MSNBC's Joy Reid apologizes for insensitive blog posts from the past, while also not taking full responsibility.

Courtesy Raw Story: 

Calling her comments “despicable and wrong,” Reid copped to writing some of the offense comments, but said she truly believed she did not write them all. 

“A community I support and deeply care about is hurting because of despicable and truly offensive posts being attributed to me,” the somber Reid began. “Many of you have seen the blog posts circulating online and social media. Many of them are homophobic and discriminatory and hateful. When a friend found them and sent them to me, I was stunned. Frankly I couldn’t imagine where they came from and whose voice that was.” 

“I spent a lot of time trying to make sense of the posts,” she continued. “I hired cyber security experts to see if somebody manipulated my words or former blog and the reality is they have not been able to prove it. But here’s what I do know: I generally do not believe I wrote those hateful things because they are completely alien to me, but I can definitely understand, based on things I have tweeted and I have written in the past, why some people don’t believe me. I’ve not been exempt from being dumb or cruel or hurtful to the very people I want to advocate for. I own that. I get it. And for that I am truly, truly story.”

I held off writing about this situation because to be honest I was not sure what to make of it.

The posts showing up on the internet, and being attributed to Reid, did not really fit my perception of her at all.

I am still not completely convinced that it was her.

Besides that I also went through something similar myself, after this blog gained a little infamy.

After the Splitsville story the Right Wing trolls went through my old posts forensically and found some that, taken out of context, did not paint a very flattering picture.

In my case most of the content was misrepresented, but there were a few things that I wrote, back when virtually NOBODY visited IM, that were truly impossible to completely defend.

They were the type of musings that one might jot down in a diary with the expectation that nobody would ever see them, but that is certainly not a mindset which translates well to the internet, where everything lives forever.

So that should serve as a lesson to us all, that we need to consider that the things we write on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even the comment section of a blog, might one day be dredged up and used against us when we least expect it.

I think that Joy Reid is very admirable person, but there is a journey to arrive at the best version of ourselves, and sometimes those missteps along they way can trip us up even after we think we have already arrived.