America’s anti-racist doyenne is caught up in her own trap

Robin DiAngelo’s anti-racist crusade always argued one of her rules for white people included ‘do not plagiarise’. Whoops.

Celebrity anti-racist Robin DiAngelo has been accused of plagiarism over her doctoral thesis.

A few years ago, not long after the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minnesota, I received an email from my now former bosses reprimanding me for not having signed up for “mandatory unconscious bias and anti-racism workshops”. This sparked a long correspondence in which they argued that I had to attend to make the office a more welcoming place, and I argued that a welcoming office wouldn’t assume its employees were racist. They asked why I didn’t want to examine my biases; I said unless my biases were affecting my work, they weren’t my employer’s business to examine.

I admit it, I was being stubborn, although I never attended the workshops so maybe my biases are showing.

I was rereading this correspondence recently. It’s already a fascinating relic of that era, showing how conversations about prejudice suddenly became – and I’m going to use a technical term here, so keep a dictionary handy – insane. And the person largely responsible for this, and for the rise of corporate anti-racism workshops, is American author Robin DiAngelo.

Last week DiAngelo was accused of plagiarism. To understand why that’s interesting, you need to know that DiAngelo is the most successful anti-racism trainer in the world. Her book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Race became a blockbuster bestseller in 2020, after Floyd’s murder. She charged up to $US20,000 ($30,000) to hold anti-racism workshops at companies such as Microsoft and Google, where – in the words of one participant who later gave an interview to the podcast Blocked and Reported – DiAngelo would tell white people if they had “any reaction to the anti-racism work that isn’t agreement or submission, then that’s proof (they are racist)”. The “anti-racism work” was little more than white people being told to accept they’re racist.

So denying you’re racist proves you’re racist, according to DiAngelo. It’s the modern-day equivalent of the 17th-century witch trials, an in-office racism ducking stool. Unfortunately, admitting you’re racist also proves you’re a racist. But at least if you fork out $US20,000 for an anti-racism course, you show you’re “doing the work”, as DiAngelo put it, like Catholics buying indulgences from the church. I guess now is a good time to mention that DiAngelo herself is white.

George Floyd was murdered while being arrested.

The few writers on liberal publications who suggested DiAngelo’s theories weren’t hugely helpful – to anyone of any race – are black, such as John McWhorter at The Atlantic. White liberal journalists gave her glowing reports. Well, what else could they do? DiAngelo and her ilk had them in a finger trap: if you questioned her, that proved you were racist. Plus there was genuine horror over Floyd’s murder by a police officer. Although quite how a horrific incident in Minnesota could be helped by white people in Europe or Australia confessing to being racist, like evangelicals crying out in church that the devil possessed them, was something I was never clear on. But, of course, it’s easier to lecture employees about micro-aggressions than make any structural changes.

After Floyd’s murder, my local bookshop devoted its front section to books about race, and not the kind I grew up reading, like Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Instead they were books with scolding titles like How to Raise an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi, “one of the world’s leading anti-racist scholars” (according to his own website), and DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Martin Luther King’s dream of a nation in which children would not be judged by the colour of their skin was very much over: the new race apostles insisted everyone must be judged by their skin because skin colour is all-defining, and the murder of Floyd proved it.

All this led to a lot of grifters getting a free pass to chide the public about racism. Only 33 per cent of the money donated to Black Lives Matter across the US between 2020 and 2022 actually went to charitable causes; tens of millions went instead to its co-founder, Patrisse Cullors, and her family and friends.

Patrisse Cullors. Picture: Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Ibram X. Kendi.

Kendi’s Centre for Anti-Racist Research at Boston University, which he founded in 2020, raised more than $80m in donations. Last year it was announced the centre was downsizing because of poor management by Kendi, and even an extremely sympathetic profile of Kendi in The New York Times in June couldn’t deny that.

Now a complaint has been filed that DiAngelo plagiarised parts of her 2004 doctoral thesis, Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis. With almost inevitable irony, two of the professors she is accused of plagiarising are Asian-American. And for the final cymbal ding, on DiAngelo’s website she writes about the importance of “giv(ing) credit to the work of BIPOC people (black, indigenous and people of colour) who have informed your thinking”.

The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative US website, broke the story, and good for it. But this is infuriating to old-school liberals like me, who believe racism is a problem and also believe in critical thinking.

DiAngelo was clearly a crackpot, yet the liberal media showered her with adoration instead of the scrutiny she deserved.

Prejudice should not be treated as a partisan issue but liberals – just as much as conservatives – make it so with stupidity like this.

Racism is real, but the anti-racism industry became an absolute racket that enriched some and improved nothing.

THE SUNDAY TIMES