Author Robin DiAngelo’s 2018 book “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism” became a New York Times bestseller shortly after its release and saw a renewed buzz a couple years later amid the George Floyd protests. She has since enjoyed a career as a “diversity consultant” who encourages white people to confront their inherit racial biases.
But, according to a recent complaint filed with the University of Washington, DiAngelo plagiarized minorities in her 2004 doctorate thesis. According to the Washington Free Beacon, DiAngelo’s 2004 dissertation entitled “Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis” allegedly contains two paragraphs that were stolen from Asian-American professor Thomas Nakayama and his coauthor Robert Krizek.
The Free Beacon notes that there was never any proper attribution crediting Nakayama and Krizek in DiAngelo’s work. DiAngelo was also accused of also plagiarizing another Asian-American professor, Stacey Lee.
An image from the Washington Free Beacon shows how DiAngelo apparently wrote Lee’s summary of scholar David Theo Goldberg’s work nearly verbatim. In total, there were 20 examples of DiAngelo’s alleged plagiarism cited in the complaint.
“It is never appropriate to use the secondary source without acknowledging it, and even worse to present it as one’s own words,” Peter Wood, a former Boston University and president of the National Association of Scholars, told the Free Beacon. “That’s plagiarism.”
Ironically, DiAngelo’s website contains an accountability statement in which she insists that the work of people of color must always be cited if they have “informed your thinking.”
The statement emphasizes the importance of white people crediting marginalized groups when they use one of their phrases or ideas.
Last year, the Free Beacon also infamously reported on numerous plagiarism claims against former Harvard President Claudine Gay, who ultimately resigned in January.
