Academic Plagiarism Complaint Against the Author of ‘White Fragility’ Dismissed

The University of Washington has dismissed a complaint against Robin DiAngelo, the author of the best-selling book “White Fragility,” which accused her of plagiarizing portions of her 2004 dissertation.

In a letter in response to the complaint dated last Wednesday, a university representative said that the evidence presented failed to meet the institution’s criteria for plagiarism, which it defines as “the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results or words without giving appropriate credit.”

As a result, the university determined that there was no basis for conducting an inquiry into DiAngelo’s thesis, according to the letter, which was provided to The Times by DiAngelo.

In a statement about the university’s dismissal of the complaint, DiAngelo described the accusations against her as a politically motivated attempt to undermine her antiracism work and her support for diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

“Anti-D.E.I. activists have been clear about their agenda to discredit D.E.I. efforts, and claiming that progressive scholars who write about race have engaged in plagiarism is one of their more predictable strategies,” DiAngelo, who is white, said in a statement. “I am certainly not the first in the D.E.I. field to be accused — progressive Black scholars in particular have been targeted with this allegation.”

The University of Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The complaint, which was filed in August, accused DiAngelo of research misconduct and cited 20 instances in which DiAngelo drew on the work of other scholars in her 2004 dissertation, “Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis.” While DiAngelo cited the scholars whose ideas she referred to and credited them in her bibliography, the complaint highlighted some lengthy passages that repeat phrases almost verbatim from their source material, without quotation marks.