Karen Attiah
Karen Attiah is a Ghanaian-American writer and Global Opinions editor for The Washington Post. Attiah was born in Northeastern Texas in 1986 to a Nigerian-Ghanaian mother and Ghanaian father. After a bachelor's degree at Northwestern University, Attiah won a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Accra, Ghana and obtained an MA from Columbia University before later joining the Washington Post.
Attiah gained further prominence in October 2018 when one of the columnists she had recruited in 2017 for the Washington Posts "Global Opinions" section, the writer Jamal Khashoggi, went missing on 2 October 2018 in Istanbul. In an interview in Marie Claire, she claimed her Whatsapp started blowing up with "Jamal's missing" messages, and she felt she knew the worst had happened. On October 5, two days after his disappearance, Attiah let his column space remain blank with the title "A missing voice" and her tweet with the empty space was retweeted by Christiane Amanpour and 1,206 others. Since then she has been interviewed by major news outlets as the primary contact for Khashoggi's last published opinion.
In July 2019, Attiah accused Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, of making dog whistling attacks against Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley and asserting that it has helped to fuel President Donald Trump's rhetoric.
Attiah garnered controversy in June 2020 when she posted a tweet to the effect that white women are "lucky" that black people are "not calling for revenge" in response to historical racism in the United States. Attiah later deleted the tweet.
