” she added.   

Except, when the subject is race, it’s always 1963 to elites on the left. It’s always Birmingham, Ala., and the hateful Bull Connor, or some other racist place and person in the Old South. You’d think that by now progressives would have, well, progressed. But they’re stuck in the past. On matters of race, the past is their safe space. That’s when Blacks were victims and whites, their oppressors. Winsome Sears is telling them that “It’s not 1963” anymore, and that’s something they don’t want to hear.

It’s a good message, one that liberal elites — Black and white — might give some thought to, if they weren’t so busy smearing Black conservatives who had the gall to stray from the liberal plantation.

Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He was a correspondent with HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” for 22 years and previously worked as a reporter for CBS News and as an analyst for Fox News. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Patreon page. Follow him on Twitter @BernardGoldberg.