DiAngelo was born into a white working class family in San Jose, California. She is of Italian descent. Her parents divorced when she was two and her mother fell into poverty raising 3 children alone. She wrote that her "experience of poverty would have been different had not been white”, reflecting that although she feels that she faced "class oppression", she also benefited from "racial privilege".
Education and career
DiAngelo received her Ph.D. in multicultural education from the University of Washington in 2004, with a dissertation entitled "Whiteness in racial dialogue: a discourse analysis". Her Ph.D. committee was chaired by James A. Banks. In 2007, she joined the faculty of Westfield State University, where she was named an associate professor of multicultural education in 2014. She resigned from her position at Westfield in 2015. She now holds the position of Affiliate Associate Professor of Education at the University of Washington. She holds two Honorary Doctoral degrees from Starr King Seminary and Lewis & Clark College. DiAngelo has worked for 20 years in providing diversity training for businesses. She argues that racism is embedded throughout America's political systems and culture. In a 2019 article for The New Yorker, the 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".
Work
DiAngelo has published a number of academic articles on race, privilege, and education and written several books. Her first book, co-written with Ozlem Sensoy, Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Critical Social Justice Education won both the AmericanEducational Research Association's Critics' Choice Book Award and the Society of Professors of Education Book Award. DiAngelo is known for her work regarding "white fragility", a term she coined in a 2011 peer-reviewed paper. 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 argues that, “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.” As of 2016, she regularly gives workshops on the topic. In June 2018, DiAngelo published the book White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. The book became a New York Times bestseller, not leaving the list for over a year. In June 2020, during the George Floyd protests, it reached no. 1 on the New York Times list. The July 26, 2020 edition of the list marked the book's 97th week in the Paperback Nonfiction category, where it was ranked number 1. The book received mixed critical reception, with positive reviews in sources including New Statesman and the Los AngelesReview of Books, and negative reviews in sources including The Federalist and The Atlantic.
