Robin DiAngelo has hit a bump in the road. It’s about goddam time. Hadley Freeman writes:

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.

And of course she donated most of the profits to anti-racism efforts by non-white people, right? Right?

Nah, we know she didn’t. We’ve talked about her massively successful grift before.

She charged up to $20,000 to hold anti-racism workshops at companies like 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 that if they had “any reaction to the anti-racism work that isn’t agreement or submission, then that’s proof [they’re racist]”. The “anti-racism work” was little more than white people being told to accept they’re racist.

She holds the anti-racism workshops and by god she gets the big bucks for doing it. Wouldn’t you think she would tell Microsoft and Google to ask non-white people to hold their anti-racism workshops? Wouldn’t you think that would be kind of an anti-racist thing to do? Wouldn’t you think she’d be asking them “What are you asking me for???”

20 grand for an hour of chatting about her book – nice for some, as the saying goes.

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.

Hmm. All of them?

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.

The thing about Kendi, as I’ve written here at some point, is that he’s a terrible writer, and not much of a thinker.

All this led to a lot of grifters getting a free pass to chide the general public about racism. Only 33 per cent of the money donated to Black Lives Matter in the US between 2020 to 2022 actually went to charitable causes; tens of millions went instead to its co-founder Patrisse Cullors and her family and friends. Kendi’s Centre for Anti-racist Research at Boston University, which he founded in 2020, raised over $55 million 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.

A dud writer, thinker, and manager. Grifters gonna grift.

Now a complaint has been filed that DiAngelo plagiarised parts of her 2004 doctoral thesis, Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis. 

I read a selection of side-by-side selections from her thesis and the sources a couple of days ago and they’re pretty damning. It’s fine to draw from other people’s work, of course, but you have to do one of two things: paraphrase what they say, or put it between quotation marks. “Paraphrase” doesn’t mean “change two or three minor words.” She did the latter.

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, and 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, which enriched some and improved nothing.

Now let’s do those two women who charge people vast sums to be abused over dinner.