Last spring, I was sitting on the couches on the 7th floor of the Washington Post, fighting back tears.

A new edict had come down from Jeff Bezos, ordering that the opinion section I had worked in for the last 11 years would not be allowed to publish anything outside personal liberties and free markets. A number of my fellow columnists had already resigned in protest of the paper’s changing policies.

A number of us were sitting on the couches, with a sense of foreboding mixed with determination. I remember saying out loud, “All I know how to do is write, and fight.”

A few months later, I declined to take a buyout to leave the Washington Post. I decided to stay and fight, and do my job as best as I could.

Still, I never thought a year later I would end up going to war—with the Washington Post itself.

But I did. And… I won.

It’s official:

After being fired last September by the Washington Post for telling the truth about race and gender in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk killing, I filed a grievance through the Washington Post Guild, of which I am a longtime member. We went to arbitration on June 4th for a day-long hearing.

And now, the newspaper has been found in violation of the Guild’s Collective Bargaining Agreement.

Independent arbitrator Sarah Miller Espinosa ruled that the “Washington Post did not have good and sufficient cause to terminate [my] employment”, and that the firing violated the collective bargaining agreement between the Guild and the Post.

The Washington Post has been ordered to reinstate me immediately, plus full back pay and benefits.

My God. I fought the Washington Post—and won.

Key Points from The Arbitrator’s Decision

Last September, the Post fired me via email a day after the Charlie Kirk killing, claiming that my posts on Bluesky on how America coddles “white men who espouse hatred and violence” were “gross misconduct” and violated the Post’s social media policy.

You can read the original termination letter here:

“White men who espouse hatred and violence”

The Post argued that I violated their social media policies and that I disparaged white men when I was specifically talking about white men who choose to engage in harmful behavior. As I said in my testimony, if the Post believes that white men who espouse hatred and violence are a protected specific group, then well— they literally proved the point of my posts about America coddling violent white men. I didn’t say all white men. I didn’t say some white men. I said those that choose to espouse hatred and violence.

Espinosa disagreed with the Post’s interpretation.

“A reasonable interpretation of this provision is that posts cannot disparage groups or individuals on the basis of protected characteristics, including race and gender. The Post’s assertion is that the Grievant’s posts disparage White men. That interpretation is unsupported by the actual words, as well as the context, of the Grievant’s posts. The Grievant was referring to a subset of White men, specifically “white men who espouse hatred and violence” and a “white man who espoused violence.”

Simply based on the plain language of the text, it is not reasonable to conclude that the Grievant’s posts were referring to or disparaging all White men or disparaging a particular white man on the basis of race or gender. Recognizing an individual’s or individuals’ race or gender does not, in and of itself, constitute misconduct.”

This was not just a win for journalism, but a win for basic reading comprehension. Pour one out for the Grammar police.

The Post Argued I Was a Security Threat. The Arbitrator Reminded Them About Protecting Their Journalists.

In the arbitration decision, Espinosa reminded the Post of their duty to safeguard their journalists. The Post’s policy says, “It is a top priority for The Post to protect its journalists. The company recognizes that harassment on social media continues to become more sophisticated and frequent. We will work to protect our journalists from these campaigns publicly and privately.”

At the time of my Bluesky posts on Sept 10th, I barely received any backlash. I did not see any threats against me. A few anonymous accounts posted screenshots to Twitter, but otherwise, as far as I could tell, my posts didn’t generate any harsh blowback. I went on about my day.

Wayne Connell and the Post argued that they believed Charlie Kirk’s assassination was such a heightened emotional moment, and that my “association with the Post was the security issue.” The Post “felt the need to act quickly in separating itself from Ms. Attiah in order to protect itself and its employees.” They fired me within 4 hours, without a conversation.

The arbitrator disagreed.

That is, in the Arbitrator’s view, the Post’s witnesses’ testimony seems to attempt to hold the Grievant accountable for the actions of bad actors who were posting threats against her and The Post on social media. The testimony implies that The Post’s leadership Page 30 of 39 believed summarily discharging the Grievant would placate the bad actors so that they would not commit violence against other Post employees. The Arbitrator finds it strange for The Post to argue it had just cause to terminate the Grievant, in part, because, if it didn’t immediately do so, criminals may commit violence against other employees. The Arbitrator wonders about the Post’s logic in that it fails to recognize it is the people making the threats who are responsible for their own behavior, not the Grievant. To imply that the Grievant’s posts were justifiable provocation for threatened criminal acts or that the Grievant’s employment may be terminated for just cause because bad actors threatened The Post is unsupportable.

This is important for all media employees. Women journalists, and particularly Black women journalists who cover anything related to race, politics or gender, statistically receive more hate and abuse online. The Post’s logic would impose a double burden on us, not only to be subject to that abuse, but to be held responsible for the threats against us— to the point where we could be terminated.

I am glad the arbitrator rejected this logic and reminded the Post—and all media houses —of their responsibility not to bend to bad-faith actors and to protect their journalists.

A WaPo Columnist Encouraged Charlie Kirk Critics to be Doxxed and “fck all the media”. He still has a job.

I wasn’t the only one posting about Charlie Kirk. Apparently, to Adam O’Neal, if you are a white male contract columnist, like Marc Theissen, you can post on Twitter about “fck the media and liberal democrats” and encourage the doxxing of Kirk critics and still have your job.

In addition to retweeting or quote tweeting comments from other social media users encouraging the doxxing and/or firing of individuals expressing negative opinions about Mr. Kirk or celebrating Mr. Kirk’s murder, Thiessen wrote: “Got a point” above a post from another user stating: “Fck all the media and the liberal democrats.” (Un. Ex. 3). It is difficult to understand how these posts could be considered collegial or professional, yet The Post took no action against Thiessen, other than O’Neal’s conversation directing Thiessen to be more careful online.

Adam O’Neal and the Mysterious Text Messages

Editorial Page editor Adam O ‘Neal testified that he doesn’t have a Bluesky account, and doesn’t regularly check social media in the mornings. But he did receive messages from various individuals about my posts. Individuals whose names and identities he then could suddenly not remember. Whoever sent the messages, it was enough for him to call a meeting and fire me within four hours.

“…,it is curious that O’Neal could remember many details of the events occurring on September 11, 2025, but could not remember the identity of even one of the several individuals who sent him messages about the Grievant’s posts…”

I have… thoughts. But it all begs the question— who or what influenced such a reckless decision? How high up did this really go? Or what outside forces exerted influence that day to fire me in such an abrupt way? Questions that still need answers.

The Washington Post’s Erasure of Jamal Khashoggi and threats to other Washington Post Journalists

Many readers may remember me from my days of being a global opinions editor, and hiring Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed by agents of the Saudi regime in 2018.

Perhaps one of the most chilling moments of the hearing was what was not said. For all the talk about threats to safety, the Post never brought up Jamal’s name once. All of the awards, honors and glory the Post covered themselves in after Jamal’s murder, for standing up against threats to journalists, all of the years I spent putting myself in harm’s way, none of that was mentioned. Nor did they mention WaPo journalists who had been imprisoned, or harmed in the wake of the Jan. 6th attacks.

After years of standing up for Jamal’s life and work, I never would have imagined that I would be painted as the threat to the Washington Post.

A Huge Win for Press Freedom and for Union Solidarity

I am still processing the magnitude of this year-long ordeal, and how important this ruling is— not just for me, but for journalists, and anyone who dares to speak the truth about America in these challenging times. I should not have had to fight this battle, but it was a fight worth having.

As the last full-time Black staff opinion columnist left in the section before my firing, I know that my termination sent a chilling message to Black journalists about our disposability, especially when we say or do anything to challenge the status quo. As the arbitrator found, I was fired without even a phone conversation, despite numerous awards, accolades, and no disciplinary record in my 11-year tenure.

Also, I am not the first woman journalist at the Washington Post to be punished for not adequately mourning the sudden death of a prominent male celebrity. My former colleague Felicia Somnez was unjustly suspended in the wake of the death of basketball star Kobe Bryant for tweeting about his sexual assault allegations. In my case, a team of male bosses specifically punished me for not stripping performatively for Charlie Kirk. This is the cruel and intimidating message they send to women journalists— and women everywhere— strip yourselves in mourning for powerful men, or we will strip you of your livelihood.

As my friend and political philosopher Olufemi Taiwo said, “Our ancestors did more, with less, against worse. Lock in.” And that was one of my mantras that helped keep me going in the last year of this fight.

But lemme brag on myself for a little bit. Why do people test me? Not only am I a martial artist and amateur fighter, but I also come from a line of war survivors. I’ve stood up against the Saudi government to fight for justice in Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. In the words of Rihanna, “who y’all think y’all frontin’ on?” Don’t y’all know who I am? I am her, that’s who.

This victory is a testament to the power and necessity of strong labor unions in media— I am especially grateful to my Washington Post Guild siblings who protested, flyered, and posted on social media on my behalf, even when the Post was going through massive upheaval and layoffs. I owe the world to my amazing Washington Baltimore News Guild legal team, lead counsel Amos Laor, and Michael Sosnick. And Kathleen Floyd, who has been on top of the comms. The possibility of going to arbitration to resolve this matter would not have been possible without the union contract.

If you have a union, I suggest you join one!

And last but certainly not least, I want to thank , Craig Becker and the team at the Democracy Defenders Fund, who lent their excellent legal support to this very important case.

To all the independent media and substackers who platformed me when no one else would, thank you. I’m especially thinking of you, , , — you all were the first to have me on your platforms to speak about my firing when mainstream media was too afraid to touch my story last year.

And I want to thank all of you readers who have followed and supported my work all these years, even over here on Substack. And to all the students who took my courses last year under Resistance Summer School / Resistance Studies Series. Your support (and subscriptions) allowed me to weather what would have been a massive financial setback and put that energy toward fighting this battle. I will be teaching Race, Media and International Affairs this fall, so sign up if you are interested!

To my fellow journalists and truth tellers: If you are fighting battles that you think are impossible, I hope this win gives you hope, courage, and some wind in your sails. Sometimes the little guy (or in this case, girl) wins against the machine. As I like to say… one must keep throwing rocks at the tanks programmed to run over us—we might not always stop them, but we can sometimes break a window.

Lastly, I want to dedicate this win to my late father, who passed away exactly six months ago today.

Daddy, you told me to keep going, to go “up and up and up”, and to “always help people.” I hope I’ve made you proud today. I miss you and love you.

Forward ever, backward never.

We move!

Cadaqués, Spain— On Monday, I was sitting on the beach in Cadaqués, a beautiful village north of Barcelona. I watched families with little children squealing with delight in the clear water. Glamorous older women in sunning themselves topless.

Wednesday, August 12th, was my 40th birthday, the same day as the long-awaited solar eclipse.

