Did Robin DiAngelo Steal the Concept of “White Fragility”?
It “Antiracist” educator and activist Robin DiAngelo is in the news again. Her book, White Fragility, published in 2018, surged in popularity following the death of George Floyd, spending nearly two years on the New York Times best-seller list and selling more than 1.3 million print copies in the United States alone. The core thesis of White Fragility is that all white people are racist, that white people react defensively when discussing race and racism, and that the defensiveness of white people serves to maintain “systemic racism.” While DiAngelo’s work was once widely praised across much of the mainstream and promoted as truth by many of our most vital institutions, it has also long been exposed by other scholars and writers for its reductionist simplicity, lack of empirical basis, absence of rigor, and race-essentialist worldview.
Unlike the summer of 2020 and its aftermath, however, when DiAngelo, together with activist and scholar Ibram X. Kendi, became the face of “anti-racism” and her flawed ideas were fawningly accepted as genuine knowledge, her work is being increasingly questioned and openly challenged. Most recently, conservative pundit Matt Walsh successfully punk’d her into providing “interpersonal reparations” to his black producer in the most discussed scene from his new film Am I Racist? And just weeks before that film’s release, she was revealed to have plagiarized from minority scholars in her 2004 University of Washington doctoral dissertation titled “Whiteness in Racial Dialogue.”
Yet there's still more to be known about her work that should forever extinguish any remaining credibility she has. Over the past couple of years, I undertook an investigation into the origins of DiAngelo’s pernicious philosophy. The story I uncovered was so full of intellectual fraud, violent extremist politics, manipulative educational techniques, and general insanity that the short article about her work that I had originally intended to write blew up into a book, recently published as Redefining Racism. (For more about the book, see this short trailer.)
Among my discoveries is that whatever DiAngelo has plagiarized from minority scholars pales in comparison to the number of ideas that she presents as her own that appear in the work of earlier white “antiracist” educators. Specifically, in her writing, DiAngelo presents as new a set of ideas originally developed in more openly radical terms by individuals working in the 1970s, most prominently Robert W. Terry, Patricia Bidol, and Judith H. Katz (author of the Smithsonian’s infamous “Aspects & Assumptions of Whiteness” infographic), none of whom are cited in White Fragility. These figures sought to spread a philosophy they called “New White Consciousness,” in which white people would dedicate themselves to being “antiracist racists” (as all white people are, as they argued, inescapably racist). James Edler, one adherent of “New White Consciousness,” proposed an idea that directly mirrors DiAngelo’s title concept of “white fragility” at least thirty-seven years before she coined that term in 2011. Edler labeled his concept, the same as DiAngelo’s in all but name, as white “distancing behaviors,” which he defined as “behaviors [among white people] that maintain a distance between the ‘terrible disease of racism’ and our very personal involvement in it.” By extension, as he argued, white people “remain more a part of the problem than of the solution.” For those familiar with DiAngelo’s writing, these words and phrases are, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from the types of sweeping statements she makes. Yet she never mentions nor cites Edler in the book by name—nor anywhere else in her writing I can find, and I’ve searched for it thoroughly.
Edler’s dissertation, titled “White on White: An Anti-Racism Manual for White Educators in the Process of Becoming,” was never published (though it has recently become available through his alma mater’s library online as a PDF). Yet, it’s not as if his ideas were unknown. His essay on “Distancing Behaviors Among White Groups Dealing With Racism” and its accompanying “Inventory of Distancing Reaction to White Implication in Racism”—included as appendices in his dissertation which thoroughly describes their genesis— were widely cited by other “antiracist” activist educators of the era, and integrated into their “Racism Awareness Training” sessions. An abridged version of his "Distancing Behaviors” essay, retitled “Distancing Behaviors Often Used by White People,“ has been cited by “antiracist” academics as recently as 2023. It appeared in the edited volume Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practical Guide to K–12 Anti-Racist, Multicultural Education and Staff Development, first published in 1997 but most recently released in 2008 as a fourth edition, which has sold more than 55,000 copies and has influenced a whole generation of “antiracist” educators.
Notably, Edler’s dissertation featured little study or analysis of the field of education but instead described his personal arrival at New White Consciousness and called for what he referred to as “New White Anti-racism.” The abstract reads:
This dissertation is directed at white educators who are willing to investigate a new focus on the racial crisis in this country. The uniqueness of the focus exists in that it implicates each of us as white people in the causes of racial suffering. It also challenges us to learn new truths about our whiteness and about our responsibility and opportunity for generating constructive change in ourselves, others, and in white controlled institutions. The objective is awareness—not guilt, with resulting new behavior among white people working on our white problem.
As communicated in his dissertation, Edler believed that to achieve New White Consciousness and to be New White Antiracists, all white people needed to overcome “the mental illness of seeing reality inaccurately” and the “true racial sickness of whites.” To do this, he believed, they would have to overcome their “distancing behaviors,” which, precisely like the “fragility” DiAngelo famously identified in herself, is something he himself experienced. Edler describes the moment in which he developed the concept:
My realization of the existence of this category of behaviors occurred when a friend and I attended a scheduled presentation that was to deal with racism in America. The large room filled with white students and faculty but no one arrived to present the program. Nervous chatter increased as the room full of people had waited close to a half hour without the arrival of the guest presenter. A number of people began leaving but many remained for reasons that are unclear. My friend and I stayed and observed the white group go through a number of behaviors that I eventually labeled as “Distancing Behaviors.” After observing individuals and small groups within the room, presumably sophisticated in their need to look at and act on our white problem, I identified about ten basic distancing behaviors. The reaction from most was silence but a few disagreed with my observations and most everyone left the room. Never before had I seen so clearly how we white Americans protect ourselves by Intellectualizing or game-playing of some kind.
