White Critical Race Theory darling Robin DiAngelo accused of plagiarizing minority authors in her doctoral thesis

The author of the New York Times bestseller White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo, has been accused of plagiarizing works from minority authors in her doctoral thesis.

The complaint, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, was filed with the University of Washington, from which DiAngelo received her Ph.D. in multicultural education. The complaint regards her 2004 dissertation, "Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis."



DiAngelo is accused of pulling two paragraphs from Northeastern University's Thomas Nakayama, an Asian-American professor, and his coauthor Robert Krizek without proper attribution and omitting quotation marks and in-text citations. Large chunks of text from the authors' work were used in DiAngelo's piece, with words here and there splitting the sections up.

She is also accused of pulling from University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Stacey Lee, an Asian-American professor of education, in which Lee was summarizing the work of scholar David Theo Goldberg. Dozens of cases of passing off others’ work as her own were discovered.

The University of Washington’s Department of Sociology defines plagiarism as "the use of ideas, words, or other work that is not your own without formal acknowledgment of the source." It notes that "Plagiarism need not be intentional, and 'I didn't know' is not a defense."

The dissertation also includes the famed phrase "white fragility," which DiAngelo described as "a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves."

The Free Beacon reported, "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."

Peter Wood, the president of the National Association of Scholars, told the outlet, "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. In any case, it shows that DiAngelo was fully conscious of what she was doing."

DiAngelo states on her website that white people must "always cite and give credit to the work of BIPOC people who have informed your thinking. When you use a phrase or idea you got from a BIPOC person, credit them."