Black Washington Post editor says white women lucky to be just called Karen: 'We are not calling for revenge'
Karen Attiah, the Global Opinions editor for the Washington Post, received backlash after she declared on Sunday that white women were "lucky" that “[we] are not calling for revenge." She later deleted her statement.
Attiah tweeted:
The lies & tears of White women hath wrought:
-The 1921 Tulsa massacre
-Murder of Emmet Till
-Exclusion of Black women from feminist movements
-53% of white women voting for Trump.
White women are lucky that we are just calling them “Karen’s”.
And not calling for revenge.
According to her Washington Post profile, Attiah “often writes on issues relating to race, gender, and international politics, with a special interest in Africa.” Furthermore, she holds a bachelor of arts in communication studies with a minor in African studies from Northwestern University and a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University.
Attiah faced considerable backlash for her statement. "Having been called 'Karen' myself on this site for correcting a news item, I find term misleading and abrasive," journalist Joyce Karam commented on her tweet. "People of course are free to come up with whatever label, but a debate for change and progress does not usually happen through finger pointing & labels."
In response, the WaPo editor argued that "change and progress never comes through the dominant group being comfortable and dictating how they should be resisted. Maybe you should read how civil rights progress actually has happened."
Attiah then continued to expand on the 'Karen' memes. "But here’s the real thing about 'Karen' memes," she tweeted. "The dark side to handwringing about how 'Karen' hurts white women’s feelings is that it is a distraction from how everyday white women uphold white supremacy through violence, aggression, and the weaponizing of their gender."
Nonetheless, Texas Senator Ted Cruz slammed Attiah's words as “sick, bigoted, racist, violent & wrong.”
"The 'global opinions' editor of WaPo says we are 'lucky' she’s not 'calling for revenge' against white women. This is sick, bigoted, racist, violent & wrong," he tweeted.
Meanwhile, others interpreted her tweet as a provocation for racial violence, with Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire asking Attiah to clarify what she meant by “revenge." “When that white woman was beaten with two by fours during the riots… is that what you mean by ‘revenge’ or did you have something more fatal in mind?” Walsh tweeted in a reply to Attiah. However, she deleted her claims instead of responding to the outrage.
This is barely the first time Attiah has ridiculed and generalized white people as a collective. On June 17, she tweeted “white people, you guys need to figure this out how to erase the emotional rewards of sadistic pleasure white people have long enjoyed in dominating and destroying black bodies.”
According to Breitbart, Attiah was Jamal Khashoggi's editor at the Washington Post. And during the coverage of Jussie Smollett's "hate crime" hoax, she tweeted, “Regarding the heinous attack on @JussieSmollett, yet another reminder that Trump’s ascendance and the resulting climate of hate has meant that lives have been increasingly at stake since 2015. Smollett could have been killed by those thugs screaming MAGA. Let that sink in.”