Despite the scenes of joy, play and sensual ease, I found myself wondering all week what, or who, I had left to live for, to fight for. The Washington Post wrongfully fired me last September. And then in February, my sweet Daddy died.

I planned to write about turning 40 as a single woman, and what rebellion, reinvention, and strategy might look like for a Black woman entering the second half of her life.

I had also been thinking about the solar eclipse of February 12, 1831 (my half birthday), which Nat Turner interpreted as a sign to prepare for the slave revolt he would lead that August.

But the midlife reflections will have to wait. Because yet another Black intellectual has been destroyed by white institutions.

The world is waking up to the news of the death of 41-year-old Black sociologist Jason Arday, who was once celebrated as the youngest Black academic at Cambridge. In the last several weeks, after allegations of plagiarism, the British media whipped itself into a frenzy of digital bloodlust, focusing on Arday at a velocity amplified by social media algorithms. I remember wondering why my social media feeds, all the way in the United States, were suddenly filled with posts about a British academic I had never heard of.

The allegations trace back to Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded Arday’s doctorate, previously investigated plagiarism claims, and did not uphold them. The latest campaign was reignited in part by Nathan Cofnas, a prominent anti-DEI academic who published his accusations under the headline “DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge.”

Arday resigned on August 5th from his dream position at Cambridge, citing that “relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary” had taken a “profound toll” on him.

Nine days later, he was dead.

We still don’t know the official details of Arday’s death.

His family said in a statement: “Jason was subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse for more than three years since he accepted the role of professor at Cambridge University by those who would leave no stone unturned in their quest to undermine him…“The campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason, who was a gentleman and who always wanted to see the best in everyone.”

According to Newscord, the British media wrote 249 articles in 22 days—188 of those coming in the last days of his life, after he requested to be left alone.

Across the pond, the Telegraph in particular sent a phalanx of writers, editors, and political commentators against Arday, flooding the pages with disparaging articles. In three weeks, the Telegraph published at least a dozen adverse articles and commentaries about Arday. On July 24th, a Telegraph associate editor called Arday “Cambridge’s diversity poster boy” in an article. Annabel Durham called Jason Arday a symptom of “academia’s moral disease” in an August 3rd piece. “A PhD is no longer a sign of brilliance – take it from Dr Arday” reads a headline from a piece from Daniel Sokol in The Telegraph in the hours before Arday’s death. And Stephen Daisely, a day after Arday’s resignation, wrote an article on August 6th with the headline, ‘Jason Arday is proof you reap what you sow”.

And now Arday is dead.

At least nine of the twelve stories were published between August 2 and August 14—less than two weeks. Several appeared after he resigned, a sign that his stepping down was not enough to satiate their bloodlust.

Many stories focused on the controversy and allegations, not his contributions or scholarship. On Instagram, acaedmic and philosopher asserted that by completely ignoring Arday’s impact on scholarship, the distorted media narrative is to blame for his death.

It is important to highlight Arday’s impact. But the media harm isn’t just in the ignoring. In fact, I would argue the opposite: Arday’s impact is precisely what made him—and what makes Black intellectuals like him—targets for elimination.

When journalism scrutiny beceomes digital terrorism

Throughout history, American and British media especially —have repeatedly shown the world their lust for the blood of Black people, especially ones they have deemed to be too powerful or influential for their liking. Black people who transgress the racial hierarchy are targets to be “put back in their place”.

In my online Race, Media and International Affairs class, my students and I examine the history of white media’s role in whipping up or justifying murderous frenzies against newly freed Black people, or African colonial subjects, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the United States, that often meant lynching, pogroms, and racial massacres; in the British context, it often operated through imperial war and colonial repression.

In the United States in the late 1800s, white newspapers made a habit of justifying lynching, even going so far as to inciting mobs to go after Black people and white abolitionists. Edward Carmack, a Tennessee newspaper editor and later senator, used his newspaper to incite a white mob to attack and destroy the offices of pioneering Black journalist Ida B. Wells. Her “crime”? She had dared call out the white media’s complicity in the wave of lynchings of Black people, including her friend.

The British colonial media had a history of justifying violent campaigns of bloodshed and looting in its colonies in Africa, arguing that Africans were savage, prone to cannibalism, and deserving of overwhelming retribution. When Britain invaded Benin in 1897, white newspapers in British colonies thousands of miles away in New Zealand justified Britain “carrying the sword” into the “dark continent” to eliminate cannibalism and slavery.

The racial media ecosystem was global long before the internet; the English-speaking press circulated narratives of Black savagery, danger and insubordination across imperial borders.

Today, these campaigns are not just limited to Black people, but to the white allies or institutions that dare hire or support Black people. In the 1800s, white newspapers incited mobs against white abolitionists.

Today, the British media didn’t just attack Arday; they sustained an attack on Cambridge. In the end, after standing by Arday at first, the institution agreed to do an investigation of Arday’s work.

In the digital era, British and American media’s epigenetic habit of anti-Black hysteria has not waned, even if actual vigilante mob violence against black people has receded, at the moment, at least.

However, with social media and the algorithms, the sheer speed and volume with which a person can be subject to global hate has never been seen before in history. A Black person in the United States can hear about what happened to Arday, and feel terrified for his or her job. A professor or researcher that would have otherwise used or citied Arday’s work in another country, now is afraid.

Digital terror campaigns have a global reach that localized mobs historically could not muster. Algorithms can now turn the punishment of a single person into a global demonstration of power, delivering a lightning-fast warning to successful Black people in white institutions around the world: Don't aim too high. What happened to Arday can happen to you. Behave accordingly.

And yet, when it comes to media, we still tend to use the words, or “cyber-bullying”, or “digital harassment”, as if these actions aren’t a part of a larger historical political project with clear tactics and objectives. It feels like we need much stronger frameworks to reflect the historically severe consequences of when the media goes after visible Black voices.

Given the history of white media’s key role in terror against Black people, at what point do we call such actions of journalism outlets digital terror campaigns?

Terror is not only violence. Historically, its power has come from fear, spectacle, and punishment used to enforce a political or social order, or a specific objective. Bad and hostile journalism alone doesn’t equate to terrorism. But this is a moment to examine the media’s role in creating the permission structures for the political objective: removing Black people from positions of influence and power.

In this global anti-DEI age, removing Black people from public life has become an explicit political project, orchestrated at the highest levels of government, academia, and media, and embedded into policy. We then started seeing high-profile news of Black college presidents being pressured to resign (Claudine Gay of Harvard), prominent Black journalists being forced out of their positions (Don Lemon, Joy Reid, and myself), and corporations stepping back from funding or supporting anything that looks like diversity initiatives.

The last point is important— Terror campaigns also act as a social deterrent, in that they are designed to cause enough fear in institutions and allies: If you support Black people, we will come for you, anywhere you are, 24/7. The target may be one person or one institution, but the audience is everyone. And the fear comes straight to your phone, inbox, and social media feeds.

At the most extreme levels, this psychological terror results in death or causes the victim to want to kill themselves.

We saw this as the British tabloids hounded Meghan Markle, to the point where she also struggled with suicidal thoughts; she and her husband Prince Harry eventually left the United Kingdom. And as I sit here in Spain, I wonder if any place in the world is safe if you are a Black person who has transgressed the racial order. The British media kept hounding her even in another country. At least she lived to tell her tale.

I decided to fight the Washington Post, and to keep going so I can tell more stories too.

But Arday is dead.

And there’s no guarantee that the media vultures will stop feeding on him, even now.

I’ve been thinking about nostalgia, childhood, and being a Black girl who read a lot about myths and fantasized about playing roles that weren’t meant for her.

One of the earliest books I remember from my childhood is Amazing Grace, by Mary Hoffman—about a Black girl who loves acting and dreams of playing all sorts of characters. Her school puts on a play about Peter Pan, and she wants to play Peter. But she's told she can’t play Peter because she is Black and a girl. The book ends with her being triumphant and landing the role as Peter. I used to take that story as inspirational.

Thirty or so years later, I wonder if the message to Black girls, to fight to play white / European characters, to fight to expand the white imagination to include us— is ultimately a trap.

The recent racial furor over Lupita Nyong’o’s casting as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s remake of the Odyssey is yet another data point in the perils of remake/reboot culture and what seems like our culture’s inability — or refusal — to imagine and fund new stories about Black heroines, goddesses, princesses and other archetypes, or older civilizational stories rooted in Black and African cosmologies.

Now, I love Greek and Roman mythology. So much so that I used to carry around D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths around the house. I took Latin in high school, and briefly flirted with the idea of becoming a classics major in college. I think the Odyssey is a very important carrier of truth, specifically the way Odysseus represents the perils of nostalgia, the archetype of male strength through strategy and intelligence, and personal resilience through challenge. But I never thought that I needed to see a Black person in those myths.

As I have gotten older, I have studied more African and diasporic myths, cosmologies, and archetypes of Black feminine power. Many of them mirror or even are more interesting than the Greek and Roman myths.

This (and my old age, probably) is why I have less time and energy for making inclusion in the white imagination the horizon of Black liberation and progress — when Black and diasporic universes are at our disposal.

Three years ago, after Black actress Halle Bailey was cast as Ariel in Disney’s remake of “The Little Mermaid”, all racial hell broke loose.

White people, especially on the right, lost their damn minds, saying that there were no such things as Black mermaids. Black people, for their part, spent a good amount of time and ink arguing for why Black people and Black women in particular have long been associated with water, and have existed as water deities (Mami Wata spirits, Oshun, Yemaja, just to name a few from West Africa).

And like the story of fictional little Grace winning the ability to play Peter Pan, plenty of Black people celebrated Bailey’s casting of Ariel as progress.

At the time, I did a little Twitter experiment and asked white people on my feed to name a Black fictional superheroine or princess that they looked up to that was originally rendered as Black, and not a Black version of a white or European character. I also said that X-Men’s Storm and Eartha Kitt’s Catwoman did not count as answers. Suffice to say— the crowd struggled— pretty mightily.

I wrote about this experiment for the Washington Post— and I said “superheroines and princesses represent the possibilities of female empowerment, of “specialness.” Whether it is a woman who possesses superhuman abilities to fight for the good of humanity, or a princess who wields social power, privilege and desirability, these are the cultural archetypes of feminine power.

I also wrote that “the lazy entertainment corporations need to create and support original Black female characters, not reheat old White characters with Black faces.”

And of course, Hollywood is gonna Hollywood, and repeat whatever formulas produce predictable cash returns. The latest furor over the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey feels like no exception. Billionaire and perpetual crybaby Elon Musk went so far as to say he would create his own version of the Homerian epic, claiming that Christopher Nolan “desecrated” the Odyssey. Once again, we have the same meltdowns over a Black actress playing a fictional, archetypal character from the Western canon. But perhaps there’s an added sexualized element—- that a white male director has “descecrated” the Odyssey by casting a Black woman is reminiscent of the hate white people get when they are accused of being “N—r lovers” and race traitors.

