Robin DiAngelo

Robin J. DiAngelo
DiAngelo appears for the Unitarian Universalist Association in 2020
Born	Robin J. DiAngelo (1956-09-08) September 8, 1956 San Francisco, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation(s)	Professor, Author, Lecturer
Known for	White Fragility
Spouse	Jason Toews
Academic background
Education	University of Washington
Alma mater	University of Washington
Academic work
Institutions	Westfield State University, University of Washington
Notable ideas	White fragility

Robin J. DiAngelo (born September 8, 1956) is an American academic, lecturer, and author working in the fields of critical discourse analysis and whiteness studies. She formerly served as a tenured professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University and is currently an Affiliate Associate Professor of Education at the University of Washington. She is known for her work pertaining to "white fragility", an expression she coined in 2011.

Education and career

DiAngelo received her Ph.D. in multicultural education from the University of Washington in 2004, with a dissertation entitled "Whiteness in racial dialogue: a discourse analysis". Her Ph.D. committee was chaired by James A. Banks. In 2007, she joined the faculty of Westfield State University, where she was named a associate professor of multicultural education in 2014. She resigned from her position at Westfield in 2015. She now holds the position of Affiliate Associate Professor of Education at the University of Washington. She holds two Honorary Doctoral degrees from Starr King Seminary (2019) and Lewis & Clark College (2017). She frequently gives seminars discussing racism, which she argues is embedded throughout America's political systems and culture.

Work

DiAngelo has published a number of academic articles on race, privilege, and education and written several books. Her first book, co-written with Ozlem Sensoy, Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Critical Social Justice Education won both the American Educational Research Association's Critics' Choice Book Award (2012) and the Society of Professors of Education Book Award (2018).

DiAngelo is known for her work regarding "white fragility", a term she coined in a 2011 peer-reviewed paper. 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 argues that, “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.” As of 2016, she regularly gives workshops on the topic.

In June 2018, DiAngelo published the book White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.

Controversy

Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility while a New York Times Best Seller has also been a polarizing work. At the time of its publication there was a bevy of negative critical review at times citing racial bias in the book against European Americans. Many mainstream publications such as the Washington Post ran critical reviews, while also running other positive reviews. White Fragility also received poor reception in the African American community, as shown by a piece in The Alantic published in 2020 that is heavily critical of the book.

Reception

See also: White Fragility § Reception

In a 2019 article for The New Yorker, the 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".

The economist and journalist Jonathan Church has published multiple articles appraising her "white fragility" thesis as a fallacy of reification brigaded by faulty science.

In her book Diversity, Inc: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business, NYU journalism professor Pamela Newkirk criticises the diversity industry in the United States, including the type of diversity training programmes conducted by DiAngelo. Newkirk argues that such trainings do not work because they do not address the country's larger historical context of racial discrimination and violence, and in practice mainly aim at protecting businesses from costly discrimination lawsuits. New Republic journalist J.C. Pan argues that DiAngelo's and Newkirk's approaches to racial inequality are actually quite similar and both fail because they focus on raising consciences instead of tackling society-wide economic inequality, which could help disproportionately poor and deprived ethnic minorities.

Bibliography

• DiAngelo, R. (2012). What Does it Mean to be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy. Counterpoints (New York, N.Y.). Peter Lang. ISBN 978-1-4331-1116-7.
• DiAngelo, R. (2018). White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0-8070-4741-5.
• Sensoy, O.; DiAngelo, R. (2017). Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, Second Edition. Multicultural Education Series. Teachers College Press. ISBN 978-0-8077-5861-8.

External links

• Official website