It’s worth highlighting here that Edler, as he shares, tried to teach the room himself when the presenter didn’t show, communicating, in effect, that all of those in attendance were not only racists but also racists in denial who were part of the very problem they sought to help solve, and causing them to flee in response to his bizarre behavior and views. Yet, rather than realize it was he alone who might have been responsible for his audience’s desire to flee, he concluded that everyone else suffered from cognitive dissonance and just couldn't accept their true racist nature.
Sound familiar? If not, recall here the bewilderment DiAngelo says she experienced as a diversity trainer when she “was taken aback by how angry and defensive so many white people became at the suggestion that they were connected to racism in any way,” the “outrage” people felt from being forced to participate in her workshops, hoe they “argued against any and all points” and her acknowledgment that “the mere title of this book [White Fragility] will cause resistance.”
Sound familiar? If not, recall the biographical details DiAngelo shares in her work that helped lead her to determine that all white people are racist—for example, the guidance she received from her racist grandmother to avoid “colored” people and the “anxiety” she experienced at the prospect of having to attend an all-black picnic. Like Edler, DiAngelo sees herself as an insider to a white collective that she must educate as a fellow white person and assumes that all white people of all ages, classes, genders, and backgrounds have the same thoughts, feelings, and fears regarding race and racism that she has—a woman born to a racist working-class family in the 1950s!
The “distancing behaviors” Edler details include making statements such as “racism doesn’t affect my area of interest (e.g. math),” “I’m not racist,” “I treat people as individuals no matter what color they are,” and “I’m doing all I can.” Edler also describes a series of “games” white people play to avoid coming to New White Consciousness, which includes “request[ing] a clear, concise definition of the word ‘racism,’” arguing there’s a “simple solution” to racism other than “massive value” changes “in all our institutions,” and pointing to the "great strides that have been made in recent years."
Sound familiar? If not, recall here both the list of statements that DiAngelo shares in White Fragility that she claims (without evidence) are evidence of “distancing behavior” “fragility”—“I’m not racist,” “I was taught to treat everyone the same,” “Race doesn’t have any meaning to me,” etc.—and her belief that “we [white people] hide our racism from people of color and deny it among ourselves.” As she writes, “I am often asked if I think the younger generation is less racist. No, I don’t. In some ways, racism’s adaptations over time are more sinister than concrete rules such as Jim Crow.”
Despite his similarly unevidenced religious-like conviction in New White Consciousness, and his view that “the objective is awareness—not guilt,” Edler writing demonstrates that his arrival at this philosophy wasn’t psychologically healthy for him. He remarked that “new whites must come to terms with being ostrasized [sic]” and recalled repeating many times “I’m tired of being angry at everyone. I’m burned out! The mistrust and disappointment take so much out of me. . . . [E]very place I go, I end up being upset; upset at television, the news broadcasts, at the newspaper, at jokes, at teachers, and even at friends.” Far from New White Consciousness serving as a solution to a race-wide white “mental illness” problem, as Edler claimed, it was commonly documented to cause “anxiety,” “anger,” “insecurity,” and “isolation.”
Sound familiar? If not, recall DiAngelo’s belief in the need for white people to develop “the ability to sit with the discomfort of being seen racially” and her description of the “discomfort associated with an honest appraisal and discussion of our internalized superiority and racial privilege” that DiAngelo recognizes even white people who have fully arrived her understanding of “white fragility” will have, while she too describes her framework as not having the objective of creating “guilt.”
While the label “New White Consciousness” has long since faded into the obscurity it deserves, DiAngelo and newer generations of white “antiracist” educators continued to spread the same philosophy under ever-newer terminology to increasing numbers of followers until their work exploded in popularity following the killing of George Floyd. Given the lack of rigor in DiAngelo’s work, it’s possible that she never once encountered Edler’s writing directly but only had exposure to his concept of “distancing behaviors” through intermediary “antiracist” educators. Indeed, references to white “distancing behaviors” are often encountered in modern “antiracist” literature with no reference to the person who first originated the concept. This fact perhaps speaks broadly to the poor quality of much “antiracist” scholarship. But given the credible charges of plagiarism DiAngelo faces, it’s equally possible that she is fully aware of Edler’s work and simply slapped a fresh coat of paint on his old idea.
Either way, thank goodness the tides are finally turning. Given the obvious similarities between the work of Edler and DiAngelo, their core ideas suffer from the same fatal flaw: the very charges of white “distancing behavior” or “white fragility” are unfalsifiable Kafka traps, whereby any rejection by a white person to the charge of distancing or fragility is presented as evidence of their alleged distancing behavior or fragility. This is an absurd form of scholarship that we would immediately recognize as such in any other context.
It's time for us all to recognize this fact and tell the truth about DiAngelo’s work.
Joseph (Jake) Klein is a writer, filmmaker, co-founder of The Black Sheep, and a Hazlitt Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also the author of the upcoming book Redefining Racism: How Racism Became “Power + Prejudice. Follow him on X @josephjakeklein.