A left-wing writer and racial-justice activist who has claimed that American society was “instituted by racist ideas and maintained by racist policies” published a black history book for kids earlier this year that appears to be filled with content plagiarized from other sources, according to a review of the book by National Review. Confronted with the apparent plagiarism, the book’s publisher said it would be pulled from circulation pending an investigation. …

While Miller cites his sources throughout the book – there are more than 400 citations listed in the notes in the back – a review of the book found that in many cases, Miller lifted the language from his sources almost verbatim, often with only minor changes in wording or punctuation. He appears to have lifted language from a variety of sources, including news organizations like the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Geographic, and the BBC, as well as from books, academic journals, and black historians. …

But some of the seemingly plagiarized content is more substantial. In a later chapter about “Black Panthers Around the World,” Miller appears to have lifted an entire page of his book from a 2018 BlackPast.org article.

[Read it all, especially for a discussion on how common plagiarism has become. One plagiarism expert quoted by Mills discloses that his website on plagiarism was itself plagiarized in a doctoral thesis that was supposed to discuss the problems of plagiarism. Front-line publishers are going to have to develop tools that flag instances of plagiarism up front before going through the expense of physical publication, or else keep losing a lot of money on clawbacks. — Ed]