The University of Connecticut is paying “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo $20,000 to train its administrators in the finer points of anti-racism.
According to a copy of DiAngelo’s contract provided to The College Fix, DiAngelo will be offering a three-and-a-half-hour workshop to college administrators during their professional development retreat. Included are up to $2,000 in travel expenses.
According to her website, DiAngelo holds a PhD in Multicultural Education from the University of Washington in Seattle and is currently an Affiliate Associate Professor of Education there. A recipient of two honorary doctorates, she claims her “area of research is in Whiteness Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, tracing how whiteness is reproduced in everyday narratives.”
In a statement announcing DiAngelo’s lecture, as well as their “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives,” UConn President Thomas Katsouleas commended UConn faculty and students who have engaged in protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death, as well as participated “in innovative online and remote initiatives aimed at righting longstanding wrongs.”
Saying UConn “have committed ourselves to matching our words with concrete, real-world actions that touch on every unit and facet of the University,” Katsouleas continued:
One example of this commitment is a professional development retreat scheduled for the fall for 44 top leaders of the university with Robin DiAngelo, the antiracism scholar whose White Fragility has become a much-discussed book during this moment. This retreat will help University leadership come to grips with the critical questions of racism and inclusion, and to bring those insights back to our campuses.
Another example is a new University course on Anti-Black Racism, that will be offered starting in Fall 2020, following on the success of the Spring 2020 course launched in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. While not a required course, it garnered the largest enrollment in the history of the University, and we expect and fully encourage the entire community to repeat that embrace of this new course.
DiAngelo’s bestselling book, “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,” has obtained even more prominence in recent months and posits that “white fragility” is “a state in which even a minimal challenge to the white position becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive responses. These responses function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and maintain white control,” according to her website.
As The Daily Caller News Foundation reported, activists like DiAngelo earn hefty sums to lecture people on what they claim is the inherent racism of white people. She “charged the University of Kentucky $12,000, not counting travel expenses, housing accommodations and meals, for a two-hour ‘Racial Justice Keynote and breakout session’ in March, according to a copy of the speaking contract obtained by the DCNF through public records requests,” DCNF discovered. DiAngelo also charges $320 per hour for phone calls.
DCNF noted that DiAngelo’s fee for the event at the University of Kentucky amounted to “more than a quarter of the annual median income for black families,” according to U.S. Census data.
Earlier this month, NASA invited Ibram X. Kendi, another anti-racism activist, to speak to its workforce. As The Daily Wire reported, an email sent to NASA employees invited them to an Aug. 12 Zoom lecture with Kendi, adding, “The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it — and then dismantle it,” writes professor Ibram X. Kendi. “That is the essence of anti-racism: the action that must follow both emotional and intellectual awareness of racism.”