Many Black writers and creators I admire and respect have gone to great lengths to explain that dark-skinned people existed in Ancient Greece, that Lupita is stunningly beautiful and is indeed worthy of being seen as a symbol of power. I’ve seen takes litigating whiteness and race in Greece and the Mediterranean. We spend hours on social media creating outrage content— whether it is Black response to white outrage, or Black outrage at being told we don’t belong— all while white Hollywood studios and social media platforms rake in the money and the press.

All of this, for what?

Personally and intellectually, I am over it. How many times are we going to fall for fighting for the scraps— to be “the first Black to do X”, or the “only Black to do Y”? When are we going to realize that corporations’ intentional stoking of white and Black anxiety over Black inclusion— and specifically, inclusion of Black women is nothing more than a marketing strategy, a form of racial capitalism, that still ends up lining the pockets of rich white men and the Hollywood machine they control? When will we realize the power imbalances remain the same?

As I wrote three years ago, “Every American generation so far has grown up in a cultural environment that disallows Black girls and women as possessing some form of power over others, whether through super abilities or social power inherited through birth or marriage.”

As for Helen of Troy, I get why this role is so appealing. She occupies a unique position in the list of white feminine power—the ability to move men to launch ships, go to war, and destroy one another, a goddess-like level of power.

We have been conditioned to desire and envy this myth that white women’s beauty and femininity can compel men to go to war for them, when all too often in real life, Black women are the ones who are the most at risk and unprotected. And even this is unstable power, because it is dependent on how men see and respond to the women.

I am not trying to critique Black actresses who pursue and secure these types of roles.

And I am also aware of the difficulties for Black actresses in Hollywood, especially dark-skinned ones, fighting an industry that has long underpaid them and undervalued and promoted Black stories, especially stories that place Black women as holding a position of power over others (Ahem, why haven’t we gotten an X-Men Storm standalone movie yet??) Which is why when we hear of a Black Ariel, or a Black Helen of Troy, we are told to get excited, because of the scarcity of Black women being allowed to be seen in positions of power, particularly over men. And this scarcity is man-made, literally— we know how often women’s contributions to movements have been erased.

And very specifically with N’yongo, I commend her for her work on Queen of Katwe, a Disney film set in East Africa that tells the story of a young girl named Phiona Mutesi, who grew up in a Ugandan slum and managed to make a name and a better life for herself through chess. She wasn’t inspirational because of being desired by men, but because of determination, community, and the power of her own mind.

And perhaps this is why Nyong’o’s career is an interesting vehicle for the tension between Black women as iconic characters in the Western canon versus the relative lack of support for new stories featuring Black/African powerful female lead characters. Nyong’o has played a slave, a central powerful figure in Disney’s Black Panther in the Marvel universe, the protective mother of a Ugandan chess phenom, and now Helen of Troy.

What interests me most is that roles represent a world where a Black Helen of Troy creates buzzy racial controversy. Nyong’o was a central and key figure in Black Panther, a fictional African kingdom — in which I argued that Wakanda’s women were the true revolutionaries- that shattered records across the globe. But the brilliant film and novel story about Phiona, the chess Queen of Katwe, did not receive anywhere near the marketing push from Disney that it deserved.

We don’t need Black Helens of Troy. We need more Wakanda women. We need more Women Kings. We need more Queens of Katwe.

It is precisely in this moment of historical erasure and rejection of even the most nominal forms of Black inclusion that Black writers and thinkers, and especially Black women, should be focusing on building out the civilizational myths, histories, and heroines we already have. It is precisely the moment to create new mythical universes and characters for ourselves. We have to reclaim sovereignty over our own imaginative power to cultivate, interpret, and expand our own myths, symbologies, philosophies, and values.

Now, such creativity is happening, and many of these stories exist. Nollywood has never asked permission from Hollywood to create films. There are indie comic book creators like David Crownson of Kingwood Comics, who has created “Harriet Tubman, Demon Slayer.” I grew up hearing stories about Anansi the Spider, and learning about Yaa Asantewaa, the Ashanti queen who held off the British. We had the film “The Woman King” based on the real-life Dahomey female warriors, the Agojie. We have the history of Ethiopian Empress Taytu Betul, who played a major role in the historic Battle of Adwa in which Ethiopia defeated Italy. I’ve already mentioned the various Yoruba mythologies of the Orisha, which is the cosmological ground for the upcoming film “Children of Blood and Bone”, based on the book by Tomi Adeyemi (although the rollout has not been without controversies).

After years of writing about inclusion and its importance, I am arguing—maybe even with myself —that the task at hand is to re-allocate our limited time and attention towards these stories, and create anew from such rich, fertile history.

Otherwise, we will be trapped in the thinking that permission from the white power structure is progress. That waiting on corporations to include us is empowerment. That retelling the same stories 1000 times over is innovation. That being cast as the Western imagination's supreme archetype of beauty is how we can be reassured that we are beautiful.

The little girl in me was once inspired by the idea of fighting to play in roles imagined for white people.

But the woman I am now knows this: When you are sovereign, you aren’t begging to be let into other people’s imaginative kingdoms.

Happy 250th Birthday, America — I guess.

I suppose one can look at 250 as this neat, little milestone of a number that demands some sort of intrinsic, unearned respect.

Nah, fuck that. I don’t automatically respect America at 250.

If anything, the only thing I can think of is how America is still a young, spoiled brat of a nation that no one is able to discipline.

Yeah, I’m writing this in a shitty mood because the environment in DC has been literally fucked up lately.

Maybe it’s the three-digit temperatures here in Washington during this heat wave. On top of that, the massive amounts of fireworks and jet fuel from the excessive air displays are literally burning taxpayer money into the air and threatening to produce god-knows- what amounts of pollution. Oh yeah, and remember that massive White House UFC fight a few weeks ago? Yeah, turns out that the backyard trailer park fight on steroids ended up completely destroying the White House Lawn and killing the grass. An Ohio-based lawn care company run by a Trump supporter has pledged $1 million to fix the lawn.

Bless their slow little hearts. We all know you can’t reseed intelligence into the soil of stupidity.

The rot isn’t just in the ground or in the (now algae-fied) water of the reflecting pool. My personal and political irritation with America comes from a thousand different directions beyond the natural and man-made heat in the air.

It is especially heightened for me because I returned to live in Washington just in time for the shitshow unleashed on this city over the last two years. Many friends and acquaintances have lost their careers thanks to the DOGE machine. I’m still having to deal with the fact that I was absurdly fired from the Washington Post last fall for not stripping my clothes and performatively grieving for a white Christian nationalist— under the direction of a new opinion section that has actively decided to purge all of its full-time Black writers— by any means necessary.

Indeed, as I type this, the white nationalist group Patriot Front is marching throughout DC with Confederate flags and various neo-Nazi symbols— a reminder that the North never fully defeated the Confederacy after the Civil War.

And instead of disciplining these assholes, people are taking photos of them, sharing these masked KKK-wannabes for content on social media and clickbytes, and maybe some photojournalism honors. At least so far, I have not seen evidence that groups are countermobilizing to meet and disrupt them with a larger, physical presence, and drive these khaki-wearing, mask-donning Party-City Nazi-crybaby cowards the fuck out of the city and back to whatever miserable mayonnaise existence they came from.

This refusal by liberals and moderates to confront and discipline these violent forces is also a form of political immaturity. As writes in his recent book, “A Resistance History of the United States”, resistance movements often fail in this country because when the question of force or violence comes into play, all too often counter-movements back down or fracture.

Or, as I have argued before— outright racism, terror and white supremacy for too many people is a titillating performance, which people will observe, witness and comment on but not disrupt. And as we share images of these white supremacists on our social media— I wonder if is doing so without disrupting them is on the same spectrum of those who went to lynchings and made photocards as souveneirs of the spectacle—- but did nothing to stop the terroristic display.

Yup, this is a snapshot of a toddler country in the middle of its terrible two (hundred)s with no one able to put it in its place.

America under Trump is trying to assert its strength, to tell you that he’s a big, strong boy now. Meanwhile, he’s making messes, killing the grass, and expecting (usually brown or Black) people to clean up after him, while also telling them they don’t belong in positions of power— or in your country at all.

What is complete with displays of a white nationalist tantrum while forcing everyone to sing happy birthday—- or ELSE.

No singing here today. America at 250 is a time to reflect upon America’s immaturity.

America’s Immaturity, As Seen by Foreigners

I’m not the only one who sees that America is stuck in perpetual adolescence.

Foreign observers have long been fascinated and quite often dismayed by the country’s moral psychology—its unique habits of mind, emotional temperament, relational skills and national character.

Specifically, foreigners have been warning about America’s developmental deficiencies for decades, if not centuries.

French political writer Alexis de Tocqueville visited America to get a sense of what the nation was. In his 1835 book, Democracy in America, he famously said, “I know of no country where there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.” He observed that Americans were impatient, were susceptible to conformity, and confused mass opinion for truth or wisdom. He also saw that anti-Black racism in America would be the one aspect to eat the country from within, and that no laws would change the “imaginary inequality” that European whites had constucted against Black people.

“Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty in Europe.” wrote British writer DH Lawrence about 100 years later. “In Europe Liberty was a great life-throb. But in America Democracy was always something anti-life. The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices. American Democracy was a form of self-murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else... The love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play.”

This quote sticks with me a lot: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

As I have said many times before, the French-Cuban writer Anaïs Nin mirroried Lawrence in her analysis, writing, that America suffers from a “cult of toughness and a hatred of sensitivity” and that one day it may have to “pay a heavy price for this.”

More recently observers from eastern Asia have also been commenting on America’s character and relative youth and inexperience as a nation.

Speaking in 1965, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew commented on why he would not “go on with the Americans”. “By and large, the administrration lacks depth and wisdom, which come out of an accumulation of knowledge of human beinds and human situations over a long period of time. That’s lacking. And it’s not their fault. What have they got, three, four hundred years of history? And they’ve become a nation just recently. I’ve only had three experiences with the Americans, and they didn’t intend any harm… but the tragedy was, they did real harm.”

Last year, during a Channel 4 News interview about the Trump administration’s trade war with China, the Chinese diplomat Victor Gao shrugged at American threats, reminding people that the United States was not the only market in the world. “We don’t care. China has been here for 5,000 years,” he said. “Most of the time, there was no United States, and we survived.” He said that if America wanted to continue on its selfish ways, China would adjust. “We expect to survive for 5000 more.”

America’s immaturity, as seen through race

Race is a central lens for viewing America’s regressive, toddleristic tendencies.

Think about it: European colonists came to America and imagined it as a tabula rasa for their imaginations and purposes. Far from being a nation of immigrants, America’s real story is about a young, inexperienced country making other races do the work and then taking the credit.

