Dr. Robin DiAngelo
Professional: I have been a consultant and trainer for over 20 years on issues of racial and social justice. I was appointed to co-design the City of Seattle’s Race and Social Justice Initiative Anti-Racism training (with Darlene Flynn). I have worked with a wide-range of organizations including private, non-profit, and governmental.
Personal: “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. In so doing, I have been able to address in greater depth my multiple locations and how they function together to hold racism in place. I now make the distinction that I grew up poor and white, for my experience of poverty would have been different had I not been white” (DiAngelo, 2006).
Academic: I received my PhD in Multicultural Education from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2004. Dr. James Banks was my dissertation Chair. I earned tenure at Westfield State University in Massachusetts. Currently I am Affiliate Associate Professor of Education at the University of Washington. I have taught courses in Multicultural Teaching, Inter-group Dialogue Facilitation, Cultural Diversity & Social Justice, and Anti-Racist Education. My area of research is in Whiteness Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, explicating how whiteness is reproduced in everyday narratives. I am a two-time winner of the Student’s Choice Award for Educator of the Year at the University of Washington’s School of Social Work. I have numerous publications and books, including Is Everybody Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Critical Social Justice Education, co-written with Özlem Sensoy, and which received both the American Educational Studies Association Critics Choice Book Award (2012) and the Society of Professors of Education Book Award (2018). My work on White Fragility has been featured or cited in Salon, NPR, PBS, Slate, Alternet, the Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Seattle Times. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism was released as a book from Beacon Press in June of 2018 and debuted on the New York Times Bestseller List.