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 passage creates the impression that DiAngelo is providing her own summary of Goldberg rather than using Lee's language—a misleading move that Peter Wood, the president of the National Association of Scholars, likened to "forgery."
"It is never appropriate to use the secondary source without acknowledging it, and even worse to present it as one's own words," said Wood, a former Boston University provost who led several research misconduct probes. "That's plagiarism."
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."
The doctorate has become a centerpiece of DiAngelo's marketing. Her website, "Robin DiAngelo, PhD," refers to her as "Dr. DiAngelo," notes that she is a professor at the University of Washington, and states that she coined the term "white fragility" in an "academic article" in 2011.
The first use of that phrase actually came in her dissertation, on page 184, where she formulated the concept that would define her career.
"White fragility," DiAngelo wrote, "is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves."
The complaint suggests that the paper responsible for these ideas violated bedrock scholarly norms. Several passages appear to meet the University of Washington's definition of plagiarism, which includes "borrowing the structure of another author's phrases or sentences without crediting the author from whom it came."
DiAngelo, for example, copies a page of material from Kristin Gates Cloyes—her classmate in the university's Ph.D. program—and frames it as original language.
She lifts another page from Debian Marty, an emerita professor of communication at California State University, Monterey Bay, keeping the structure of the passage the same while swapping out synonyms and details.
Turnitin.com defines this sort of splicing as "mosaic plagiarism," in which a source's phrases are interspersed, uncredited, with one's own. "Plagiarism need not be intentional," the University of Washington states, "and 'I didn't know' is not a defense."
DiAngelo did not respond to a request for comment. The University of Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
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.
Last week's complaint is part of a wave of plagiarism allegations unleashed by the resignation of former Harvard University president Claudine Gay, who stepped down in January after half of her published works were found to contain plagiarized material. Subsequent complaints targeted diversity officials at Harvard, Columbia, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The allegations ranged from mild sloppiness to copying huge chunks of text from other sources, including Wikipedia, without attribution. DiAngelo falls on the severer half of that continuum, lifting longer chunks of text than some officials, including Gay, and displaying telltale signs of deliberate plagiarism.
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. 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.
In a sentence taken from Queen's University's Cynthia Levine-Rasky, for example, DiAngelo changes just one word.
"It could be one of those signatures of the habitual plagiarist in which a minor change is meant either to throw people off or to justify the pretense of taking someone else's words for oneself," Wood said. "In any case, it shows that DiAngelo was fully conscious of what she was doing."
A similar case involves two sentences from Bronwyn Davies, a professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne, and Rom Harré, a deceased philosopher and psychologist. DiAngelo copies the sentences almost verbatim, tweaking a word here or there to avoid an exact reproduction.
"It does look like plagiarism," Davies told the Washington Free Beacon. Other scholars named in the complaint did not respond to requests for comment.