White settlers created elaborate systems in which they forced enslaved Africans to do the hard work of the American group project in the South, before turning to Chinese labor to build the railroads in the West, and then to Latino labor. Throughout history, when these groups have asked, largely politely, to share in the same rights, freedoms, and dignity, or at the very least, have protested being lynched, massacred, and forcibly disappeared, white America 1) Pretends said harms never happened 2) Covers its ears and shouts “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” really loudly. 3) Literally will pour acid or concrete in a pool and then share it with free Black people.

Speaking of brawling, tantrums and race, the historian Gerald Horne writes in his book “The Bittersweet Science: Racism, Racketeering and the Political Economy of Boxing” about how part of what enraged white America about the end of slavery is that they saw Black people— their property, their toys, their status objects, their sources of entertainment literally walking around free, reminding them of literal economic and psychological loss. We would then see the failures of reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the increase in terror attacks against Black people in the early 20th century. In other words, a white national temper tantrum against free Black people.

Seeing neo-Nazi groups comfortable enough to march en masse in DC during America at 250 is a reminder that the white nationalist temper tantrum over losing slaves never really ended. It just changed into khakis, polo shirts, and baseball caps.

It is this political immaturity that shows up in the fact that this country refuses to consider meaningful reparations for Black people in the same vein that it has done for other groups, including Japanese Americans and Holocaust survivors. We see that it is capable of considering repair for some groups but not Black people.

This immaturity, I have argued, has come in the form of the election of Trump after having President Obama for two terms.

This political immaturity shows up in the rollbacks in voting rights, attacks against racial integration (I largely refuse to say DEI cause what we are talking about is a move towards resegregation), and attacks on birthright citizenship. This is a white America that not only can’t share freedom and opportunities with Black people, women, and other non-whites, but it is willing to deny itself good, life-improving policies if it is shown that Black people will benefit. (This is directly tied to the racism of why D.C., a long majority Black city, has long been denied statehood). This, as I have argued, is to ensure that a Black man and his family would never occupy the White House to rule over whites ever again.

And for the liberals who naively believe in America’s innate goodness, American culture doesn’t respect human dignity instinctively; it respects and follows power. At 250 years old, America still needs written legislation, amendments, backed with the force of the state— to tell people to not commit hate crimes and that people with different skin and hair shouldn’t be treated badly.

Moreover, the same people throwing the White Nationalist tantrums are being coddled by privileged centrists/moderates who think we just need to understand them and let them scream and cry it out. And for how long? Another 50 years? 100? 200? As James Baldwin once said, how long am I to wait for your progress?

So all in all—- is there much to celebrate about America at 250? A young, immature country that has more strength than sense? That still mistakes power for wisdom, and force for maturity, and violence for legitimacy?

For Black people, we are wondering if we just have to run for cover to let the tantrum pass without having our lives destroyed by it. Or others are just leaving the country altogether, represented by the fact that net migration out of America has increased to Great Depression-era levels.

I know this is a country with an audience that needs hope, endless reinvention, and to forget the past. I dont have any of those empty platitudes to give today.

All I can wish that America will stop the toddler tantrums, and grow the fuck up.

At 12 PM ET today, I will be in virtual conversation with Martin Peterson, who made national news for being told not to teach Plato in his philosophy classes.

In April, Peterson formally resigned from his tenured position. His resignation letter has been circulating among academics as an example of principled resistance to academic censorship.

You can read the letter for yourself below.

And if you haven’t already, you can sign up here to hear from Peterson himself at 12:00 pm ET today on Zoom!

Register Here!

They say the year of firsts after losing a parent is the hardest.

Today is my first Father’s Day since my dad died. It will be four months ago this week.

And all I can think about is regret and rebirth.

I can’t help but remember my inability to process and act upon the increasing signs that his life was slipping away. He was in a nursing home in Dallas, my hometown.

The call that he had stopped eating? I figured he was depressed about not being able to travel to Ghana. The call that he was in hospice? I was told not to panic, that it was for his comfort. I am normally a decisive, action-oriented person. But this? The news of hospice was like water hitting psychic concrete; I simply could not absorb the mortal implications.

In February, I went to Selma, Alabama, for a writing residency, hoping to recover from being wrongfully fired by the Washington Post and make progress on my book manuscript. When I got to Selma, I saw signs for Dallas County, Alabama. My heart sank. I had the feeling I had come to the wrong Dallas County. I was trying to recover from my dead Washington Post career in Dallas County, Alabama, when Dallas County, Texas, was where I should have been, to say goodbye to my dying father.

On the 23^rd, my mother called. They were feeding him ice cream, his favorite. My mom put me on the phone to talk to my dad. I told him I was going to come home soon. He managed a raspy, “Okay”.

That would be the last time I heard his voice.

And then the call came at 8:20 am on Tuesday, February 24^th. “Karen, Daddy has passed away”, my mother said. The sobbing began. I managed to get a local friend to drive me from Selma to Montgomery to catch a flight to Dallas, Texas.

A month later, I sat in the front row of the church, my father’s casket in front of my brother and me. We had a wake for friends and family for an hour. My dad was dressed in a brown suit. I wished we had a chance to view him the day before, so that I could be wracked in pain in private. I had only seen my father’s body once, the day after his passing. Then again, perhaps no amount of body viewings prepares you for your father’s funeral.

Miss Jo-Ann, the wife of Pastor Robert Summers, who officiated Daddy’s funeral, told me to just let it all out. “I was a Daddy’s girl too”, she said to me, her eyes welling with tears. I wasn’t sure if that was comforting or not. She was old enough to be my grandmother. I looked at my father’s casket as she talked. If she was still crying over her father, then I couldn’t help but feel I had a long, long grief journey ahead of me.

Grief over the death of a loved one is universal, and isolating at the same time. I now understand why so many other cultures and religious traditions treat grief with the reverence and submission it deserves—for it is one of the most powerful forces I have ever encountered.

I find myself angry at having to grieve as an American. I wish I belonged to a culture that wasn’t so terrible about grief. For all of America’s current language and permission structures around diagnosing various forms of neurodivergence, anxiety, triggers, and disability, it’s maddening how ill-equipped our culture is with grief and the mental, emotional, and social impairment it causes.

It’s the brain fog. The inability to do what should be simple tasks. The chronic exhaustion, no matter how much sleep I get. I’ve lost about 15 pounds. I am a lot quieter in social situations than I used to be. I wrote before about freak accidents and dumb mistakes I’ve made since my dad died.

For me, grief is an energy-hungry program that is constantly running in my psychic background, which drains my battery. And at worst, we know that grief can kill people—that, yes, it is possible to die of a broken heart.

In his powerful book, “A Grief Observed”, C.S. Lewis writes about the aftermath of the death of his beloved wife. He writes of the feeling of social embarrassment, that your grief is a repellent.

People quickly want to change the subject when you talk about mourning a loved one. Work tasks don’t stop. Friends who were there for you in the fun times are nowhere to be found.

The feeling of being jealous of people who still have their parents. Sadness when I hear of friends whose young children will still have their grandfathers around. The difficulty I have, especially being single and childless, when people announce weddings, coming births – when all I can think about is separation, death, and whether I will ever have any children of my own.

Rebirthing Yourself After Your Father Dies

To that end, on Father’s Day, I think about how I need to re-birth myself after my father’s death.

But how do I give birth to a new self when the father who gave me life is no longer here?

I am no longer the child who had a Daddy to come home to, to show off my schoolwork, or to come to my games. I am no longer the young adult whose father came to graduations or award ceremonies, or who called to check up on her to see how work was going. There will be no more trips to Ghana with my father alive—the next time I go to the fatherland will be to lay my father’s ashes to rest.

I now have to birth a third self—a fatherless self. And with this comes the painful labor of grief. To me, grief is the requisite emotional labor pain of self-creation through void, though absence. Some of the current labor pains are the regrets I have for not being physically present in his last days, that I didn’t have a deathing plan for helping my father transition to the next life. That there were no cultural rituals I inherited to help both him and me with the transition.

At least birthing labor ends. Grief is a labor pain that can last for months, years, or decades.

With birth, at least pregnancy (usually) gives a visible signal to the outside world that a woman is going through a birthing process, and that she needs extra care and attention from the community. There is no grief bump for men or women, no visible signal to others that someone is pregnant with grief. I see now why, in the past, people wore black armbands, black outfits, or grieving jewelry to physically signal to the world that they are mourning – and that they need to be handled with care and connection.

Maybe I will start wearing a black armband.

Otherwise, I am doing my best to practice somatic work, especially Chinese internal martial arts like Tai Chi and sword work. When I am overwhelmed with grief, I do not push through. I realize that psychic rest is more than just sleep, it’s just doing a lot less of— well, everything.

There is one bright side to this time, and it is the fact that on this Father’s Day, even though my father is recently gone, I’ve been reminded of what male nurturing looks like, with my father as a blueprint. This is not to say that the women in my life have not been supportive. But perhaps it’s no surprise that I would be especially attuned to anything that feels like paternal care— particularly in ways that remind me of my father.

Those of you who followed my work on my relationship with my father know that I loved him very much, and I know he was proud of me. I remember when I caught COVID, and was quarantining upstairs in my dad’s house. Ever the doctor, he was very worried and tried to come upstairs to check on me, but the family told him to get back down, that he was at much higher risk of COVID than I was. I remember seeing my father cry several times, at the death of his friends, and especially in recent years, he would cry when his brothers would leave after a visit. I’ve written about my father and our fig tree, and posted about how he and I would watch hummingbirds together during the pandemic. My father wanted to build a farm in Ghana, just like his father, a cocoa farmer. He died before that dream could be realized.

Lately, it's been older male friends, mentors, and spiritual guides who are coming by and checking in on me while I am sick with grief.

It is men literally feeding me, sending check-in texts, and encouraging me to keep training, writing, and creating. They’ve been telling me it’s okay to focus on myself, sending me books on grief, and in some cases, even cooking for me.

And perhaps part of the self-rebirth is the fact that I have to accept a certain form of dependence, and that my father raised me to be wise enough to know when I am weak and vulnerable and to express that.

That there is wisdom in allowing myself to receive help from fatherly figures in the aftermath of my father’s death— help I might have resisted before. And I don’t mean fatherly energy in the sense of age, or even if those men are fathers themselves. But rather, men who are sensitive enough to understand pain and wounding, and are generous enough to offer wisdom, care, and consistency during this rebirthing time of my life. My father’s death has taught me that men, should they choose to, can be father figures to others at any stage in their lives.

Of course, none of this brings my dad back. I am not trying to use people to bypass the grief or soften the reality of loneliness and social alienation.

But at least for today, grief’s sharp edge is softer. I am visiting a male friend with a place in the woods, and I am watching him mow the lawn, just like my father used to. The plan is to eat plantains and ice cream in my dad’s honor today.

