Robin DiAngelo

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Robin DiAngelo
Robin DiAngelo.jpg
DiAngelo in 2020
Born
Robin Jeanne Taylor

(1956-09-08) September 8, 1956 (age 68)
NationalityAmerican
Occupation(s)Author, consultant
SpouseJason Toews
Academic background
Education
Thesis Whiteness in racial dialogue: a discourse analysis  (2004)
Doctoral advisor James A. Banks

DiAngelo has published a number of academic articles and books on race, privilege, and education. [20] In 2011, she co-wrote with Ozlem Sensoy Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Critical Social Justice Education, which won the American Educational Research Association's Critics' Choice Book Award (2012) and the Society of Professors of Education Book Award (2018). [21] [22]

That year, DiAngelo published a paper titled "White Fragility" in The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, thereby coining the term. [8] [23] [24] She has defined the concept of white fragility as "a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves". In the paper, she wrote:

White people in the U.S. and other white settler colonialist societies live in a racially insular social environment. This insulation builds our expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering our stamina for enduring racial stress. I term this lack of racial stamina White Fragility. White Fragility is a state in which even a minimal challenge to the white position becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves including: argumentation, invalidation, silence, withdrawal and claims of being attacked and misunderstood. These moves function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and maintain control.

Since 2016, DiAngelo has regularly led workshops on the topic. [25] [26] In 2017, the term "white fragility" was shortlisted by the Oxford Dictionary for Word of the Year. [27]

In June 2018, DiAngelo published White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism , [28] which debuted on the New York Times bestseller list and remained there for one hundred fifty-five weeks. [29] It has been translated into eleven languages, including French, Italian, German, Japanese, Dutch, and Portuguese. [30]

In June 2020, during the George Floyd protests, White Fragility reached number one on the New York Times list. [31] The July 26, 2020 edition of the list marked the book's 97th week in the Paperback Nonfiction category, where it was ranked number one. [32] The book received mixed critical reception, with positive reviews in sources including New Statesman , The New Yorker , Publishers Weekly , and the Los Angeles Review of Books , [33] [34] [35] [36] and negative reviews in sources including The Atlantic and The Washington Post . [37] [31] Publishers Weekly praised the book as "a thoughtful, instructive, and comprehensive book on challenging racism." [38] Isaac Chotiner, in The New Yorker , wrote that in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, DiAngelo's book served as a guide for many of the millions of Americans questioning systemic racism, though he notes that some critics have described her definition of white fragility as broad, reductive, and condescending towards people of color. [39]

In June 2021, DiAngelo published Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm , a continuation of White Fragility. [40]

She appears in the 2024 Daily Wire documentary Am I Racist? , in which she is shown paying $30 in reparations to the documentary's Black producer. DiAngelo charged $15,000 for her appearance. [41] [42]

Criticism

By 2020, DiAngelo had become a leading figure in the field and industry of "antiracism training." [8] Scholars dispute whether antiracism training achieves its intended purpose and whether in some cases it can backfire. [8] According to Harvard University sociologist Frank Dobbin, there is no evidence to indicate that anti-bias training leads to increases in the number of women or people of color in management positions. [8] A 2009 Annual Review of Psychology study concluded: "We currently do not know whether a wide range of programs and policies tend to work on average," with the authors of the study stating in 2020 that as the quality of studies increases, the effect size of anti-bias training dwindles. [8]

In February 2021, an online training course bearing her name came under scrutiny after a major social media backlash against The Coca-Cola Company, following the leak of pictures showing excerpts from an employee webinar. The course, entitled "Confronting Racism" and offered on the LinkedIn Learning platform, attracted negative publicity concerning DiAngelo's claim that "[t]o be less white is to: be less oppressive, less arrogant, less certain, less defensive, less ignorant, more humble". It showed DiAngelo asking viewers to "break with white solidarity". A Coca-Cola spokesperson later stated that the course was not a compulsory part of their employee training program and specified that it is "not the focus of the company's curriculum," adding that the course was "part of a learning plan to help build an inclusive workplace". [43] [44] The course was swiftly removed from LinkedIn Learning. [45] According to DiAngelo, the clips containing her advice to "be less white" came from a 2018 interview conducted with a different company and were being used by Coca-Cola alongside other materials without her knowledge or approval. [46]

In August 2024, DiAngelo's doctoral dissertation, Whiteness in racial dialogue: A discourse analysis from the University of Washington, came under scrutiny due to accusations of plagiarism, including from minority academics. [47] [48] [49] [50] [51] On September 11, 2024, the University of Washington dismissed the complaint, stating that it "...falls short of a research misconduct allegation that would give rise to an inquiry." [52] [53]

Works

Related Research Articles

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