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Eugene Robinson
“Politics and the Nation”
Eugene Robinson uses his column in The Washington Post to pick American society apart and then put it back together again in unexpected, and revelatory, new ways. To do this, Robinson relies on a large and varied tool kit: energy, curiosity, elegant writing, and the wide-ranging experience of a life that took him from childhood in the segregated South—on what they called the “colored” side of the tracks—to the heights of American journalism.
Robinson is an associate editor and twice-weekly columnist for The Washington Post. He joined the newspaper in 1980 and worked his way up through the ranks, starting as a city hall reporter. He then became assistant city editor, city editor, South America correspondent in Buenos Aires, London bureau chief, foreign editor, and most recently, assistant managing editor in charge of the paper’s award-winning Style section. In 2005, he started writing a column for the op-ed page.
In his columns, Robinson generally takes liberal positions and often criticizes President George W. Bush for his perceived domestic and foreign-policy failures, especially the Iraq War. He is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and has received numerous journalism awards.
Robinson is the author of Coal to Cream: A Black Man’s Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race (1999) and Last Dance in Havana (2004). He appears frequently on MSNBC as a political analyst on shows such as Race for the White House, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, and Hardball with Chris Matthews.