PERSON: Robin DiAngelo

Affiliate Associate Professor of Education

Robin Jeanne DiAngelo (born September 8, 1956) is an American author working in the fields of critical discourse analysis and whiteness studies. She formerly served as a tenured professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University and is currently an affiliate associate professor of education at the University of Washington. She is known for her work pertaining to “white fragility,” an expression she coined in 2011 and explored further in a 2018 book entitled White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.

DiAngelo was born Robin Jeanne Taylor into a working-class family in San Jose, California, the youngest of three daughters born to Robert Z. Taylor and Maryanne Jeanne DiAngelo.

She lived with her mother in poverty until her mother’s death from cancer, after which she and her siblings lived with her father. She became a single mother with one child in her mid-20s, and worked as a waitress before beginning college at the age of 30.

In her youth, she believed that her poverty led to class oppression, though it was only later in life that she identified personally benefiting from white privilege, even while being “poor and white”. In 2018, DiAngelo stated that her “experience of poverty would have been different had not been white”.

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