A private arbitrator has ordered The Washington Post to rehire opinion columnist Karen Attiah—who was fired from the paper last September after she criticized gun violence and posted a racist quote from right-wing activist Charlie Kirk after his death.
“After the Washington Post fired me last year for speaking the truth in the wake of the Charlie Kirk killing, I fought back. And I’m happy to announce: I won my case against the Washington Post,” Attiah—the Post’s only Black opinion columnist at the time of her firing—wrote Monday on Bluesky. “They have been ordered to reinstate me immediately.”
“This decision confirms what we’ve said from the start: I was doing my job as an opinion writer, and this was wrongful termination,” she said in another statement.
An independent arbitrator found the Post “violated” its labor agreement and “did not have good and sufficient cause” to fire Attiah, according to a copy of the order reviewed by The New York Times.
Attiah made a string of posts on Bluesky in the aftermath of Kirk’s shooting in Utah, which followed a school shooting in Colorado, with only one of her posts 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.”
“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 then wrote, referring to Kirk, who spent much of his career trying to justify racism and bigotry. “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,” she wrote. (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,” and called it a “violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.” The arbitrator felt similarly, and the decision to reinstate Attiah was widely celebrated.
“Journalists can’t work at an organization where they must live in fear of being arbitrarily fired for doing their jobs - which, in Karen’s case, was writing her opinion,” Washington Post Guild Chair Natalie Vineberg wrote in a statement. “This decision is a victory for all Guild members who benefit from and fought for the just cause protections in our contract, and a tribute to every Guild member who took action in solidarity with Karen.”
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