The one thing both MLK's white professors and his white critics agreed on is that he was smart enough to plagiarize. But maybe they both got it wrong. Maybe they were both fooled by a "winning personality", vastly underestimating the alienness of the negro. The title question occurred to me today because of one of my wife's students. My wife recently caught her plagiarizing. The student responded with an odd denial that at first seemed dishonest to us. My wife then reviewed the student's previous work, and found most of it also to be plagiarized. But upon talking with this student further, it seems that she really, truly does not comprehend what "putting things in her own words" means! She really doesn't get it, and there was no premeditation in her apparent plagiarism. She can't truly commit plagiarism if she's not capable of words of her own in the first place; it's another example of a negro committing a crime without being criminal. It's a weird kind of imbecility that you would never guess from casual contact.
We need a new word for this sort of thing.
The sad part is this black female student has taken six other courses at the institution, and somehow got a high school diploma before that, without this having been detected.