Did Robin DiAngelo Steal the Concept of “White Fragility”?

DiAngelo's ideas are identical to those of the 1970s' "New White Consciousness" cult.

“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 “antiracism” and…