I keep coming back to something my dad said. After he became sick, my dad told me years ago that I didn’t belong to him or my mother— that I belonged to the universe— I only came through him. I miss my Daddy very much. He didn’t live to give my hand away to another man in marriage, but he has passed on the idea that I belong to everyone and no one at all— not even to him.

And that freedom to be myself— that my father gave me, is the most loving thing a any girl could hope for from her Daddy.

Hello everyone! Resistance Summer School 2026 is officially in session!

Last year, Resistance Summer School was born after Columbia University canceled my course on Race and Media.

Resistance Studies Series continues to exist because I believe difficult ideas deserve a hearing, especially when institutions deem them too controversial to discuss. And as more institutions cave to repressive forces, it is even more critical to find alternative ways to spread knowledge.

Which is why I’m excited to announce our first Resistance Salon of Summer 2026:

When Plato Gets Canceled: Philosophy in an Age of Censorship with Martin Peterson

On June 24, at 12 pm ET, I will be in a virtual discussion with philosopher Martin Peterson, who resigned from Texas A&M after administrators directed him to remove or alter course material involving Plato’s discussions of gender and identity.

We will be discussing his experience with censorship, Plato, philosophy, and his warning about Texas universities quickly becoming institutions of “dead dogmas”.

In 2026, Peterson made national news when Texas A&M directed him not to teach certain passages from Plato about gender issues and sexual identity, which administrators believed might violate state regulations.

University leaders ordered him to “mitigate” his course’s “content to remove the modules on race ideology and gender ideology” or teach something else.

Peterson publicly challenged this directive, arguing that universities cannot fulfill their educational mission if faculty are prohibited from teaching foundational texts.

As chair of Texas A&M’s Academic Freedom Council, he had been a vocal supporter of free inquiry and institutional neutrality, warning against political interference in university classrooms.

In April, Peterson resigned from Texas A&M and announced he would be joining the faculty of Southern Methodist University in Dallas later this year. You can read his resignation letter here.

We will be discussing his experience at Texas A&M, what advice he may have for other educators facing calls to censor content, and what he thinks Plato might have said about intellectual freedom and resistance in a time of repression in America.

Details: June 24th, 12 pm ET (virtual, via Zoom)

Virtual registration costs $20. (Funds help go towards RSS programming, operations, scholarships, and hosting more salons— and buying our favorite authors’ books!)

Register here for the RSS x Martin Peterson Salon!

I’m really excited to bring this important and timely conversation to the opening of Resistance Summer School’s 2026 season. If you have questions, please email support@resistancesummerschool.com

We Move!

Karen

Life comes at you fast. One moment you’re a columnist. The next moment, you become a case study of racial double standards and institutional censorship.

That was my experience after being wrongfully fired via email last year, 11 years into my tenure at the Washington Post as a columnist and editor. In the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk killing, I was accused of “gross misconduct” and being a physical safety risk to my colleagues for pointing out documented patterns of racial double standards in how America talks about political violence, and specifically white men who espouse hatred and violence.

As a proud member of the Washington Post Guild and the Washington-Baltimore Newsguild, I was able to file a grievance against the Post; our case finally went to arbitration last week. We are confident that we successfully argued that the Washington Post had no just cause to fire me.

There will be more updates on that front.

But for now, this is yet another brutally clarifying lesson.

In a time in which democracy is under attack, and civil rights are being stripped away in broad daylight, we cannot trust our most “prestigious” institutions to save us. They can’t even stomach the most basic of discussions about race and power, much less help us to imagine a better and more equitable future.

I know this because it's not the first time I’ve fought back against institutions that have tried to silence my work on race, media, and power.

Many of you last year remember when Columbia canceled my class on race and media, and I decided to teach it anyway.

I decided to launch my virtual Race, Media, and International Affairs 101 class independently last summer, under the name Resistance Summer School. We sold out 500 seats in 48 hours.

What started as a response to institutional retreat grew into something much, much bigger.

Students showed so much enthusiasm for the course that we ran a Fall 101 and 102 cohort with over 660 students enrolled. and over 5,000 on our waitlist. We have awarded nearly 100 scholarships through community funding. We’ve now built Resistance Summer School into a bigger brand: "Resistance Studies.”

We have a small operations team that has been tireless in providing a great learning experience for students. We have also been able to host salons and events— including a sold-out event with former Teen Vogue editor, Versha Sharma, ’s , and philosopher Olufemi Taiwo.

In the middle of so much turmoil, I’ve decided to keep building anyway. I’m happy to announce that….

Enrollment is Now Open for Race Media and International Affairs 101 and 102!

We are officially enrolling for Resistance Summer School 2026!

Beginning July 20th, I’ll be bringing back Race, Media, and International Affairs 101 and 102 to the public for a seven-week online course.

The class explores the construction of race in Western media and how these depictions of race, power, and labor systems constructed the global order we live in today.

• I’ll offer a hybrid mix of live online lectures and recordings, access to a syllabus, and guest speakers. Live group discussions are available to paid participants.

• To keep things manageable and meaningful, I’ll be capping the weekly discussion cohorts at 20 people.

• This course is suitable for all ages. While I taught this at the graduate level, the material is primarily a media history and current events course.

• We look at the development of newspapers, the telegram, radio, photography, and film to examine how various technological developments in media either advanced or set back race relations.

• We’ll cover a global range of material—from the development of colonial mass media in the U.S., to media coverage of racial justice at the 1919 League of Nations, to the recent rollback of civil rights laws, to how labor movements and protests are covered differently in left-leaning media.

And we analyze current headlines, news stories, and narrative framings through these historical lenses.

The courses are joined by guest lecturers from academia, journalism, history, and political science to help us navigate both the past and the present.

Live Zoom lectures for 101 will be held on Mondays at 6:00 pm ET — 102 lectures will be held on Wednesdays at 6:00 pm. Discussion sections will be on Thursday evenings.

More information on scheduling and enrollment can be found here!

For those who would like to support the work but cannot commit to a full six-week course, you can contribute to support scholarships and operations here.

If you've asked how you can support me during this period, the answer is simple:

Help us build. Learn from us. Support Resistance Studies. Support independent education. Difficult conversations belong in public life, even when powerful institutions would rather avoid them.

They try to cancel us, but we build schools anyway.

I’m looking forward to seeing you all in class for Summer School!

We Move!

Karen

On September 11, 2025, after 11 years at the Washington Post as an editor and columnist, I was fired via email.

In the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk killing, I did what I have always done— and was expected to do — as a public voice and columnist on race, gender, and culture: I commented on America’s racial double standards in public discourse when it comes to political violence. You can read my posts below.

And then this post of mine:

The very next day, I was fired from my job at the Washington Post without so much as a conversation.

According to the termination letter from the Post, the company cited these two Bluesky posts, claimed that I disparaged white men, accused me of ‘gross misconduct’, and that my Bluesky posts “potentially endanger[ed] the physical safety of our staff”.

You can read the letter for yourself here.

In October, along with the Washington Post Guild and the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, we filed a grievance against the Post, challenging the termination.

So, I have some updates…

After eight months of legal proceedings, I am finally heading to arbitration against the Washington Post.

The arbitration hearing will be this Thursday, June 4, in Washington, D.C.

As the last remaining Black full-time staff columnist in the Washington Post’s Opinions section, I was very aware of what my firing represented for diversity in newsrooms.

While newsroom diversity is absolutely critical, it is not the only principle at stake. I am fighting for journalists' rights to do their jobs, to comment on matters of public concern without fear of censorship, retaliation, or political pressure.

And this is a battle well worth having.

I am thankful for the support of the Washington Post Guild, my lawyers at the Washington Baltimore News Guild, as well as and the legal support from the Democracy Defenders Fund.

And of course, I am deeply grateful to my readers, followers, friends, mentors, and the industry peers who have supported me throughout my career and through what has been one of the most personally and professionally challenging periods of my life.

The stakes are high, but I’m ready.

Let’s go.

-Karen

This week’s edition of the Golden Hour will be short. I am preparing for some major news and battles next week, so I need to conserve as much energy as I can. All I can say for now is—- watch this space!

The Roman Empire… but on steroids

Speaking of battles— it should be obvious to anyone by now that I think a lot about fighting and various forms of power. In particular, as a martial artist (Muay Thai and boxing), I am very interested in how politics intersects with athletic competition. Here are a couple of things I’ve been thinking about.

Last weekend, I listened to an excellent podcast, SuperHuman— a deep dive into the origins, hype, and controversies surrounding the Enhanced Games, aka the “steroid Olympics, which took place this past Sunday. Gayomali follows several semi-retired athletes, who decide to agree to dope up in exchange for not just athletic glory but for the possibility of winning 1 million dollars for breaking world records. What happens when a bunch of billionaires pay former top-level athletes to take a bunch of testosterone, peptides, and other types of steroids and run/swim/jump/lift as best they can? Can they break world records?

Well, for one, the podcast talks about how one swimming athlete, James Magnussen, got so big so fast that his muscles were literally spilling out of his swim bodysuit.

Turns out— more gear doesn’t make you more of a winner. Natural athletes ended up outperforming and winning events— and only one world record was broken.

The Enhanced Games are the brainchild of Australian entrepreneur Aron D’Souza, who saw them as an example of humanity's future without limits. D’Souza, who was friends with right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, also clearly hoped to exploit the pay gap at the highest level of sports, and offer mid-age athletes more money than they would have seen in a lifetime. Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr. were among the major financial backers of the Games.

There’s a lot to be said about the booming industry of selling speed, strength, and virility in a pill or shot to people who are past their athletic prime. It is a chance to have an identity again, a purpose. Given the taboos and bans around PED’s— as well as the serious long-term health risks, I am in favor of more research and open discussion around the downsides.

But there’s more to it all, in my opinion, which is the ritual of hero-worship. From Samson in the Bible to Hercules, to Superman, the Superman that is given divine strength and power is embedded in Greek/Roman, and Judeo-Christian lore in particular.

In the podcast, Gayomali features an athlete who remarks about the rich men who invested in these enhanced games, saying that he felt a bit like wealthy men inspecting their prized racehorses.

And indeed— for all that can be said about the crisis of masculinity— these are men — some of them materially desperate— who are basically bought and paid for by other financially men— to put on a shit ton of muscle— and then perform an equivalent of superheroic stunts on command.

I wondered if this was a modern-day male meat market, in that the human meat is pumped full of drugs in order for us to consume. But it’s not true that the games are selling the athletes— they are now basically shunned from formal competition forever after these games, and after the Enhanced Games' stock plummeted, it’s doubtful the public will ever know or care about these athletes again.

