Robin DiAngelo

DiAngelo was born Robin Jeanne Taylor into a white working-class family in San Jose, California, the youngest of three daughters born to Robert Z. Taylor and Maryanne Jeanne DiAngelo.[3][4] Her parents divorced when she was two and the family fell into poverty. When DiAngelo was ten years old her mother died of cancer, after which time she and her sisters went to live with their father.[5]

She has written that her "experience of poverty would have been different had [she] not been white”, reflecting that although she feels that she faced "class oppression", she also benefited from "racial privilege".[6]

DiAngelo earned a B.A. in Sociology and History from Seattle University in 1991 where she graduated summa cum laude and the class valedictorian.[7]

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".[8] Her Ph.D. committee was chaired by James A. Banks.[3] In 2007, she joined the faculty of Westfield State University,[9] where she was named an associate professor of multicultural education in 2014.[10] She resigned from her position at Westfield in 2015.[11] She now holds the position of Affiliate Associate Professor of Education at the University of Washington.[12] She holds two Honorary Doctoral degrees from Starr King Seminary (2019) and Lewis & Clark College (2017).[13][14]

DiAngelo has worked for 20 years in providing diversity training for businesses.[15][16][17] She argues that racism is embedded throughout America's political systems and culture.[2] 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".[18]

DiAngelo has published a number of academic articles on race, privilege, and education[19] 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).[20][21]

DiAngelo is known for her work regarding "white fragility", a term she coined in a 2011 peer-reviewed paper.[22][23] 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.[24][25]

In June 2018, DiAngelo published the book White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.[26] The book became a New York Times bestseller, not leaving the list for over a year.[27] In June 2020, during the George Floyd protests, it reached number 1 on the New York Times list.[28] The July 26, 2020 edition of the list marked the book's 97th week in the Paperback Nonfiction category, where it was ranked number 1.[29] The book received mixed critical reception, with positive reviews in sources including New Statesman and the Los Angeles Review of Books,[30][31] and negative reviews in sources including The Atlantic and The Washington Post.[32][33]

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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