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Author Who Wrote a Crackpot Book About 'White Fragility' Might Have Committed Plagiarism

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  September 04, 2024 8:00 AM

If there’s one racial group that is legitimately guilty of the "privilege" offense tossed about by the left, it’s white progressives. They attack other whites for being racist over—get this—not being as angry for whatever is the pseudointellectual outrage of the week. And now, they’re allegedly stealing the intellectual property of other non-white scholars for their doctoral thesis. Oh, yes, that woman who wrote the book "White Fragility" got busted over a potential plagiarism row. It couldn’t happen to better people, to be honest. 

Since 2020, Robin DiAngelo has subjected the masses to this drivel:

DiAngelo barked about how nonwhites aren’t given their due in society—did she steal that narrative, too? The controversy surrounding this woman is beyond delicious in the comeuppance department: a shrill white woman who took race politics to the extreme and allegedly stole material from nonwhite scholars. Talk about abuse of privilege and power if we’re going by the left’s rules on all this stuff. The Washington Free Beacon delivered this ICBM strike on Ms. DiAngelo, whose career might be entering nuclear winter (via WFB):

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. 

My lord—she’s the plantation owner, taking all the benefits from those, not her, in the academic fields. DiAngelo was interviewed by conservative commentator Matt Walsh for his documentary "Am I Racist?" albeit in disguise. 

Now, it’s not only a white liberal thing. I’ll show a little mercy to this group that deserves none: Former Harvard President Claudine Gay, who is black, also got engulfed in a plagiarism scandal that imbued her entire career and forced her to resign her position at the institution that’s become overrun with antisemites and pro-Hamas underlings. Yet, the hypocrisy and implosion of Ms. DiAngelo make this more entertaining and a more worthy scalp. These people have a moral system that’s fraudulent. There’s nothing underneath. Is racism still an issue? Yes, but these incidents occur when you don’t consider facts, like how much progress we have made in this area, and try to frame America as hopelessly racist, apartheid South Africa 2.0, and then steal from other people to make your shoddy point. 

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Not even nonwhite voters are as intense on the race issues. It’s not black voters who make up the largest cohort regarding defunding the police. It’s white liberals who happen to be the loudest. 

The woman banked millions, perpetrating fraud. I think lawsuits are in order. What a racket.