But it's the intoxicating combination of muscles and money that forms the foundation of the psychological spectacle. This dynamic operates on a smaller scale, through entire fetish communities/fantasies on the internet dedicated to the dynamic of one person contributing to or watching another person grow bigger and stronger. Indeed, these athletes were one-time-use-only muscle labor. They were not selling direct pleasure to their billionaire benefactors (AFAIK), but a multi-billion-dollar commodity to the world—the promise of a younger, more joyful life through steroids, peptides, recovery protocols, ancillaries, and other chemical compounds. Compared to that potential, working as human billboards for maybe $1 million? Life-changing money for many— sure. But those billionaires are still the owner class, and athletes are still manual laborers.

With the right injectables, dads and moms could have more energy after work to keep up with young children. The right cycles of oral anabolics could help athletes extend their sports life well into middle age. The longevity industry promises to extend erotic longevity, in which men and women can improve their libido and connection to each other.

In short, the Enhanced Games are helping to sell the most important commodities we all have: joy and time.

That’s the high-altitude read of it. But maybe the base reason— as to why so much money was pumped into this thing— men just have fun watching muscly men do muscly-man things.

In that sense, we have to contend with the fact that right-wing billionaires are cornering the market on cultivating joy and fun.

Which leads me to my next point about fun and politics….

Make (Anti) Fascism Fun Again

This week, at ’s Media Founder’s Forum in New York, of the made a remark about the White House’s upcoming White House UFC fight on the lawn. Construction has begun for the vent. Miller basically said, well hey, at least the right is having fun and doing cool things.

There’s a lot to be said about this, giving Roman Empire gladiator vibes. Once again, muscled, sweaty men performing for the billionaire Emperor Trump.

And when it comes to muscles and money— again, it has been reported that Trump bought TKO group stock — the parent company of the UFC—ahead of the June 18th match.

As much as I detest that the UFC, MMA, and Brazilian Jiujitsu give the appearance that they have been captured by the right wing, Miller is on to something.

As a martial artist and sometimes fighter, something that Liberation Martial Arts, aka, talked about with me for the last few years is the importance of fun and play when it comes to— well, anything. That lefties tend to focus too much on self-defense and resistance as reasons to train, and that self-defense is actually a poor motivator for consistent training.

One needs to have FUN. Do I think I could handle myself better than the untrained in a fight? Sure! But I train Muay Thai and engage in ritualized suffering with others because I think it’s fucking fun, I get to meet people and learn new things.

I read this post, “Why Is the Left No Fun?” by Eric Blanc. In short, he argues that the right has figured out how to have more fun than the left. (I also think that anti-Blackness will also be a forever thorn in the side of the American left, but thats another post for another day.) He talks about how early lefties understood that you can’t recruit through boring meetings, or only theory, PowerPoint, or facts alone. You have to have FUN.

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Sports and physical fitness activities were another pivotal way to make socialism more social. When asked what work young socialists should initially do locally, organizers replied—in addition to obvious things like educational classes—with the following activities: “form baseball and other athletic teams; run excursions; […] take cross-country walks, distributing literature on the way.”

Fun, sports, and joy are important parts of the history of Jewish resistance, as laid out so well in her amazing book “Here Where We Are is Our Country: The History of The Jewish Labor Bund”. The Jewish Bund, a working-class revolutionary party with roots in Russia and Poland in the late 1800s, made it a point to have sports teams, dance, and other social activities as part of their resistance to anti-semitism in Eastern Europe.

One of my favorite sayings from the Netflix animated show “Blue Eyed Samurai” is “pleasure builds strength.” Fun, sensuality, and physical connection build social and political power.

And yet, too many leftists insist on separating the mind and the body from building such power. And then wonder why movements remain easily fractured. As Blanc writes,

Until we can make the left more fun, more full of song, and more welcoming for working families, we’ll likely continue to primarily recruit self-selecting activists from college-educated backgrounds, many of whom are more comfortable posting online than inviting their neighbors to a barbecue.

I’m not saying that death matches are the solution. But maybe we need to think about how to make (anti) fascism fun again. Our lives may depend on it.

A few weeks ago, in the aftermath of my father’s death in February, I wrote a manifesto about how his death inspired discipline.

I said that death was an opportunity to renew commitments, in that vow to honor what our loved ones instilled in us— and that there can be beauty in the discipline, in the struggle to try to transform death into new life. And indeed, I have returned to writing weekly. I’ve been reading more. I’ve gotten back to training Muay Thai several times a week at a new gym, whose community I love. I have also gotten back into practicing sword work. I’ve even begun training a little Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

I am writing this in the middle of the night, watching the sun come up. As a writer and journalist, I get fixated on transformation, justice, reinvention, and turning darkness into light. It is why I created this Golden Hour space. The world is terrible; the least that I can do is bear witness and write beautifully out of the darkness.

I was hoping that recommitting to art, whether martial or literary, would deliver me from my father’s death.

But like Mike Tyson said, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”.

Over the last several weeks, there were grief blows that nothing could have prepared me for.

First, I was not ready to begin dreaming about my father this soon, and this frequently. Dreams in which he and I are together again. Eating mangoes and plantains (our favorite) and watching YouTube. When he was alive, my dad would watch a lot of TV and order gadgets. I would always ask him how he was feeling, and he always would tell me he was fine, that he wasn’t in any pain, and that he was feeling better. In the last year or so of his life, when he was essentially bedridden, he claimed to have seen an ad on TV for a device that could help him walk again, and asked me to help him order it. Of course, I didn’t and couldn’t know what he was talking about, but I said I would try to help— and see if we could find the gadget. I never did.

Now, in my latest dreams, Daddy is alive—but strapped into robotic technology, proud that he was able to order the right gadgetry. He was not only mobile, but he also healed from death itself. “See?” he said in one of the dreams, excited. “I’m better now!”

And then I wake up. Knowing that his ashes are in a gold urn in the next room.

I usually cry uncontrollably for five or six minutes, give or take. Then the grief hangover lasts the rest of the day. Everyone talks about panic attacks and anxiety attacks. No one talks about grief attacks.

I see why, in many cultures, people shut themselves in for a year, receiving only visitors. But America? We are terrible at helping people through grief. Other cultures realize that being shut in for a while carries some protective wisdom, that exposure to other people’s carelessness or indifference delays the healing process.

Second, someone warned me to be careful about freak accidents, stupid mistakes, or illness. I do not consider myself to be a clumsy or accident-prone person, and I rarely get ill. Yet in the last few weeks, I shattered two of my favorite glass vases that I’ve had for years. The first vase basically exploded when it slipped from my hand onto the countertop—but what I do know is that the glass shards sliced the side of my hand pretty badly, and they fell into Artemis’ food bowl. I had hoped that using flowers, new plants, and new decor to infuse my space with new life would help.

Instead, I ended up bleeding all over my countertop and scrambling to avoid my cat from eating the glass.

I put a bandage on it and cleaned it. And like many martial artists I know, I went on to train with my sword despite the injury— the first time touching a sword since my father died.

After a few minutes of doing sword flowers, the wound opened up again, and I started bleeding over the sword handle. I had to stop and go home. (TW for the next image- blood)

As for stupid mistakes—nostalgia, as I have written before, has been a frequent nemesis of mine. And she contributed to a mistake I made just yesterday.

I tried to put a new coat of paint in the office of my apartment. I love lush, warm emerald, jewel tones. Impulsively, instead of testing new emerald green shades, I chose a shade that I had used before in my old apartment, Benjamin Moore’s Bavarian Forest. It was the color of my bathroom when I lived with my ex. Maybe I thought I could make old love look like new life. I was wrong.

When the painter finished the room, the shade read more like a dark, greenish navy on camera, darker and different than the bathroom color I had painted before. If there is one shade of blue I cannot stand, it’s dark navy. I’m a perfume collector, and the shade reminded me of a niche fragrance I bought after my father’s death— Senyoko’s Kunjira Densetsu, or “Legend of the Whale” in Japanese. The fragrance makers created the perfume to invoke a dying whale’s final descent into the depths of the ocean, where light doesn’t penetrate. It is a beautiful, challenging fragrance, but one I will forever associate with the grief after my father’s demise.

My painter said I should give the dead whale color some time to settle in, to get used to it. But my soul is rejecting the color. In trying to move forward, I dug up a past I don’t even recognize anymore. In trying to heal from grief, I inadvertently painted aquatic death on my wall.

I hate it. If anyone has better emerald green color ideas, let me know.

Third, as a single, childless person who has just lost a parent, I realize being out in the world forces me to confront multiple deaths at once. Beyond the death of my father, I am filled with grief over the death of dreams I once had to be partnered and a mother myself. To have my father at my wedding, to meet and be a grandfather to my child. This will never happen. No matter what people say to try to make me feel better, to give hope, the timelines have ended, those portals have closed for my father and me forever. And I feel left behind in life.

All of this was becoming too much. I went to visit an old friend of mine.

Her name is Hopelessness.

I have written before about losing political hope in White America as a Black woman. Educator and racial justice advocate Austin Channing, in her book “I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness”, writes about working in the shadow of hope, not hope itself. “I cannot hope in whiteness, I cannot hope in white institutions or white America, I cannot hope in lawmakers or politicians. I cannot hope for misquoted wisdom from MLK, superficial ethnic heritage celebrations, or love that is aloof. I cannot even hope in myself. I am no one’s savior.”

I mean, I can’t even hope for myself that I can pick a decent wall color, much less stave off death.

These days, I am reading about hopelessness from a Buddhist perspective. In her famous book “When Things Fall Apart”, Pema Chödrön writes about hopelessness and death, and that we must embrace hopelessness and the deaths that happen in everyday life. The disappointments, the job losses, the relationships not working out, the friendships ending, the bleeding hands, and the mispainted walls, all of these are little deaths.

To embrace hopelessness is to realize that beauty and discipline can easily tip into the ugliness of avoidance— a way of trying to run from death and the reality of impermanence. Instead of rushing to re-invention, there is true strength in sitting with my multiple deaths, and resisting the urge to put fake flowers and plastic glitter over the very real bones of old dreams.

In the meantime, maybe I’ll get a new vase. Maybe I won’t. I’ll still write, even if no one ever reads, and the world never changes. I’ll still practice my sword flowers in the park.

And I’ll definitely repaint that damn wall.

It’s 8:16 pm ET. Welcome to the evening sunset edition of The Golden Hour.

Today, as I watch the light of day literally run out, today’s Golden Hour essay is about golden statues. And how they can be the symbolic bearers of bad news about the light going out in dying empires.

I love gold. It’s my favorite color. ‘The Golden Hour’ is Substack’s name, obviously. I typically only wear gold or gold colored jewelry. I mean, I can’t help it—gold is in my DNA—my family is from the “Gold Coast,” aka Ghana. I have written about gold swords and my family before.

I have been following the news reports about Trump’s colossal gold statue, aka " Don Colossus,” which was unveiled last week at Trump National Doral Miami resort in Florida. It is 22 feet tall, and reportedly cost about $450,000 to erect. The statue was paid for by the $Patriot memecoin crypto investors.

