Critical race theorist faced complaint after reusing portions of other scholars’ work
“White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo has been cleared of plagiarism charges under a university policy that allows professors to “reuse” other people’s work.
The University of Washington professor did not plagiarize, according to the school.
Rather, the “White Fragility” author’s copying of large passages from other academics represented a “reuse of a moderate amount of language to describe a commonly-used methodology, previous research, or background information,” according to the school’s “research misconduct policy.”
The Guardian received a copy of the dismissal document from Beacon Press, the publisher of “White Fragility.”
DiAngelo, who appeared in Matt Walsh’s “Am I Racist” film and subsequently deleted her X account, faced a plagiarism accusation for her 2004 doctoral thesis at UW. She is now a professor at the public university.
“In a letter dated 11 September and shared with the Guardian by DiAngelo’s US publisher Beacon Press, the university said that the complaint ‘falls short of a research misconduct allegation that would give rise to an inquiry,’” the British news outlet reported on Sep. 18.
“DiAngelo’s thesis, titled Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis, uses the exact or slightly tweaked wordings of other scholars without quotation marks or proper referencing,” The Guardian reported. “DiAngelo listed these authors in a reference section, but in several cases she did not cite their names next to the relevant sections in the text of the thesis itself.”
The Washington Free Beacon first reported on the complaint. The news outlet pointed out DiAngelo, who is white, said credit should always be given to racial minority scholars.
Yet that did not stop her from engaging in “mosaic plagiarism,” which is taking the structure of a sentence and changing a few words, as the Free Beacon noted.
“Anti-DEI activists have been clear about their agenda to discredit DEI efforts, and claiming that progressive scholars who write about race have engaged in plagiarism is one of their more predictable strategies,” The Guardian quoted DiAngelo as saying in comment about the dismissal. “I am certainly not the first in the DEI field to be accused – progressive Black scholars in particular have been targeted with this allegation.”
One scholar who DiAngelo borrowed language from told The Fix that “plagiarism is plagiarism.”
“But in a thesis on Critical Race Theory, it would seem to be even more egregious,” University of Melbourne professorial fellow Bronwyn Davies told The Fix for a Sep. 4 article.
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