Robin DiAngelo Plagiarized Minority Scholars, Complaint Alleges

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.

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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.

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