Last week’s New York Times had a fascinating profile of Robin DiAngelo. Now that her work is so ubiquitous, it’s interesting to see some reviewers and readers giving her work much closer scrutiny. When I read her book “White Fragility” last year, I had not read many books in the critical theory tradition, so I was quite taken aback by some of the claims she made and new definitions she proposed. I thought some of her ideas were extremely promising and some deeply questionable. Yet it was difficult to find much substantive discussion of it online or in the press.
But just a year later, DiAngelo is in the news so much, we’re starting to see people writing about her and discussing her work more carefully. This NYT profile was a good example: it’s pretty balanced, and a few times the author, Daniel Bergner, probes deeper to get at some of the more latent issues. I thought there were some really interesting things to think about — particularly for those of us who work in schools.
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