Robin DiAngelo’s Alleged Plagiarism Is No Coincidence

COMMENTARY Progressivism

Robin DiAngelo’s Alleged Plagiarism Is No Coincidence

Sep 4, 2024 4 min read
COMMENTARY BY
Mike Gonzalez

Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow

Mike is the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
RonOrmanJr/Getty Images

Key Takeaways

The discovery that race baiter Robin DiAngelo is being accused of plagiarism stands out for several reasons.

The most important is that DiAngelo is a key force in the malignant strategy to inflame racial relations to overthrow our economic, political, and cultural systems.

Racial grift is inherently dishonest, so this “coincidence” shouldn’t surprise us.

The discovery that race baiter Robin DiAngelo is being accused of plagiarism stands out for several reasons. The most important is that DiAngelo is a key force in the malignant strategy to inflame racial relations to overthrow our economic, political, and cultural systems.

That alone makes it hard not to cheer the potential professional downfall of this self-styled antiracism consultant.

There’s also the fact that DiAngelo is hardly the first of her political ilk found with her hands in the plagiarizing jar. Racial grift is inherently dishonest, so this “coincidence” shouldn’t surprise us.

The last reason is that this story, like many others exposing the race industrial complex, is being reported by a new, exciting wave of muckraking journalists. The legacy media, meanwhile, strain to adopt ostrich stances for as long as possible until these stories get too big and can be ignored no longer.

The charges of plagiarism against DiAngelo are contained in a complaint filed this month with the University of Washington. It alleges multiple instances where DiAngelo simply borrowed complete passages from someone else’s work without giving any credit when writing her thesis for a doctoral degree in multicultural education.

A 35-word passage lifted entirely from the work of Stacey Lee, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, makes it appear that DiAngelo is giving her own assessment of the work of David Theo Goldberg.

Aaron Sibarium, one of the muckrakers who has broken many of the plagiarism stories, including the ones that eventually led to the dismissal of Harvard President Claudine Gay, quotes National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood as likening DiAngelo’s work to “forgery.”

It’s these new journalists—writing for the Washington Examiner, the Washington Free Beacon, the Daily Signal, etc.—who have been upending the rotten progressive new establishment that has taken over universities and other cultural institutions with the intention of dismantling capitalism, representative democracy, etc.

Why so many of these “educators” and cultural gatekeepers—people such as Gay, her chief diversity officer, and now DiAngelo—are now being discovered as plagiarists points to a related issue. Many of them were hired for their commitment to woke ideology, not because of their scholarship.

DiAngelo is particularly important, and a big get. Her 2018 bestseller, White Fragility, Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, instantly became de rigueur reading among white liberals wracked with guilt for things they’d never done. She has sold millions of copies of this and other titles.

In June 2020, not 10 days after the death of George Floyd, she addressed 184 Democrat members of Congress, nearly 80% of the House Democratic caucus, in a conference call. (We were in the midst of the COVID panic, and the only people allowed to gather were Black Lives Matter rioters.)

None other than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) introduced DiAngelo, who went on to give white congressmen quite the tongue-lashing.

“For all the white people listening right now, thinking I am not talking to you, I am looking directly in your eyes and saying, ‘It is you,’” the New York Times reported DiAngelo as saying. She urged the members at the conference call to reckon with the question of “What does it mean to be white?”

Until they did this type of probing, the New York Times reported her as saying, the congressmen would “continue to enact policies and practices—intentionally or not—that hurt and limit” blacks.

That is the type of guilt-mongering that DiAngelo has been spreading, and making a mint out of, for years. Her influence goes beyond commanding the heights of the Amazon bestseller list. On that June day, for example, DiAngelo was addressing lawmakers from a party with a majority in both houses of Congress—in other words, people with the power to effect change. 

And change did come in 2020, and for the next four years, in the form of not just laws but also norms and practices in everything to do with race, sex, gender orientation, etc. And the change she seeks is systemic. Capitalism, she and people in her line of work make clear to those who will but listen, is the target.

That is because capitalism, they say, rewards the wrong criteria, including standards such as “rationalism,” which they insist (without blushing at the rank racism they reveal) are associated with whiteness.

DiAngelo, for example, told the New York Times that if a criterion “consistently and measurably leads to certain people” being excluded, then that criterion must be abandoned. Outcomes are all that matters.

“Capitalism is so bound up with racism,” she told the New York Times. She avoided being vocal about capitalism, she admitted, preferring to practice dissimulation so as not to have her aims revealed. But then she couldn’t help but blurt out, “But capitalism is dependent on inequality, on an underclass. If the model is profit over everything else, you’re not going to look at your policies to see what is most racially equitable.”

You talk to someone long enough, and they will reveal who they are.

This piece originally appeared in the Washington Examiner

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