Sellers responds to Ingraham’s ‘accent’ remark

Civil rights attorney Bakari Sellers, a CNN commentator, said Tuesday that you “never argue with a fool,” taking a shot at Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham the morning after she said he had used an “accent” on television that she’d never heard before.

“I know that people said that, you know, I switch accents,” Sellers said during a Tuesday press conference in North Carolina with attorneys and family members of Andrew Brown Jr., a Black man shot and killed by police a week ago.

“But my daddy in Denmark, S.C., would always say you never argue with a fool,” Sellers continued. 

The press conference was held to discuss an autopsy report from police on Brown’s shooting. On Monday, Sellers and other attorneys for Brown’s family had criticized local prosecutors for not allowing them to see a full body camera video capturing Brown’s shooting. 

Brown’s family and their attorneys have called that shooting an “execution” and said that Brown was shot by police as he was fleeing. They also argue police started firing while Brown, 42, had his hands on his steering wheel. Police had a warrant for Brown related to a drug charge.

Brown was shot the day after a jury delivered a guilty verdict in former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s trial for murdering George Floyd.

Ingraham, commenting on the situation on Monday night, criticized Sellers for going after the police.

“Bakari Sellers suddenly showed in North Carolina today to condemn the police, in another case pouring on the dramatic effect as if you needed it, and sporting an accent that maybe I missed something, but I never heard him use on TV before,” Ingraham said. 

Sellers did not mention Ingraham by name in responding, but her remark had received a lot of attention on social media.

He said he wasn’t worried about the criticism, and that he hoped people regardless of their politics would join Brown’s family in calling for justice.

“So we will deal with people who may not like us. We will deal with people who may not vote like us, but at the end of the day I do not care what you look like, who you pray to, where you walk or how you voted but what I care about is the fact that an injustice was done and gotten carried away,” Sellers said.