Robin DiAngelo now joins a growing list of prominent racial agitators, festooned with advanced degrees, who have been exposed as plagiarists. Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon has published side-by-side comparisons of segments of DiAngelo’s doctoral dissertation with writings by various scholars. It is apparent at a glance that DiAngelo lifted whole sentences and paragraphs from other authors without attribution. In some places, she made single-word substitutions. Occasionally, she deleted a sentence or two from the original or inserted mid-paragraph a sentence of her own.
These are the tricks of a practiced plagiarist who wants to cover her tracks. I know something about this. I am not exactly the Van Helsing of plagiarist hunters, but I’ve been doing such work for decades. I worked on uncovering the plagiarism in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s doctoral dissertation and later on Bill Cosby’s contributions to the genre of stolen scholarship. Aaron Sibarium invited me to examine the writings of Claudine Gay, whose serial plagiarism cost her the presidency of Harvard in January. And he invited me to examine the evidence in DiAngelo’s case as well.
DiAngelo’s case comes with the rich irony that she had strongly inveighed on the importance of scrupulously citing not just the words but also the ideas of minority scholars. But in her dissertation, she robustly plundered both. Her hypocrisy adds a rich broth to this dish, but it isn’t the most important reason to pay attention to this story. What we are seeing is the crumbling of a deceit that has played a significant part in American social and political life for the last five years.
Robin DiAngelo, Ph.D., is far and away the most prominent white promoter of the social hysteria known as “anti-racism.” With the 2018 publication of her book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, DiAngelo muscled her way to leadership in the movement that seeks to convince Americans that our society is profoundly racist. That idea had been in circulation long before DiAngelo scratched out her version of it. But her timing was perfect. In 2016, the young historian Ibram X. Kendi had enunciated the view that the only acceptable response to racism against blacks is a permanent state of psychological war against whites that he called — without irony — anti-racism. Kendian anti-racism demanded the surrender of whites (and everyone else) who upheld the ideal of America as a nonracist society built on legal equality and personal integrity.
Kendi’s barbed-wire prescriptions for reordering America were launched a few years after the Ferguson riots and the emergence of the Marxist–inspired Black Lives Matter movement. White liberals and radicals had played supporting roles in these protests. Melissa Click, a white professor of communications at Missouri State University, famously tried to expel a student journalist from a black protest in November 2015. She was caught on camera declaring, “I need some muscle over here!” That phrase along with others, such as “Hands up. Don’t shoot!” “I can’t breathe!” “Say their names,” and “White silence is violence,” became part the chorus of racial grievance played on a continuous loop in the ensuing years.
While there was plenty of eager white guilt for Kendi and other black writers such Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones to exploit, something was missing. Let’s call it the need for a simplistic paraphrase aimed specifically at white Americans. DiAngelo hit on the perfect formulation by baiting the paraphrase with a bit of psychobabble. “White fragility” sounds like a diagnosis. In the opening pages of her book, DiAngelo cites the discomfort white people feel when forced to talk about race:
Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about race. We consider a challenge to our racial worldviews as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. Thus, we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense…. I conceptualize this process as white fragility.
This is written in the tone of intellectual authority. It takes as self-evident several ideas that deserve skeptical scrutiny. Are white people really “socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority”? What are “racial worldviews,” as opposed, say, to the mix of doubts, intuitions, and fragmentary half-knowledge that most Americans live with? Are conversations about race perceived by white people as “a challenge to their very identities as good, moral people”? Are there such things as “the system of racism”?
Robin DiAngelo would never have registered at all in the American conversation about race except that she supplied such glib formulations of key elements in the great racial hysteria that broke out in full force after the death of George Floyd in police custody in May 2020. At that point, the demand for public excuses for riots and extortion exceeded the plausible supply. The general public had to be persuaded that it was a good idea to defund the police, decriminalize shoplifting and other urban sports, use prosecutorial discretion to let predators go free, and generally authorize a wide range of other assaults against justice and public order. That “general public” was not necessarily “white,” but it suited the narrative to describe it that way.
And that made DiAngelo’s book the gold standard of rationalization for racial violence and predation. To raise objections to the new disorder was to display “white fragility,” and therefore racism. Who believed this nonsense? Apart from the leftist agitators themselves, there were two categories who did so: the college students who were assigned White Fragility as a textbook of unquestionable authority and the white suburban women who supplied DiAngelo her core audience.
It remains to be seen how quickly DiAngelo’s standing will fade. Bogus books can have a long afterlife. I think of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú’s memoir, long exposed as fraudulent, but still appearing on college syllabi as part of the indictment of American imperialism in Central America. The concept of “white fragility” will no doubt remain standard on the playlist of the “anti-racist” Left for many years to come. But DiAngelo’s credibility with the broader public is at the beginning of the end.
It is not that plagiarism itself is seen as an unforgivable sin. It is exactly that in academic circles, but the general public is largely indifferent to the matter. What will stick to DiAngelo, however, is her shameless exploitation of minority writers and black grievance for her own personal gain. The whole “anti-racism” project was a grift from the start. It enriched the founders of BLM; made Kendi rich; and propelled Hannah-Jones to fame and fortune. But what DiAngelo will be remembered for is creating a grift on top of that grift. It was a fragile proposition all along.
READ MORE:
The Fatal Assumptions of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility
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