The statue has drawn immediate backlash, with critics likening it to idol worship. And, plenty in the news media and on social media say that this is like the story of the golden calf in the Bible.

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The scrutiny got so bad that they trotted out a Black Republican pastor, Mark Burns, to defend the statue and say it’s not idol worship.

Yes, everyone is making the Golden Calf references. It’s perhaps one of the more recognizable stories and symbols even with non-Christians, so I understand why. For the uninitiated, the "golden calf’ story refers to when Moses took a little too long to return from Mount Sinai while he was receiving the Ten Commandments. In his absence, the Israelites who were waiting for him grew impatient, melted their gold jewelry, and formed a golden calf to worship instead of God. Of course, God— and Moses, got pissed. Moses burned the calf, mixed the gold powder with water, and forced the Israelites to drink it.

God handled the Israelites the Old Testament way— he sent a plague upon them.

Pastor Burns is right, to an extent; my colleagues in the media are getting it wrong.

Trump’s statue is not a ‘golden calf’. The golden calf story is the wrong narrative frame. There’s more in the well of Biblical symbols we can draw from to understand ‘Don Colossus’— and the trajectory of the American empire.

Trump is more of a King Nebuchadnezzar figure than he is a golden calf. Which means that America is Babylon. And in both Biblical and historical terms, the Babylonian Empire came to a sad end.

So, the ‘Don Colossus’ statue is a golden warning of America’s fall.

Gather around the fire, friends. Let’s talk about King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, and what happened when he constructed his ill-fated golden statue of himself.

King Nebuchadnezzar’s Golden Statue

In the Book of Daniel in the Bible’s Old Testament, King Nebuchadnezzar ruled over Babylon from 605 BC to 562 BC. He led the conquest of Egypt and the eventual capture and destruction of Jerusalem.

Nebuchadnezzar dreams of a great statue of mixed materials, with a head of gold, a chest of silver, legs of bronze, and feet of clay. In the dream, the statue is destroyed by a meteor. Daniel interprets the dream as signifying that all empires live and die.

King Nebuchadnezzar erected a 90-foot-tall gold statue of himself, going against the prophet Daniel’s warnings. He ordered that all the kingdom’s peoples, officials, and magistrates worship and bow down before the statue, lest they be thrown into a blazing hot furnace.

The King got word that three Jews, Shadrach, Mesach, and Abednego, refused to bow down and worship the statue. They told the king, “If we are thrown into the furnace, the God we serve will deliver us from it. But even if he does not, we will not serve your gods or the image of gold you have set up.” They are thrown into the furnace, but protected from the fire. Nebuchadnezzar is amazed and praises the God of the three men. This is usually how the story stops.

But more is in store for the prideful, but ill-fated Nebuchadnezzar.

A year later, he is walking by his palace, admiring its beauty. Per the Book of Daniel 4:27-33:

“Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?”

 Even as the words were on his lips, a voice came from heaven, “This is what is decreed for you, King Nebuchadnezzar: Your royal authority has been taken from you. You will be driven away from people and will live with the wild animals; you will eat grass like the ox.

Seven times will pass by for you until you acknowledge that the Most High is sovereign over all kingdoms on earth and gives them to anyone he wishes.”

Immediately what had been said about Nebuchadnezzar was fulfilled. He was driven away from people and ate grass like the ox. His body was drenched with the dew of heaven until his hair grew like the feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird.

Given what happened to Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible, one would think that Trump’s spiritual advisors would have warned him against building a golden statue.

Alas, they don’t make royal spiritual advisors like they used to. Maybe this is what happens when you order spiritual interpreters from Temu.

The Biblical Fall of Babylon

At one time, like America, Babylon was considered one of the most splendid empires on earth.

In Revelation 18:1-14, Babylon falls.

Verses 4 to 20 are the laments of the kings and trading partners of Babylon who weep because a major market for them is gone. There is no one left to buy their gold, silver, jewelry, woods, silks, spices, or human slaves.

Then a mighty angel picked up a boulder the size of a huge millstone. He threw it into the ocean and shouted,

“Just like this, the great city Babylon

will be thrown down with violence

and will never be found again.

²²The sound of harps, singers, flutes, and trumpets

will never be heard in you again.

No craftsmen and no trades

will ever be found in you again.

The sound of the mill

will never be heard in you again.

²³The light of a lamp

will never shine in you again.

The happy voices of brides and grooms

will never be heard in you again.

For your merchants were the greatest in the world,

and you deceived the nations with your sorceries.

²⁴In your streets flowed the blood of the prophets and of God’s holy people

and the blood of people slaughtered all over the world.”

Historical Babylon fell into a slow decline after the death of Nebuchadnezzar.

So why is the media reaching for the golden calf story when the allegory of Trump as a King Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon is RIGHT THERE?

First of all, most journalists are not historians or religious experts. But we can’t afford to be ignorant of either of these forces any longer.

I have long believed that corporate news media have done a poor job of covering spirituality and politics in America. I saw this during my time as an editor and Columnist at the Washington Post. As someone who grew up going to an evangelical church in Texas and to an Episcopal school on weekdays, it would shock me how religion and spirituality were topics that were dismissed, treated with disdain, almost.

What I mean is that the news media lack basic fluency in religious foundational texts and their symbolism—an illiteracy about religious and mythological archetypes and how they consciously—and subconsciously — shape our understanding of the world.

Frankly, the fact that most news media are hanging on to the wrong symbolic image to interpret and discuss Don Colossus makes me even more alarmed about the utter failures of the liberal, secular world to combat the right-wing’s very explicit fusion of empire, technology, Christian dominionism, and White Nationalism.

Okay, back to Trump and gold statues.

Now, Trump is not forcing people by threat of death to bow down to his golden statue in Florida, as Nebuchadnezzar did with his colossus statue.

But Trump is trying to remake American cultural and political institutions in his own image—literally. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which is now the Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The Trump administration is releasing a commemorative passport featuring his face in honor of America’s birthday, not his. Meanwhile, thanks to Trump ordering the Kennedy Center closed for two years, the sounds of harps, lutes, and trumpets in the performance halls are literally being silenced— like the warning in Revelation.

All of this is happening against the backdrop of a possible economic depression in America, fears of another virus outbreak, and Trump’s foolish war in Iran, which could destabilize the world’s entire energy economy. While America might not be trafficking in spices, silks, and luxury woods, it’s very telling of the technocracy that the gold statue of Trump’s empire has been paid for by cryptocurrency investors and memecoins.

Of course, it is debatable whether cryptocurrency is “fake” money.

But the gold statue is getting attention precisely because it taps a very real, very Biblical, civilizational, almost primitive nerve. Gold and imperial maximalism catch our human attention in ways that other aesthetic displays of power don’t.

Writing for the CBC in 2011, Brent Bambury spoke with Peter York, author of “Dictator Style,” about the maximalist aesthetics of dictatorial leaders and the need to re-express power at home and abroad through excess.

“It’s designed to intimidate and impress…

…He’s saying there’s a threat attached to the outrageous esthetic decisions of a Gadhafi. Bad taste is not the exclusive domain of the world’s worst dictators. But when it’s magnified by unlimited funds, bad taste transcends esthetics. It bullies and diminishes the people exposed to it.”

In other words, excessive gold, when combined with state power, can be read as a threat.

Is America’s Empire Reaching Sunset?

Photography, light, and beauty are not the only reasons I called this space “The Golden Hour”. In medical terms, the “golden hour” refers to the critical time interval between when someone suffers a traumatic injury and when they receive care. If care is not given within that first hour, the likelihood of severe permanent damage or even death is higher.

And maybe as America heads towards its 250th anniversary in July, it makes sense to think out loud about imperial mortality.

In a New York Times guest essay, “America is Officially an Empire in Decline, " Christopher Caldwell assesses the American-Israeli attack on Iran as a “watershed in the decline of the American empire”. He writes, “Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.”

Is this a ‘superpower suicide’, as calls it? “The United States has just spent billions of dollars to lose a war that enriches its oligarchs, impoverishes the citizenry, sabotages its alliances, and strengthens its enemies,” he writes. “As justification for the self-destructive mindlessness, the White House gestures towards Jesus and genocide.”

Certainly, we are in the death throes of… something in America. Whether it is an extinction burst that will lead to corrective behavior, or a true suicide, will remain to be seen.

As more and more Americans struggle to find jobs, as voting rights are rolled back across the country, and as federal forces patrol the streets looking for non-whites to deport, the dominant American myth— that it is a multicultural democracy and a land of opportunity and freedom — is coming apart at the seams. The rushed construction of imperial monuments and gold statues is a sign of an imperial animal that feels wounded and cornered.

Again, Revelation told of Babylon’s destruction in no small part because of the bloodshed it caused in foreign lands.

Perhaps empires that sense their end approaching reach instinctively for new gold statues, gigantic monuments, and new useless wars.

How much time does the American empire really have left?

Of course, no empire disappears in a day. But the moral of the story of the Biblical Babylon — and for America, is that imperial kingdoms that run on gold, greed, and blood do not last forever.

And of course, neither do statues.

The light is quickly fading into darkness, so I must wrap up this golden meditation on “Don Colossus”. I leave you all with the ‘Ozymandias’ by the English Poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, on what happens to the statues of kings from ancient lands.

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Welcome to the morning Golden Hour on the East Coast. I’m watching the darkness turn into light as I write this, at 5:30 am.

I’ve been thinking a lot about nostalgia and public rituals lately. Of course, a large part of this is because my father died in February. But it’s not just that. Yes — my decade-long career as a Washington Post journalist came to an unfair, illegal end — but it’s not just that, either.

My grief is making me more sensitive than usual about the past and the future. Including reevaluating my own professional choices and the role, even if minor, I played in public ritual discourse.

During my time as a columnist at the Post, part of my charge was to write about culture, the internet, and, to an extent, celebrity culture. Which means I would quite often write about the Met Gala. Which means I would get clicks and traffic to the site. The Met Gala has become a spring public ritual, in which we all gain some sort of social currency from discussing it. While its attendees dress in haute couture, adorn and surround themselves with art, those of us who are relegated to the outside the velvet ropes, well, in a way, we get to adorn ourselves with something else, perhaps— to perform our public scorn for those for whom money and fame have afforded them access to beauty, while many of us who make our living on the internet are being forced to contend with AI slop and tech-powered theft of creativity.

And certain things deserve scorn. Enough has already been said about billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos sponsoring this week’s Met Gala, to the tune of $10 million. Much ink has been spilled about his censorship of the Washington Post’s opinion section, the decimation of the newsroom earlier this year. We know about the cozying up to Trump. Of course, Jeff Bezos made more money than G-d hawking wares on Amazon, aka the online mall of everything— (which helped kill actual stores, btw). We know now about the exploitation of Amazon workers, the dire conditions they have been forced to work under, and the union-busting activities of Amazon leaders. Chris Smalls, former head of the Amazon union, was forcefully arrested on Monday at the Met Gala. (The Amazon Union disavowed his actions).

