Dr. Khyati Y. Joshi is a public intellectual whose social science research and community connections inform policy-makers, educators, and everyday people about race, religion, and immigration in 21st century America. Her most recent book is White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America (NYU Press, 2020). She is the author and co-editor of Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice, 3rd edition (Routledge, 2016), one of the most widely-used books by diversity practitioners and social justice scholars alike. Her other works include New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America (Rutgers U. Press, 2006); Envisioning Religion, Race, and Asian Americans (University of Hawaii Press, 2020) and Asian Americans in Dixie: Race and Migration in the South (U. of Illinois Press, 2013), both as co-editor; and numerous book chapters and articles. She has lectured around the world, including at the White House; to policy-makers at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE); and for scholarly and popular audiences in Denmark, India, Lebanon, and across the United States. She is the co-founder of the Institute for Teaching Diversity and Social Justice and consults on equity and inclusion for schools, colleges and universities, nonprofit organizations, and businesses; she has provided professional development to educators across the U.S., and continuing education programs for lawyers and judges. As a Professor of Education at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Dr. Joshi received the 2014 Distinguished Faculty Award for Research and Scholarship. She was a consultant for the Pew Research Forum’s groundbreaking 2015 survey on Asian Americans and Religion, and is a founder and board member of Jersey Promise and co-author of its groundbreaking report on Asian Americans in New Jersey. Professor Joshi earned her doctorate in Social Justice Education at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is a graduate of Emory University and the Candler School of Theology, and pursued post-graduate studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Often contacted by journalists, Prof. Joshi has appeared on MSNBC, CSPAN, CBS2 New York, on radio such as Voice of America, PRI’s The World, and NPR’s Morning Edition, numerous NPR affiliates around the country, and quoted in numerous publications in the U.S. and abroad, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, The Times of India, and others.
White Christian Privilege: Race and Religion in America
White Christian Privilege: Race and Religion in America
Christianity’s overwhelming social power shapes America today, even when religious discrimination is mistaken for racism or obscured in debates over immigration or national identity. The United States’ most powerful myth is that it was created as a haven of religious freedom for all, and that the First Amendment makes people of all faiths, and of no faith, equal before the law. It is time for us to understand that Christian privilege is embedded in U.S. policy, politics, and society’s rules and assumptions about who belongs. At the same time, Christianity has also had a role in the construction of Whiteness in the United States.
In this webinar, Khyati Y. Joshi maps the origins of Christian privilege and the entwinement of Christianity and whiteness in U.S. national identity. In doing so, she provides a roadmap for working for justice and building a "more perfect union".
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