Joy Reid responds to Nicki Minaj call out: ‘A teachable moment’
MSNBC host Joy Reid made her first public remarks following fiery tweets sent her way from the rap superstar
MSNBC host Joy Reid made her first public remarks following fiery messages aimed her way on Twitter from rap superstar, Nicki Minaj, on her show The ReidOut on Tuesday night.
As previously reported, Minaj noted that she was still researching the coronavirus vaccines in a series of viral tweets earlier this week. In one tweet, Nicki Minaj suggested that a family friend had become impotent after taking the COVID-19 vacccine.
Responding to Minaj’s final tweets, Reid accused the rapper of encouraging the Black community not to get vaccinated, to which Minaj replied that Reid was “thirsty” for jumping to “spread a false narrative about a black woman.”
“For you to use your platform to encourage our community to not protect themselves and save their lives… As a fan, I am so sad that you did that,” said Reid on her Monday night show of The ReidOut.
“This is what happens when you’re so thirsty to down another black woman (by the request of the white man), that you didn’t bother to read all my tweets. “My God SISTER do better” imagine getting ur dumb ass on tv a min after a tweet to spread a false narrative about a black woman,” Minaj said in response. “Why would they bother to read when the lie is so juicy & provocative & got her dumb ass on tv. They got someone with black skin for a reason. They always use us against us.”
On her show on Tuesday night, Reid called the dustup between herself and Minaj a “teachable moment.”
“Essentially, she made public her own vaccine deliberation, which according to trusted friends is a better way to describe vaccine hesitancy, which by the way is not the same thing as refusal,” Reid told her viewers on Tuesday as reported by Fox News.
“But by doing, Nicki also used her social media platform and her 22 million Twitter followers to cast doubt on the vaccine to a heavily Black audience. Needless to say, both my comments and her series of infuriated responses went viral.”
“Clearly, Nicki was not amused, but that’s OK. I feel like every moment is a teachable moment. And this might be the one that illustrates on Twitter in public how hard it is for us to talk to each other on these two sides of the ‘get the vaccine,’ ‘don’t get the vaccine’ aisle,” Reid added.
Reid noted that Minaj’s tweets illustrates that there is still a lot of “vaccine hesitancy” among African Americans.
“Everything from just being reluctant or fear of potential side effects all the way up to conspiracy theories about the vaccines that are causing people to refuse to take them or just delay,” Reid said. “And that needs to be addressed. Let’s be clear, there are good solid reasons for Black people to have these doubts.”
Reid noted that she herself was hesitant to get the vaccine under the Trump administration. Something that Minaj pointed out on Twitter the previous day, including one tweet from September 2020 that read, “Who on God’s green earth would trust a vaccine by the @US-FDA?”
But Reid noted that her doctors and the scientists who reassured the American public convinced her and her family to be vaccinated months ago. She noted that African Americans have historical reasons to be hesitant about vaccines, calling it a “real and pressing issue.”
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