Mick Hartley

I'm a bit late on this – well, I was away – but it's a goody. Robin Di Angelo, who made her name and her fortune on the idea that all white people are racist – apart from her, presumably – has been accused of plagiarism.

Robin DiAngelo, the best-selling author of White Fragility, is a big believer in citing minorities.

In an "accountability" statement on her website, which makes repeated reference to her Ph.D., DiAngelo, 67, tells "fellow white people" that they should "always cite and give credit to the work of BIPOC people who have informed your thinking."

It doesn't matter if their contribution is just a few words. "When you use a phrase or idea you got from a BIPOC person," DiAngelo says, referring to black, indigenous, and other people of color, "credit them."

But the white diversity trainer has not always taken her own advice. 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 2004 dissertation, "Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis," lifts two paragraphs from an Asian-American professor, Northeastern University's Thomas Nakayama, and his coauthor, Robert Krizek, without proper attribution, omitting quotation marks and in-text citations.

DiAngelo also lifts material from Stacey Lee, an Asian-American professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in which Lee summarizes the work of a third scholar, David Theo Goldberg….

The complaint describes dozens of cases in which DiAngelo, who rakes in almost $1 million a year in speaking fees, passed off the work of others as her own. It calls into question the key credential on which DiAngelo built her career, which has relied on the notion that her therapeutic workshops—which can cost up to $40,000 and insist that all white people are racist—are backed by scholarly expertise.

"No one who respected the basic expectations of scholarship would do this," said Steve McGuire, a member of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and former professor of political theory at Villanova University. "The amount of copying of verbatim language without quotation marks or clear and consistent citations in these examples is appalling."…

Once an obscure professor at Westfield State University, DiAngelo emerged in 2020 as the high priestess of progressive racialism. Her most famous book, White Fragility, published in 2018, flew off the shelves following George Floyd's death, beating out How to Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi—a black man—on USA Today's best-seller list.

DiAngelo has become a staple of teacher trainings, corporate affinity groups, fundraisers, and "antiracist" book clubs. She even addressed 184 members of Congress, including then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), about what it "mean[s] to be white," telling the Democratic caucus in 2020 that its members would continue to "hurt" black people until they reckoned with the question.

The talk was one of myriad speaking engagements that launched DiAngelo into the top 1 percent of American earners and helped her afford three houses worth $1.6 million. At one of those houses, a cabin in rural Washington State, DiAngelo has been photographed relaxing with a group of friends who, by all outward appearances, are exclusively white.

It's such an American story: selling guilt to white liberals. There's an inbuilt problem that affects us all, apparently, which only her teachings can resolve – at some considerable expense. Freud laid the groundwork, and the unscrupulous have been cashing in ever since.