Tag: racsim

‘White Fragility’ author Robin DiAngelo accused of plagiarizing minority scholars in Ph.D thesis

Robin DiAngelo, the author and “anti-racism consultant” who rose to fame and made a fortune scolding white people for their inherent bigotry, has been accused of ripping off the work of two Asian American scholars in her 2004 doctoral thesis.

A complaint filed with the University of Washington and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon outlines 20 examples of alleged plagiarism in the “White Fragility” author’s dissertation, “Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis.”

Among the examples cited are two paragraphs reproduced almost entirely from Northeastern University’s Thomas Nakayama — who is Asian-American — and coauthor Robert Krizek, in which DiAngelo fails to provide adequate attribution.

Another example in the complaint shows DiAngelo allegedly playing fast and loose with a paragraph written by Asian-American professor Stacey Lee of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In it, rather than clearly delineating that Lee had summarized the work of scholar David Theo Goldberg, the information was presented in such a way to appear as though DiAngelo herself was providing the summary herself.

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Men accused of mutilating corpse won’t face trial, a casualty of Antioch police scandal

Contra Costa County prosecutors have dismissed felony charges against two men accused of mutilating a woman’s corpse — the latest case to be fouled by a racist text message scandal that rocked the Antioch Police Department.

Ashton Montalvo and Deangelo Boone were arrested and charged in October 2022 with arson and mutilation after the burned body of Mykaella Sharlman, 25, was found near a hiking trail in Antioch.

Sharlman’s autopsy ruled out homicide, but Montalvo and Boone were charged with setting Sharlman’s body on fire and putting it in a garbage can, according to the Mercury News in San Jose.

Sharlman‘s death was attributed to a fentanyl overdose, according to Bay Area television station KNTV.

In April, the Mercury News reported on an FBI and county prosecutor’s office investigation into the Antioch Police Department that revealed dozens of officers had been sending racist and homophobic messages to one another for years, using anti-Black slurs and other derogatory terms.

The report sent shock waves through the department, with more than 40 officers implicated in the scandal.

The case against Montalvo and Boone “relied heavily” on investigations by several Antioch police officers who were associated with the racist texts, the Contra Costa County district attorney’s office said last week in a statement.

The officers were not identified.

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The Wokest News Stories of 2020

The year 2020 will be remembered in the real world for a terrifying pandemic, mass unemployment, a nationwide protest movement, and a historically uninspiring presidential race. The year in media, meanwhile, was marked by grotesque factual scandals, journalist-cheered censorship, and an accelerating newsroom mania for political groupthink that was equal parts frightening and ridiculous.

The tiniest violations of perceived orthodoxies cost jobs. Reporters and editors were whacked en masse in uprisings at the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Wall Street Journal, Vox, the Miami Herald, and countless other places.

Some of the purges were themselves amazing news stories. A contractor named Sue Schafer was fired after the Washington Post published a 3,000-word expose about a two-year-old incident in which she attended a Halloween party dressed as Megyn Kelly, who herself had been fired from NBC for defending blackface costumes. Schafer, in other words, was fired for dressing in blackface as a satire of blackface costumes, in an incident no one heard of until the Post decided to make an issue of it. This was one example of what the New Yorker recently exulted as the “expensive and laborious” process of investigative journalism, as practiced in 2020.

Raymond Chandler once said that when he ran out of ideas, he just had a character burst into a room with a gun. 2020 op-ed writers in the same predicament could insert random nouns into a MadLibs template: “Is _____ Racist?” Everything from knitting to Jesus to women to botanical gardens to dieting to mermaids to  Scrabble and perhaps a hundred other things made the cut, to the point where it became a bottomless running gag for inevitable cancel targets like the satirical Twitter personality, “Titania McGrath.”

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