Peering Inside the White Container: Feminism and Antiracism in the Work of JFSR

Abstract

Peering Inside The White ContainerFeminism and Antiracism in the Work of JFSR Sailaja Krishnamurti (bio) As a new board member, I welcome this opportunity to respond to Judith Plaskow’s essay, “Race, Racism, and the JFSR,” part of a series of actions that Feminist Studies in Religion (FSR) has undertaken as a response to growing concern about anti-Black racism and carceral violence in the United States. When I was invited to join the board in 2020, I was glad to become part of an academic community that has made so many important interventions in the field. But as Plaskow rightly observes, for many of us scholars of color, the journal still feels like a “white container.” To understand this problem, I invite readers to reflect on three questions. First, what does the word race mean in FSR’s action plan? There is a critical difference between advocating for “diversity” and committing to antiracist work. Let me contextualize my question by first interrogating my own position in this discussion. I am a queer cisgender woman of Brahmin (upper caste) Hindu South Asian descent. I live and work in Canada, the carceral state next door. As a racialized settler on colonized land, and as an academic of color with tenure, I occupy positions of marginalization and of privilege in academia and in North American society. I locate myself this way as a practice of interrogative positionality, a method which asks that we continually reexamine our locations, orientations, and relationships to power.1 From this vantage point, I can see that I am one of those non-Black scholars of color whose numbers, Plaskow notes, have grown on the board in recent years while the number of Black scholars has stayed steady. Non-Black women of color are indeed often used as an alibi in equity initiatives: the number of women of [End Page 51] color goes up, and “diversity” is achieved.2 Why is it that non-Black women of color like me grow in number in academic spaces when Black women do not? The core problem—that white supremacy, class inequality, and anti-Black racism are deeply embedded in American and global history and culture—cannot be addressed through institutional diversity initiatives that do not radically change institutions. It requires an explicitly antiracist approach that understands anti-Black racism and settler colonialism as institutional ontologies and as transnational phenomena. A second question therefore arises: What does it mean to engage in “the study of religion” when we know that our field owes its existence to colonial, orientalist, and imperial institutions? These are the same institutions that are responsible for exploiting people of color all over the world. Some traditions, and some scholars, sit more comfortably in relation to the term religion than others. Assumed divisions between insider and outsider, practitioner and scholar continue to shape our theories and methodologies. It is inevitable, therefore, that efforts to diversify representation within the field will expose the limits of what “religion” itself can contain. Plaskow writes that “like systemic racism, Christian hegemony is built into the fabric of the academy and society in ways FSR has been unable to escape” (7). Indeed, white Christian hegemony is so deeply enmeshed in the academy that we must ask how we can challenge it as long as we are so invested in maintaining its terms and structures. Here is one small and unscientific example. A brief search of JFSR’s hundreds of articles shows that only eighty-three contain the word Hindu, and of those, only sixteen are authored or coauthored by scholars who are (or at least whom I know to be) racialized people. I offer this observation to make two points: a) diversity in the coverage of religious traditions does not always equal racial diversity, and b) white scholars continue to dominate many fields of religious studies, particularly those which have been historically connected to the colonial apparatus. In her 2020 blog post “Not Just the Syllabus, Throw the Whole Discipline in the Trash,” Harvard MTS scholar Ciarra Jones writes that the “foundation of American academia is white supremacy. By refusing to reimagine not only the canon but also the theories and methods...