A pair of left-wing academics have been accused of sour grapes after insisting that white conservatives who vote for black Republican lawmakers are still racist.
Stanford University Assistant Professor Hakeem Jeffries and University of California Irvine Professor Michael Tesler penned the article for ABC News' politics site FiveThirtyEight in the wake of last week's shock GOP win in the Virginia governor's race, which saw black Republican Winsome Sears elected Lieutenant Governor.
The progressive authors wrote: 'But supporting a Black candidate hardly precludes voters from harboring racist beliefs and motivations.
'Republicans are increasingly more likely than Democrats to hold prejudiced views of minorities, so Black Republicans like Sears often draw especially strong support from [W]hite Americans with otherwise anti-Black views simply because they draw most of their support from Republican voters.'
Jeffries and Telser went on to site a complex study about 2016 GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson, who is black, and insisted that any support for a black conservative candidate is down to partisanship, rather than open-mindedness towards race.
The authors wrote: 'But that’s the point: For many white GOP voters, anti-Black views don’t seem to get in the way of supporting a Black Republican.'
They were condemned for what some saw as a biased interpretation online.
Author and journalist Sophia Nelson said: 'I was a black republican for 25 years, I am not sure I agree with this article at all. But it is an interesting read with some data points via @hakeemjefferson.'
Winsome Sears made history last week as the first black female to be elected as Virginia's Lieutenant Governor. After her historic win, ABC News published an article Why White Voters With Racist Views Often Still Support Black Republicans
And another tweeter called Shawn in America wrote: 'Its extremely important that you believe anyone who disagrees with me politically is motivated solely by racism.'
Virginia's incoming Lieutenant Governor Sears has become a hero among black conservatives after her victory, and touts herself as a staunch conservative and defender of Second Amendment rights.
The Virginia race - which saw Republican upstart Glenn Youngkin beat one-time Democrat favorite Terry McAuliffe - was largely swung in the GOP's favor by the states' woke school boards' obsession with teaching critical race theory-inspired lessons to schoolchildren.
The recent vote elected Republican Winsome Sears to become Virginia's first black female Lieutenant Governor, which some noted to discrediting allegations of 'Republican racism.'
But as the article explains, the study claims 'racially prejudiced' white voters favor black Republicans because they see a black persons 'embrace of the
