Karen Attiah:

Last week, the Washington Post fired me.

The reason? Speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns.

Attiah was with the Post for eleven years, where she was their Global Opinions editor and their “last remaining Black full-time opinion columnist.”

Her firing comes after several social media posts where she criticized the “ritualized responses” following Charlie Kirk’s killing:

“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.”

Her posts were restrained, and condemned “violence and murder without engaging in excessive, false mourning.”

And yet, the Post accused my measured Bluesky posts of being “unacceptable”, “gross misconduct” and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues — charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false. They rushed to fire me without even a 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.

“Democracy Dies in Darkness”—and the Post itself is dousing the light.

(You may recall that Columbia University cancelled Attiah’s course on Race, Media and International Affairs, leading her to launch Resistance Summer School to teach it anyway. The classes (which I attended) were terrific (and will be repeated and expanded—I’m again signed up, for 102). I’m hopeful she’ll now be able to expand further.)