DiAngelo was born Robin Jeanne Taylor into a working-class family in San Jose, California, the youngest of three daughters born to Robert Z. Taylor and Maryanne Jeanne DiAngelo.[3][4]
She lived with her mother in poverty until her mother's death from cancer, after which she and her siblings lived with her father. She became a single mother with one child in her mid-20s, and worked as a waitress before beginning college at the age of 30.[5]
In her youth, she believed that her poverty led to class oppression, though it was only later in life that she identified personally benefiting from white privilege, even while being "poor and white".[6] In 2018, DiAngelo stated that her "experience of poverty would have been different had [she] not been white".[6]
For over twenty years, DiAngelo has offered racial justice training for schools, nonprofit organizations, universities, and businesses,[16][17][18] arguing that racism is embedded throughout American political systems and culture.[2] In a 2019 article for The New Yorker, columnist Kelefa Sanneh characterized DiAngelo as "perhaps the country's most visible expert in anti-bias training, a practice that is also an industry, and, from all appearances, a prospering one".[19]
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.
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
DiAngelo, R. (2012). What Does it Mean to be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy. Counterpoints (New York, N.Y.). Peter Lang. ISBN978-1-4331-1116-7.
^Sanneh, Kelefa (August 12, 2019). "The Fight to Redefine Racism". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on August 13, 2019. Retrieved August 14, 2019.
