Robin DiAngelo, the pro-DEI author of the bestselling book “White Fragility,” is a fraud.
She’s also been accused of rampantly plagiarizing minority scholars in a scathing new report by The Washington Free Beacon.
“According to a complaint filed last week with the University of Washington, where DiAngelo received her Ph.D. in multicultural education, she plagiarized several scholars—including two minorities—in her doctoral thesis,” the Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium reported.
For those who are unaware, DiAngelo is one of the most prominent public faces of the “antiracism” movement. She, alongside fellow guru of antiracism Ibram X. Kendi, exploded in popularity during the 2020 “racial awakening” and Black Lives Matter-provoked protests.
Kendi, who is black, has already been exposed as a snake oil salesman. His Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University imploded after raking in $43 million from donors and grants. The center produced virtually nothing, which is a good thing.
Even The New York Times admitted that Kendi’s star was fading and that his center was bunk.
Now DiAngelo, who is white, is being exposed too.
DiAngelo’s writing generally follows the same basic rubric with which I concluded my review of her book “Nice Racism,” the follow-up to “White Fragility”: “Everything you do is racist. If you want to do something about it you need to buy these books, attend these lectures, pay these consultants, and only then you will have begun the process of purging racism from society.”
DiAngelo’s books are essentially surface-level self-help guides for guilty white liberals with one of those “In this house, we believe …” signs in their yard.
I imagine that countless copies of her books sit unread on coffee tables so that liberals can demonstrate to their friends and neighbors that they are good comrades, er allies, fighting for the cause.
If they actually bother to crack open DiAngelo’s works, they will find that her analysis is shallow at best and relies on the reader’s simply accepting the premise that American society is irredeemably racist in countless unseen ways.
It looks like she’s going to have to put herself in the category of hopeless racists.
The Free Beacon noted that on the “accountability” section of her website, DiAngelo notifies “fellow white people” that they must “always cite and give credit to the work of BIPOC people who have informed your thinking.”
“BIPOC” means “black, indigenous, and other people of color.”
Whenever a white person uses words or ideas that he or she got from a minority, DiAngelo wrote, “cite them.”
Yet, according to the complaint and the Free Beacon’s reporting, DiAngelo lifted large parts of her 2004 University of Washington dissertation from a paper co-authored by Thomas Nakayama, an Asian American professor.
She lifted a great deal from other authors too, sometimes using language that is extremely similar to the source. In the cases cited, she doesn’t use quotes and doesn’t make a direct citation. Those are definitely big no-nos.
DiAngelo did reportedly include the works she lifted from in her bibliography for the dissertation, but generally that’s not good enough when copying a source so closely.
“Though she cites all of her sources in her bibliography, DiAngelo omits quotation marks, footnotes, and other forms of attribution that would mark off her words from those of her sources,” Sibarium wrote in the Free Beacon. “And while a verbatim quote could have been copied accidentally, she often tweaks her sources’ prose—suggesting she is aware of what she is doing and intentionally misleading readers.”
So, it’s not looking good for DiAngelo.
Will her readers and supporters care?
Maybe not, but it ramps up the pickle that academia finds itself in. DiAngelo leads with her credibility. She frequently is referred to, the Beacon notes, as a “Ph.D.” who acquired her degree from the University of Washington.
Yet, DiAngelo along with many other pro-DEI academics apparently can’t follow the basic guidelines of citation that one assumes an elite scholar would have no problem with. It’s remarkable just how many left-wing academics—especially proponents of DEI—have been accused of rampant plagiarism in the past few years.
Harvard President Claudine Gay, whose infamous testimony at a House hearing about antisemitism on campus put her in hot water, famously resigned after plagiarism accusations emerged.
Other professors also have been hit with plagiarism allegations. The Left has cried foul, saying that these accusations—rarely rebutted—have been “weaponized” against its adherents.
But the issue creates a genuine dilemma for academia, which relies on the authority of its research to maintain a high status in society.
Academics can’t simply dismiss these charges unless they are willing to risk letting the entire house of cards collapse.
The truth is that the DEI/antiracism movement was never based on thorough research or an evenhanded assessment of American society. Sure, adherents sometimes point to studies and such, but even these often turn out to be bogus.
Instead, the movement relied on ideology and emotion alongside a good deal of threats from institutions that really did weaponize DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—against dissenters.
The wind has been taken out of their sails in recent years as the movement revealed itself to be discriminatory (by design, for those paying attention), divisive, counterproductive, and deeply unpopular.
Elite institutions haven’t given up the DEI project, not by a long shot. But they are scrambling to rebrand their efforts to escape public scrutiny.
That’s why it’s important to keep the pressure on, not only exposing the antiracist frauds such as DiAngelo, but insisting that institutions, corporations, and governments abandon the poisonous ideology they peddle.
The Daily Signal reached out to the University of Washington about the plagiarism accusations, but the school did not immediately comment.