The Washington Post fired its last full-time Black opinion columnist, who says it was because they didn’t like what she posted after Charlie Kirk’s shooting.
Karen Attiah joined the Post in 2014 as a columnist, then became the founding Global Opinions editor in 2016, and has received numerous awards since, including for her coverage of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. On Monday, she announced she was fired for criticizing gun violence and posting a racist quote from Kirk in the wake of his death.
Last Wednesday, in the aftermath of Kirk’s shooting in Utah and the school shooting in Colorado, Attiah made a string of posts on Bluesky, with only one of them actually mentioning Kirk by name.
“I wish I had hope for gun control and that I could believe ‘political violence has no place in this country.’ But we live in a country that accepts white children being massacred by gun violence,” she wrote first. “Not just accepts, but worships violence.”
“Political violence has no place in this country…. But we will also do nothing to curb the availability of the guns used to carry out said violence,” she said in another post. “The denial and empty rhetoric is learned helplessness—because the truth is … America is sick and there is no cure in sight.”
Those posts are not lacking in validity, and neither are the statements Attiah suspects she actually got fired for.
“Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence,” she wrote, referring to Kirk, who spent much of his career punching down and spreading racism and negativity. “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is … not the same as violence,” she said later.
The one post Attiah made that actually had Kirk’s name in it was a slightly paraphrased quote.
“‘Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot’—Charlie Kirk.” (Kirk’s original quote was “You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously,” in reference to former first lady Michelle Obama, news host Joy Reid, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and former Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, although his ire was certainly directed at any successful Black woman.)
Attiah said the Post found her BlueSky posts to be “unacceptable,” “gross misconduct” and “endangering the physical safety” of her co-workers. She added that she was fired “without conversation.”
“This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold,” Attiah wrote. “Since then, my words on absolution for white male violence have proven prescient. The suspect in Kirk’s killing is indeed a young white man, and already, lawmakers are urging us to pray for him. The media is painting the 22-year-old as a good, all-American suburban kid. The cycle I mentioned has once again come to pass.”
Attiah also noted that her firing, as the last Black opinion columnist at the Post, reflected a greater trend of reactionary, anti-DEI policy that has been reaffirmed by the Trump administration’s culture war on woke, “a historical pattern as dangerous as it is shameful—and tragic,” she wrote.
This comes as many on the online right try (with some success) to attack and censure anyone they see speaking ill of Kirk, even if it just entails reposting the countless wildly offensive and inaccurate things he said while he was alive. This shows once again that the right wing’s ideology has never been one of free speech in America, no matter how much they say it is.
From McCarthyism to the Dixie Chicks, to this current witch hunt, it’s clear that the right is far more sensitive than it has portrayed itself to be. That’s why it’s crashing out over people like Attiah and others rightly pointing out that Kirk’s legacy is one of bigotry and contempt, not one that should be held up as some shining example of political discourse.
Attiah plans to continue her writing on her substack The Golden Hour.
“I am proud of my eleven years at the Post. Beyond awards and recognition, the greatest honor has been working with brilliant colleagues and connecting with readers and writers around the world,” she wrote. “To all who have supported me, read me, even those who disagreed with me—I say, thank you. You’ve made me a better writer, thinker, and person.”
The post Black Washington Post Journalist Says She Was Fired Over Charlie Kirk appeared first on New Republic.