Jeff Bezos was absent from the red carpet—apparently, the protests and backlash led the tech titan to scurry away from the spotlight. Same with Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, who did not walk the red carpet. But Bezos’s wife, Lauren Sanchez Bezos, made an appearance in a gown that was underwhelming at best— and left to catch the heat that her husband’s wealth and disdain for human workers has generated.

In the New York Times, fashion critic and my former colleague Robin Givhan, writes,

Mrs. Sánchez Bezos is the star of the Met Gala because she represents what fashion, buffeted by social and technological change, has surrendered to: economic inequality in human form, with pink, glossy lips, cinched up in a couture corset…

Taste is one more part of the culture for ruthless tech titans to attempt to optimize for their benefit. With Ms. Wintour’s determined gatekeeping and the Costume Institute’s intellectual concerns about human creativity, the Met Gala is the perfect laundromat for soulless tech money.

Maybe this year’s Met Gala is making people mourn some sort of glorious past, when art was just about art and fashion was just about fashion. But as I’ve written about nostalgia and dying malls, we remember a past that never fully existed.

I am also very concerned with beauty— and as I said, the Golden Hour is about light and dark.

Beauty is necessary for evil. Art has always been a way for extraordinary wealth and destructive power to justify their existence. When we marvel at the riches of Europe, the wealth in its museums, the jewels in castles and the Vatican, that beauty could not have existed without the ruthless exploitation of the poor, and of Europe’s colonies abroad. The beauty of many lifesaving medical treatments and scientific achievements emerged from the exploitation of wars, of grotesque medical experiments on prisoners and colonized peoples.

In many ways, today’s tech titans are no different from the colonial masters of the past. Wealth and power romanticized and fetishized the cultures they have ruthlessly extracted from, while destroying the people. We’d like to think that the old colonial ways of enslavement and invading territories for natural resources were in the past. No, the ugliness of extraction has just evolved— under the sparkle of “innovation”. In just 30 or so years, our new tech colonial masters have learned how to mine our desires, personal data, thoughts, messages, and creativity. They are trying their hardest to replace humans with AI or robots, and calling that progress. Their exploitation has expanded from those we deem to be of the lower class, and has expanded to forcing their soullessness on journalism, on fashion, and on art. Soulless tech money is now not just dirty, robber baron money in no small part because their technology is an existential threat to (relatively) privileged writers and thinkers like me.

But unlike the colonial masters of the past, these tech titans have the power to manipulate our digital realities through elegantly coded changes to the algorithm. American power means we prefer frictionless ease and the convenience of consumption. But ultimately, we are the ones being consumed.

What these male tech architects are designing is far more potent than haute couture. They have taken our data, our thoughts, our attention, our creativity, and the most finite of resources, our earthly time. With these precious elements, they are redesigning our habits, our work culture, our relationships, our incomes—and yes, our psychological reality itself.

A future in which many of us become digital sharecroppers is something to fear. There are very few legal mechanisms for accountability for algorithmic harm. There is no universal basic income to support those who are being forced out of work by unimaginative bosses who wish to impose AI to replace jobs.

We are headed to a future in which it will be a privilege to work with humans.

Our philosophers, engineers, educators, therapists, and journalists will find themselves with the task of technical kitchen work— washing machine code in back rooms until it has a human-like sparkle. So that the machine becomes more productive, superhuman, beautiful. And the danger is, though we prefer human-made art, research has shown that we are still largely unable to distinguish between art that is human-made and “art “ made by AI.

And maybe this is what feels so empty and almost insulting: the Met Gala and dissecting celebrities' fashion choices. No amount of explanations about how the Met Gala is for charity and costumes can erase the ennui of it all, and a dark fact: our current crop of tech titans wants to design a frictionless world that will be tasteless, odorless, and soulless. We now know we are weak, that even the smartest, most educated of us can be duped by AI, that our work can and is being stolen, and that there is little we can do about it, at least, at the moment.

And how dare they throw the equivalent of pennies at costume charity when we know their utopian fantasies are fundamentally escapist and post-human—about virtual companions, virtual metaverses, and colonizing Mars, literally anything but deeper engagement with other humans here on Earth.

I’d rather we find better forces for good to give our time, energy, and clicks to than the current crop of tech overlords that are trying to redesign our entire existence.

Maybe we will figure out how to opt out of their dystopian world- building. But hey, in the meantime, let’s look at the pretty dresses.

I wish I could say the light was beautiful right now over downtown Los Angeles, but it is gray and gloomy. I am working on a few longer thoughts on this week’s Supreme Court ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act. I hope to release it next week.

But today, let’s talk about the promise and peril of nostalgia.

Gather round the digital campfire, my fellow Millennials. You, too, Gen X’ers, and a few of you Boomers. We all have tales of our favorite childhood malls.

In a capitalist society, malls might be the closest thing to a common sacred space Americans go to. My favorite malls growing up were Redbird Shopping Mall in South Dallas, Parks Mall in Arlington, and, for special occasions or back-to-school shopping, my late father would take us to Hillsboro Premium Outlets.

We could meet our friends at the movie theater, then get ICEEs, drinks, and popcorn. We’d go get my inflatable furniture and cargo pants from Limited Too. We would wander into dark-lit Abercrombie and Fitch, but never feel q(WHITE) welcome. There were stalls selling knock-off Dooney & Burke purses, along with covers for our Nokia phones. And the Dipping Dots in front of the Sears that I’d always remember being sad and empty— even before the chain’s virtual demise. (There are just five or six stores left in the whole country as of 2026).

I’ve said before, America is giving off decaying childhood strip-mall vibes.

At least in a digital sense, the online spaces like Twitter and Facebook that used to be a “global sphere”, feel like decaying strip malls. Once, places for delight and discovery of new friends, communities.

Now, on my part, going to X, or even Threads, feels like a strip mall turned into a flea market that is now overrun by drug dealers, bots, half-naked influencers, and the neighborhood skinheads. There are viral fights and gun battles breaking out in the parking lots of the strip mall all the time. And the old stores smell super funny because the roof leaks never got fixed—and the mold is taking on a life of its own. Maybe it could be fixed, but the slumlord owners don’t give a fuck. And maybe the city leaders could force the malls to be converted into affordable housing, community centers, or other useful spaces. But they, too, don’t give a fuck.

In a very real sense, yes, malls are dying in America. Walking in many of them is depressing and evokes a sense of grief over the loss of the feeling of infinite possibilities.

In a piece for the Dispatch, “The Decline of the American Mall”, Nic Rowan opens with Don DeLilio’s comic novel, “White Noise”. The protagonist is going through a midlife crisis and goes to a mall to try to solve it.

“I shopped with reckless abandon,” he says.

“I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it.”

The more he buys, the more he grows “in value and self-regard.” In the mall, he says, “I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed.” He feels as if the building itself enhances his self-understanding.

Writing for the New York Times Magazine, writer Kelly Kalivaris called dying malls the “Roman Ruins of Our Civilization”, with religious odes to the almost divine nature of the emptying of mega-malls.

Macy’s. Best Buy. Barnes & Noble. It feels silly to be sentimental about these dwindling commercial spaces, but I have no choice — this is the beautiful, dark, twisted America I grew up in! These dying spaces are as much sublime purgatories as they are my Roman ruins. My formative years will always be associated with drifting through the atriums of big chain stores that pushed out small, beloved independent businesses. But now I watch in awe as these behemoths meet their own end.

Of course, there’s much to be said about how online shopping was the proverbial meteor to the dinosaurs that were mall chain stores. And indeed, those same dinosaurs were the ones that preyed on and ate the smaller, more defenseless mom-and-pop stores in the neighborhood. Nature Capitalism is scary. Why are we nostalgic about predatory mall-chain dinosaurs that killed the smaller community spaces that came before? Do we really want to go back in time and resurrect these mall dinosaurs— Jurassic-Park style?

Yeah—— I don't know about that. I’m reminded of the famous Jurassic Park Line—

No, malls aren’t coming back.

Our childhoods aren’t coming back.

Looking at the state of the economy, our ability to “shop with reckless abandon”— well, for many of us, we never quite had that anyway. But the promises that malls had— American monoculture in which we can all partake in consumption— that anything we could see or touch could be ours with just a swipe of a card, or a layaway plan.

I’d argue that the dominant cultural and political force in our country right now is nostalgia. Nostalgia is extremely powerful, and in many ways, it is easy money. We have powerful desires to indulge in the belief that our childhood was better, carefree, and full of possibilities. In a time where the very foundations of the American dream are unstable, and the future of work, family, and America’s place in the world looks bleak, Nostalgia Core tells us that the best time is behind us.

And I believe it is leading us into dark places. This piece from has had me thinking.

Mini Philosophy

The danger of nostalgia

Hello everybody…

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7 months ago · 106 likes · 1 comment · Jonny Thomson and Big Think

Nostalgia— real or manufactured— can also lead to political repression, and in the worst cases, identity-based atrocities.

“..the promise to rebuild the ideal home lies at the core of many powerful ideologies today, tempting us to relinquish critical thinking for emotional bonding…In extreme cases, it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unreflective nostalgia can breed monsters.”

We see millennial cultural nostalgia everywhere, in the superhero blockbuster remakes, and in extremely popular Instagram accounts solely dedicated to 90s pop culture.

In some ways, the retrospective lookbacks can be good—after all, I do think it is wise to revisit how horribly the culture treated, say, Britney Spears during her pop prime in the late 90s/early 00s. The questions about her body, her virginity, and the sheer fascination and revulsion she inspired are worth re-examining.

Many times, we have to fight nostalgia in order to pursue justice.

It’s worth overcoming our wistful memories of bopping to Diddy in the 90s so that we can hold him accountable for terrorizing the women in his life.

We are already seeing White Political Nostalgia play out in our politics. The roll-back of affirmative action, the purging of Black voices from education and journalism, and now the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act are all fueled by white nostalgia for an America where Black people were kept from power and authority. It is nostalgia for a time when the only socially permissible roles for Black people in America were under the foot of White people. While billionaires outsource jobs overseas, or to AI, white people are being sold the idea that they can return to power, to a carefree time with more opportunities, as long as they get rid of the Blacks and immigrants first.

And this is the thing— maybe we are all collectively hurtling into decaying mall nostalgia because it feels like we are in an era where America is destroying itself. We Black people know about the swimming pool politics. In the South, white people would pour acid in pools instead of sharing the space with Black people. We remember what happened with Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the Greenwood. That this country would rather destroy itself than share power with Black people, women, poor people, or immigrants.

Alas. The future looks bleak. But the glorious past we think we remember never existed. So we are yearning for a time where it seemed like, for a moment, we all shared space, and some Dippin’ Dots.

Might as well enjoy what we can while we can. Can anyone send me an Orange Julius?