The University of Washington has dismissed a complaint against Robin DiAngelo, the author of the best-selling book “White Fragility,” which accused her of plagiarizing portions of her 2004 dissertation.
In a letter in response to the complaint dated last Wednesday, a university representative said that the evidence presented failed to meet the institution’s criteria for plagiarism, which it defines as “the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results or words without giving appropriate credit.”
As a result, the university determined that there was no basis for conducting an inquiry into DiAngelo’s thesis, according to the letter, which was provided to The Times by DiAngelo.
In a statement about the university’s dismissal of the complaint, DiAngelo described the accusations against her as a politically motivated attempt to undermine her antiracism work and her support for diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
“Anti-D.E.I. activists have been clear about their agenda to discredit D.E.I. efforts, and claiming that progressive scholars who write about race have engaged in plagiarism is one of their more predictable strategies,” DiAngelo, who is white, said in a statement. “I am certainly not the first in the D.E.I. field to be accused — progressive Black scholars in particular have been targeted with this allegation.”
The University of Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The complaint, which was filed in August, accused DiAngelo of research misconduct and cited 20 instances in which DiAngelo drew on the work of other scholars in her 2004 dissertation, “Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis.” While DiAngelo cited the scholars whose ideas she referred to and credited them in her bibliography, the complaint highlighted some lengthy passages that repeat phrases almost verbatim from their source material, without quotation marks.
The university, in its response, said that those similarities in language did not constitute plagiarism, because research norms allow for the limited reuse of language to describe previous research or background information.
Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism expert and consultant who reviewed the complaint when portions of it were published in August by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online journal, said that while one or two of the passages cited in the complaint were “problematic,” the majority of them weren’t similar enough to substantiate claims of plagiarism.
“It looks to me more like sloppy writing than it did a clinical, deliberate attempt to plagiarize,” he said.
The complaint against DiAngelo followed several other cases in which plagiarism allegations were made against university administrators and academics who support or develop diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Similar complaints have been filed against diversity officers at Harvard, Columbia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California, Los Angeles, Bailey noted.
Typically, these complaints are submitted anonymously and treated as confidential by the universities while they are evaluated.
“These series of claims I’ve been looking at very skeptically, because they’re not coming from a place of trying to improve academic integrity, they’re coming from a place of attacking diversity, inclusion and equity programs,” Bailey said.
DiAngelo rose to prominence in 2018, with the release of her book “White Fragility,” which argues that white people like herself need to examine the ways in which they are responsible for systemic racism. The book drew on ideas that she developed in her Ph.D. thesis, which explored the concept of “white fragility,” or the way white people can feel threatened by the suggestion that they bear responsibility for perpetuating racism. After her book became a best seller, DiAngelo emerged as a spokeswoman for antiracism.
Her profile grew in 2020, as protests against racism and police violence broke out across the country following the murder of George Floyd. “White Fragility” shot to No. 1 on Amazon, and DiAngelo addressed members of Congress and received requests to speak at major companies like Amazon, Facebook and American Express. To date, “White Fragility” has sold more than five million copies.
DiAngelo’s book and her growing influence also made her a magnet for criticism, not all of it from the right. As a backlash against diversity initiatives has grown and taken aim at diversity and inclusion programs at universities and corporations, she’s braced for more of it, she said.
“For those of us committed to racial justice in this deeply polarized political moment, the attacks are only going to escalate,” she said in her statement.
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