Anyone who thinks the plagiarism allegations against Robin DiAngelo will somehow damage her status or delegitimize her movement fundamentally does not understand the intent and purpose of contemporary “anti-racism.”
First, it should be noted that plagiarism is rampant in the modern academy. If you subjected 1000 humanities PhD dissertations to the same tight scrutiny deployed against DiAngelo’s, I’d bet that between 990-999 of them would be found guilty of similar offenses. Citation bloat combined with the simple fact that basically no one actually reads the sources they cite (and they never, ever read anything cited by someone else) has led to system where you basically can’t get a diss approved without doing something that could be regarded as ripping off someone else. Also there’s the simple fact that the scholarship is X Studies fields is policed for ideological purity at levels that would make Stalin blush—the “scholars” in these fields can only make one of a handful of arguments while using very particular, pre-approved language, lest they shall find themselves labeled problematic and rendered unemployable. Of course this means one person’s work is always going to heavily resemble the work of others. Tautology isn’t an aspect of these fields. It’s the entirety of these fields.
More fundamentally: why the fuck would you think that anyone who goes along with this shit would care about the honesty of one of its major purveyors? What is it about DiAngelo-ian race fetishism that has convinced you these people are concerned with rigor or integrity? Because they just seem so darn honest and sincere? Are you in a coma? Are you capable of drawing a clock face?
How many white lady academics have been outed as pretending to be Native American or Hispanic? What’s the fallout been from that? Nothing? Literally nothing?
How many exaggeratedly fake and insane articles did a dimwit of James Lindsey’s caliber manage to get past peer review? How many studies have shown that the policies prescribed by these people either have no effect whatsoever or actively make participants more racist? If this movement was capable of being debunked, it would have collapsed a long, long time ago.
But it’s not! It’s not because honestly and efficacy do not matter to the people who preach and practice this stuff! They care only about achieving the dominance of their ideological and aesthetic preferences and lowering the bar for academic and workplace success for themselves and their lackeys. They don’t care if their movement is literally accomplishing the exact opposite of what it purports to accomplish.
Robin DiAngelo could be caught on tape lustily screaming the n-word while beating a black lab puppy to death and nothing would change. She herself might suffer some disproportionately small professional consequences, but her movement would continue, uncriticized and unabated. Nothing is stopping this. It’s never going away. Because failure is the point.