It’s Hard to Accept That Robin DiAngelo Might Not Be the Intellectual Giant We All Thought She Was

A colossus falls

Photo by boana, DiAngelo headshot by Jason P. Toews.

This week, the Washington Free Beacon reported that Robin DiAngelo may have plagiarised parts of her PhD thesis. The accusation is compounded by the fact that some of the scholars who lodged a complaint against DiAngelo are not white, and DiAngelo has been adamant that white people should credit the work of non-white people. It’s a stunning charge that indicts the credibility of one of America’s most beloved and admired intellectuals.

I, for one, am shattered. Say it ain’t so, Robin! How could the modern-day Socrates who uncovered profound truths like “the everyday is the primary site of the signification of Whiteness” and “racism is raining down on us 24/7, and there are no umbrellas” be a faux-intellectual hack? How could the oracle who revealed that racism is everywhere and nobody knows it, except we all know it, but we never talk about it, except that we talk about it constantly in the lucrative book-and-guest-speaker circuit that made her a millionaire, be a fraud? It’s almost as if in the panicked moments after George Floyd’s death, America groped desperately for someone — anyone! — to provide answers, and DiAngelo happened to be in the right place at the right time, so we elevated her to guru status even though she’s obviously a garden-variety midwit charlatan. It is almost like that!

I’m left feeling unmoored. I’ve tried to live my life according to DiAngelo’s principles. I always view actions through the lens of race, even though I also know that racialized thinking is the source of all inequality. I acknowledge non-white people’s dignity by treating them as racial avatars with no agency who are perpetual underlings in a world in which white people are the Undisputed Masters Of The Universe Forever. I fight institutionalized racism because I’m obliged to do so, but it’s pointless, but I have to, even though I can’t, but I must raise my consciousness, even though my consciousness can never be raised, but I have to do my part to build a better world, even though a better world is impossible and frankly I should really just shut the fuck up (while not remaining silent). This is how I’ve been living — could the author of this sterling moral code possibly be full of shit?

This is so confusing. If DiAngelo is a fraud, then why did no less of an intellect than Jimmy Fallon nod along to her ideas? We’re talking about Jimmy Fallon here — has the world ever produced a more incisive and skeptical mind? And sure, Fallon had recently taken heat for an impression of Chris Rock that he did 20 years earlier, so DiAngelo was basically being used as a totem by a guilt-stricken white person seeking absolution, which is arguably her entire role in our discourse, but is that really relevant? You’re asking me to believe that DiAngelo is a hack and that entertainers are the wrong people to tackle America’s complex racial dynamic? That might just be more than I can process.

I suppose the next thing you’re going to tell me is that Ibram X. Kendi is also a D-minus academic who got lucky by riding the mid-2020 wave of racial hysteria to fame and fortune. And you’ll probably cite the total collapse of his Center for Antiracist Research as evidence that he’s an obvious lightweight with bad ideas who got in way over his head. Which, sure, theoretically could be true. And it also theoretically could be true that Julie Andrews is the Zodiac Killer, but what’s the point of entertaining ridiculous hypotheticals?

I suppose after that, you’re going to tell me that large swaths of academia are utter fucking nonsense with no societal benefit. You’ll ask me to believe that not every PhD-holder is a sparkling intellect, and that these wannabe philosophs produce large amounts of intentionally opaque writing that should be loaded onto a barge and then sunk. You’ll say that to imagine that our university system — with its perverse incentive structures — can identify true genius is like imagining that astrology can predict the next chair of the Federal Reserve. These are insane propositions, but they’d all have to be true to explain DiAngelo’s rise!

And I suppose the last thing you’re going to tell me is that tastemakers in media and entertainment are largely incapable of differentiating good arguments from bad ones. You’ll point out that these people are: 1) In business, and 2) Typically highly institutionalized, and therefore are about as likely to go against the grain as a terrified third-grader on her first day at a new school. You’ll say that if there was any doubt about this dynamic, then the elevation of cranks like DiAngelo and Kendi are definitive proof that our most influential voices will promote any arguments that society deems fashionable, even if those arguments could be unspooled by a moderately trained Border Collie. I mean…as long as you’re spouting utter nonsense, you might as well say that!

It’s all too much. And frankly: I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it — the people who lodged this complaint against DiAngelo must be mistaken. There is simply no way that Robin DiAngleo — THE Robin DiAngelo! — is a consummate hack who achieved Svengali status simply because people were too scared to call out her obvious bullshit. There is no way that she’s sold millions of books and made a fortune on the lecture circuit by being a drivel-spouting mediocrity. Just pondering the idea that all of that happened — and recently! — absolutely blows my fucking mind. So, I simply choose to believe that none of it is true.

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