Melissa Harris-Perry took conservative pundit George Will to task on her show Saturday morning for saying President Barack Obama still had good job approval numbers because he is black.

“the nation, which is generally reluctant to declare a president a failure — thereby admitting that it made a mistake in choosing him — seems especially reluctant to give up on the first African American president,” Will wrote in an Oct. 1 column for The Washington Post, a conclusion Harris took issue with.

ADVERTISEMENT

“Right. Because we all know that black men have an unfair advantage in the labor market,” Harris-Perry scoffed. “You can see the evidence of it all around you. After decades of racial goodwill shown to black workers as a result of the unfairly imposed guilt trip by radical race card playing media types like me, black workers now have an unemployment rate of 13.4 percent. Right, racial guilt, that’s it.”

Will also criticized MSNBC, which airs Harris-Perry’s program, calling its on-air talent “excitable boys and girls who, with their (at most) one-track minds and exquisitely sensitive olfactory receptors, sniff racism in any criticism of their pin-up.”

But the “paradox” Will cited, Harris-Perry said, could instead be tied to Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s “devastatingly uninspiring” campaign, or that voters had connected Romney to his party’s reproductive policies.

“That big old gender gap could be because of ‘transvaginal’ [Bob] McDonnell, ‘legitimate rape’ [Todd] Akin or ‘no pills’ [Rick] Santorum,” she explained. “Or, George, perhaps it’s that Mr. Romney chose a running mate [Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)] who advocated transforming Medicare into a voucher system that might have caused reliably conservative seniors to rethink their willingness to support the president.”

Watch Harris-Perry’s rebuttal to Will, aired Saturday on MSNBC, below.

ADVERTISEMENT

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy