In 2020, Robin DiAngelo was the queen of DEI, raking in a healthy six-figure salary to scold other white people about their privilege. But now her diversity empire has withered — leaving her spewing nonsense in obscure crevices of the internet.
On a recent episode of the “Not Your Ordinary Parts” podcast, the “White Fragility” author slammed Michelangelo’s depiction of God creating man as “white supremacist” — and repeatedly misidentified the Old Testament’s Adam as David in the process.
DiAngelo told host Jalon Johnson that the iconic painting “The Creation of Adam” is “the single image I use to capture the concept of white supremacy.”
As she described the masterpiece to the podcast’s whopping 188 YouTube subscribers, DiAngelo made a major gaffe: “God is in a cloud and there’s all these angels, and he’s reaching out and he’s touching — I don’t know who that is, David or something?”
Johnson smirked as she continued, “And God is white and David is white and the angels are white — that, that is the perfect convergence of white supremacy, of patriarchy.”
She then goes on to mention she was raised Catholic (did Adam and Eve not get a mention in Sunday school?), and recollects looking up at art in church.
“I didn’t think to myself that God is white, but that, in a lot of ways, is power,” she explained. “I don’t need to. God just reflects me … I always belong racially to what is depicted as the human ideal.”
It’s a bizarre word salad, punctuated with academic jargon like “patriarchy” and “white supremacy” — and a strangely self-indulgent descriptor of herself as the “human ideal.”
Even a 500-year-old masterpiece is an expression of modern white supremacy when viewed through DiAngelo’s tortoiseshell spectacles.
Did it not occur to DiAngelo that, as a 16th-century Italian artist, Michelangelo might not have had racial animosity in his heart as he painted God and “David”?
It’s worth zooming out for a moment to appreciate DiAngelo’s fall from grace — from leader of a DEI movement that swept corporate America, to some wacky lady misidentifying supposedly white supremacist biblical figures on minor podcasts.
DiAngelo was an obscure whiteness studies professor at the University of Washington in 2020, when her 2018 book “White Fragility” soared to the number one slot of the New York Times bestseller list following George Floyd’s murder.
Her message — that all white people are inherently racist — ignited a scourge of white liberal self-flagellation that enriched her greatly.
“The question that white people need to ask ourselves is not if we were shaped by the forces of racism, but how,” DiAngelo wrote in her book. “The antidote to white fragility is ongoing and lifelong and includes sustained engagement, humility, and education.”
That summer, DiAngelo capitalized on social unrest — and thrust herself into the spotlight as the go-to expert for racial justice training at corporations, schools and organizations alike.
She reportedly raked in more than $700,000 just from speeches and workshops in the year following George Floyd’s murder — not to mention royalties and her salary as a professor of whiteness studies.
The author even pocketed $12,750 for a 2020 speaking gig at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Diversity Forum, while black speaker Austin Channing Brown got only $7,500 for the same event.
For her brave work spreading white guilt across the nation, she was even bestowed with two honorary degrees from Starr King Seminary and Lewis & Clark College.
The optics of DiAngelo’s rise to antiracist superstardom were astounding: A liberal white woman wagging her finger at other liberal white people, monetizing their guil, and doing just about nothing to actually fight racism or improve the lives of Black people in America.
But, as it turns out, being told you’re a racist gets old fast — and DiAngelo’s jig is up.
Recently, major players in the business world have taken aim at DEI.
Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman tweeted that “DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out).”
Meanwhile Elon Musk rejiggered the letters of DEI—short for diversity, equity and inclusion — to DIE on X.
Although demands for DEI roles soared by 55% in 2020 — 76% of which were taken by white people like DiAngelo, and only 3.8% by Black employees — corporations are scaling back en masse.
Diversity job postings are down 44% year-over-year, and companies like Google and Meta slashed their budget for external DEI consultants by as much as 90% in 2023. Zoom also recently laid off its DEI team.
Turns out paying hustlers like DiAngelo to tell you your company is irredeemably racist isn’t a winning business strategy after all.
Just as the DEI industry has risen and fallen, so too has DiAngelo — a scold whose stardom was propelled by a momentary moral panic, and who apparently could use some brushing up on her biblical and cultural references.
