Karen Attiah won her job back, and on November 8, 2026, she said she was not taking it.
Attiah spent eleven years at The Washington Post as an editor and columnist, and she was the last full-time Black columnist in its Opinions section. In September 2025, the paper fired her over commentary on gun violence in America and on the grace the country extends to white men who espouse hatred and violence. It ended her employment by email the next day, accusing her of gross misconduct and calling her a threat to colleagues.
She fought it with the support of the Washington Baltimore News Guild. “In August, an independent arbitrator ruled that the Washington Post had no just cause to fire me,” she wrote. “I won reinstatement and full back pay.”
Then she wrote the sentence that ends it. “I have decided not to return to what The Washington Post has become,” she said, in an essay on her own newsletter, The Golden Hour. She said returning would not guarantee the editorial independence and institutional support she needed. “I have accepted a settlement with the Post and will move forward with my life and career,” she wrote. The settlement amount and the back pay figure have not been disclosed.
She did not treat the ruling as hers alone. “I recognized how important the win was for Black journalists, especially those pushed out of newsrooms in recent years,” she wrote. She called it an important moment for labor rights and for free speech as well, at a time when Black representation in newsrooms is shrinking.
The arithmetic of that is on her own record. Eleven years inside the building, the last of them as the only full-time Black columnist its Opinions section had, and then a firing by email the day after the commentary went up. Eleven months after that, an arbitrator said the paper had been wrong about it.
During her years at the paper, she wrote on race, gender, culture and global human rights, and she worked with the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi before his murder in 2018. She closed the essay in four words: forward ever, backward never.
