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Audio versions of this episode can be found here on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. You can also watch it on YouTube:
My guest today is Karen Attiah.
Karen Attiah is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and global thought leader whose work explores the intersections of race, culture, gender, and international affairs. She was born and raised in DeSoto, Texas, and began her journey in media and advocacy at 19 through an internship at the Dallas Public Defender’s Office. A formative summer in Spain studying Spanish ignited her lifelong commitment to international storytelling and human rights.
A former Fulbright Scholar to Ghana, Karen has reported from across the globe—including Nigeria, Germany, Curaçao, and beyond. Her reporting and commentary have appeared in Voice of America, Al Jazeera, the Associated Press, Haitian Times, and other international outlets. She is also a frequent contributor to broadcast media, with appearances on CNN, MSNBC, BBC, NPR, and CBC.
In 2016, Karen became the founding editor of The Washington Post’s Global Opinions section, where she commissioned commentary from some of the world’s most influential thinkers and dissidents. She became a staff columnist in 2021. Her writing—widely recognized for its clarity, courage, and impact—focuses on global justice, human rights, and the Black diaspora.
Karen’s work has earned her numerous accolades, including the 2019 George Polk Special Award, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Freedom Writer Award, the National Association of Black Journalists’ Journalist of the Year Award, and recognition in Essence’s “Woke 100” and The Root 100. Washingtonian magazine named her a “Star to Watch” in 2021.
She is the author of the forthcoming book Say Your Word, Then Leave, about the life and assassination of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, whom she worked with closely during the last year of his life.
In addition to her work as a writer and commentator, Karen is an amateur Muay Thai fighter and boxing enthusiast, having trained and competed both in the U.S. and abroad. She was the 2021 U.S. Muay Thai Open Silver Medalist in the 125-132 pound division.
Karen also runs the awesome The Golden Hour here on Substack: subscribe now!
Karen is somebody whose work I’ve long admired, an admiration that has only grown in observing her evolution in the public eye following her firing from the Washington Post (she has written about the experience here). I mean this in a couple important ways. First—and perhaps most obviously—is watching her fearlessness in challenging the Jeff Bezos-owned paper over what she (and her union) believe was an improper firing, one that violates her First Amendment rights. We live in such a litigious society it’s easy to forget that facing off against power structures is daunting and exhausting, but Karen has rightly recognized that her case is a potential precedent for journalists in the future. In other words, circumstances forced her to become an avatar for attacks on free speech and censorship, and she’s powerfully risen to that challenge (often a smile on her face).
The other piece to the puzzle is how Karen has lived into the affordances of being an independent writer and public intellectual, stretching to show more even more of her personal and political lives than she did while an editor at the Post. As we discuss in the episode, the notion of journalistic objectivity, while perhaps having served a role in the evolution of journalism, is now not the way many journalists and commentators will be able to be most honest with their audiences.
All that and more in this episode, so get to it!
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Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renée DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode with dr. maytha ميثاء الحسن on ‘withnessing’ and freedom:
