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Meet Robin DiAngelo, Woman Who Coined Term 'White Fragility'

Robin DiAngelo is an academician and an American author.

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Anoushka Das
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Robin DiAngelo
Robin DiAngelo: Robin DiAngelo is an academician, and an American author who is pursuing whiteness studies.
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She has now grabbed headlines after CoCa-Cola was accused of forcing it's employees to be 'less white.' Karlyn Borysenko, a critic of critical race theory tweeted several images of Robin DiAngelo's training course called "Confronting Racism, with Robin DiAngelo".  The course was being presented as a virtual presentation during the company's training session. The course is also available on the LinkedIn too.

Here are a few things to know about Robin DiAngelo:

  1. Robin DiAngelo was born on September 8, 1956, in San Jose, California to a working class family.
  2. DiAngelo revealed a lot about her experiences as a white girl who lived in poverty. “I grew up poor and white. While my class oppression has been relatively visible to me, my race privilege has not. In my efforts to uncover how race has shaped my life, I have gained deeper insight by placing race in the center of my analysis and asking how each of my other group locations have socialized me to collude with racism," she says.
  3. She obtained her PhD in Multicultural Education from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2004. She is working as the Associate Professor of Education at the University of Washington, Seattle at present.
  4. DiAngelo has published numerous articles and books based on race, privilege, and education. Her first book Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Critical Social Justice Education which was co-written with Ozlem Sensoy bagged the American Educational Research Association's Critics' Choice Book Award (2012) and the Society of Professors of Education Book Award (2018).
  5. Robin DiAngelo is credited for coining the term 'White Fragility.' She did so in a peer-reviewed paper which was published in 2011.
  6. Her book White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism on was published in 2018. It reached the number one position in the New York Times bestseller list especially during the George Floyd protests in America.
  7. DiAngelo has over 20 years of experience in providing what is known as 'diversity training' sessions for various companies. She is considered to be an expert in anti-bias training.

Read about Rashmi Samant, the woman who demanded her resignation at Oxford University Student Union due to racism here.

Robin DiAngelo Anti-Racism Movement
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