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DiAngelo was born Robin Jeanne Taylor into a working-class family in San Jose, California, the youngest of three daughters born to Robert Z. Taylor and Maryanne Jeanne DiAngelo.[3][4]
She lived with her mother in poverty until her mother's death from cancer, after which she and her siblings lived with her father. She became a single mother with one child in her mid-20s, and worked as a waitress before beginning college at the age of 30.[5]
In her youth, she believed that her poverty led to class oppression, though it was only later in life that she believed she was benefiting from white privilege, even while being "poor and white".[6] In 2018, DiAngelo stated that her "experience of poverty would have been different had [she] not been white".[6]
For over twenty years, DiAngelo has offered racial justice training for schools, nonprofit organizations, universities, and businesses,[16][17][18] arguing that racism is embedded throughout American political systems and culture.[2] In a 2019 article for The New Yorker, 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".[19]
DiAngelo has published a number of academic articles and books on race, privilege, and education.[20] In 2011, she co-wrote with Ozlem Sensoy Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Critical Social Justice Education, which won the American Educational Research Association's Critics' Choice Book Award (2012) and the Society of Professors of Education Book Award (2018).[21][22]
That year, DiAngelo published a paper titled "White Fragility" in The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, thereby coining the term.[8][23][24] 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 wrote:
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.
She appears in the 2024 Daily Wire documentary Am I Racist?, in which she is shown paying $30 in reparations to the documentary's Black producer. DiAngelo charged $15,000 for her appearance.[41][42]
In August 2024, DiAngelo's doctoral dissertation, Whiteness in racial dialogue: A discourse analysis from the University of Washington, came under scrutiny due to accusations of plagiarism, including from minority academics.[43][44][45][46][47] On September 11, 2024, the University of Washington dismissed the complaint, stating that it "...falls short of a research misconduct allegation that would give rise to an inquiry."[48][49]
DiAngelo, R. (2012). What Does it Mean to be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy. Counterpoints (New York, N.Y.). Peter Lang. ISBN978-1-4331-1116-7.
^Sanneh, Kelefa (August 12, 2019). "The Fight to Redefine Racism". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on August 13, 2019. Retrieved August 14, 2019.
