Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capeheart quits editorial board over dispute with white colleague: Robbing me of my humanity

A black Washington Post opinion writer said he quit the newspaper’s editorial board over a dispute with a white colleague about a piece concerning Georgia’s voting laws that he didn’t agree with — accusing her of “robbing me of my humanity,” according to a report.Jonathan Capehart, who was the only African American member of the editorial board when he quit in 2023, writes in a new book titled “Yet Here I Am: Lessons from a Black Man’s Search for Home,” that he stepped down over a dispute with another opinion editor, Karen Tumulty, the news site Semafor reported.In his book, Capehart, who remains a columnist at the paper, writes that he clashed with Tumulty over an editorial which took issue with then-President Joe Biden’s criticism of a 2021 Georgia voting law.Biden described the law as “Jim Crow 2.0” — a characterization that the Washington Post editorial board deemed to be “hyperbolic.”That didn’t sit well with Capehart, who agreed with Biden’s view of the law and was upset that the editorial may make it appear as if he supported the board’s position that it was “hyperbolic,” according to Semafor.According to the book, Capehart was incensed when Tumulty later did not apologize to him for publishing it.He wrote that he felt additionally put off when Tumulty said Biden’s choice of words was insulting to people who had lived through racial segregation in the South.“Tumulty took an incident where I felt she ignored and compounded the insult by robbing me of my humanity,” he wrote in the book, which was published last week.“She either couldn’t or wouldn’t see that I was black, that I came to the conversation with knowledge and history she could never have, that my worldview, albeit different from hers, was equally valid.”Capehart left the editorial board after complaining about the incident to human resources and other senior figures at the paper, Semafor reported.Capehart’s frustrations were notable enough that...