Karen Attiah Wins Washington Post Job Back [Op-Ed]

The Washington Post has been ordered to rehire Black woman opinion columnist  Karen Attiah, whom the outlet fired last September for, well, essentially telling the truth about Charlie Kirk.

According to the New York Times, Sarah Miller Espinosa, the arbitrator who oversaw Attiah’s legal challenge against the Post, said the outlet “did not have good and sufficient cause” and that it “violated” her labor agreement.

“The Washington Post failed to establish the grievant engaged in gross misconduct,” she wrote in her ruling.

According to the Times, lawyers for the Post and lawyers for the Washington-Baltimore News Guild and Democracy Defenders Fund, which represented Attiah, made their arguments before Espinosa in June. Espinosa heard testimony from Attiah, Adam O’Neal, then the opinion editor at the Washington Post, and Wayne Connell, the company’s chief human resources officer. O’Neal said in his testimony that he saw Attiah’s social media posts about Kirk the morning after Kirk was killed, and he shared them with Connell, writing, “Karen’s social media feed yesterday and today is beyond the pale, completely unacceptable for someone associated with Opinions.” Apparently, Connell agreed, and he and O’Neal met with Will Lewis, then the chief executive of The Washington Post, to discuss the posts, and ultimately, they decided Attiah should be fired.

Attiah defended her social media posts, saying that they were part of her work for the Post, “commenting on our discourse on political violence,” and the arbitrator apparently agreed.

“This decision confirms what we’ve said from the start: I was doing my job as an opinion writer, and this was wrongful termination,” Attiah said in a statement, adding that she was “relieved to finally have that record set straight.”

As previously reported, Attiah announced her firing last year via Substack, saying she was let go for “speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns.”

“On Bluesky, in the aftermath of the horrific shootings in Utah and Colorado, I condemned America’s acceptance of political violence and criticized its ritualized responses — the hollow, cliched calls for ‘thoughts and prayers’ and ‘this is not who we are’ that normalize gun violence and absolve white perpetrators especially, while nothing is done to curb deaths,” Attiah wrote. “I expressed sadness and fear for America.”

She even noted in her post that Kirk was “horribly murdered,” which was more than many on social media were willing to say about a white Christian nationalist bigot who made his entire platform about characterizing Black men as violent, generalizing Black professionals as DEI hires, denigrating the Civil Rights Movement and its leaders, and promoting racist and xenophobic “great replacement” ideology, among other pro-white supremacy offenses.

As I noted in our previous report, Attiah had, at the time, deleted a post in which she paraphrased Kirk, writing that Kirk said, “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.” Actually, a lot of people slightly misquoted what Kirk had said, and Kirk defenders were quick to defend their white nationalist hero by adding what I’m sure they thought was context that should have shielded him from allegations of racism.

Here’s my argument for why the so-called “context” didn’t do that at all:

Kirk didn’t actually mention “Black women” in general; he was speaking specifically about Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all of whom he referred to as “affirmative action picks” before accusing them of not having “the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.” But here’s the thing: Charlie Kirk was a community college dropout who fancied himself a political expert, and he said these things about an accomplished journalist with decades of reporting under her belt (Reid), a Princeton University and Harvard Law School graduate who was a practicing attorney before she became our First Lady (Obama), a U.S. congresswoman whose political career spanned three and a half decades before she died last year (Jackson Lee), and the Black woman currently serving on the U.S. Supreme Court who has a deeper resume than virtually all of her co-justices (Brown Jackson.)

Kirk was attacking Black women. If one can’t see that clearly and unmistakably, they are just not living in truth.

Attiah, of course, wasn’t the only person who, in the wake of Kirk’s killing, proved white conservatives have been lying about how much they hate “cancel culture,” and that their love for “free speech” is limited based on who’s speaking. 

A Black student at Texas Tech was expelled and arrested for mocking a memorial for Kirk. In July, a now-former University of Tennessee professor received a $1.9 million wrongful termination settlement after being fired for his comments on Kirk. Disney and  ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air over a joke that wasn’t even directly aimed at Kirk, but did mock President Donald Trump’s political posturing after the killing. Then, after Kimmel’s show was, well, un-pulled from the air, Trump complained as if that was the true injustice.

These are just a few examples of people showing the outrage for people’s responses to Kirk’s death that they should have shown in response to the unfettered bigotry Kirk espoused when he was alive.

Anyway, according to the Times, Attiah said in a statement that she hopes Espinosa’s decision “sends a message to journalists and media institutions everywhere that freedom of expression is always worth fighting for.” She also said she’s “willing to go back” to the Post, which she called “one of the world’s most storied newspapers.”

I mean, I guess, but there’s a reason that, along with Stephen A. Smith, the Washington Post received a “Thumbs Down” award from the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ).

Jussayin’.

SEE ALSO:

Washington Post Fires Karen Attiah For Charlie Kirk Posts

Professor Watchlist, Karen Attiah, And The GOP War On Free Speech