#006 - Dr. Shreena Gandhi - Yoga, White Supremacy, and Caste

Shreena Gandhi is a part of the Religious Studies Department at Michigan State University, where is primarily teaches classes on religion and race in the Americas.

She is currently finishing up edits on a manuscript, A Cultural History of Yoga in the United States, which looks at the impacts of race, gender and class on how yoga is practiced and commodified in religious and secular spaces.

And she is working on two other projects: one on religious seeking in the colonial and post-colonial global south, which uses her grandfather’s writings and books as primary evidence, as well as the writings of other colonial and post-colonial religious seekers.

And the other is a collaborative project on how to transform U.S. religious history into an anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-sexist discipline which helps move forward the goals of decolonization.

She joined Kelly and John to talk about the history of yoga in the United States, how the story of colonialism and white supremacy cannot be separated from the popularity of yoga in the west, and what can and should be done about it. She also shared her thoughts on the past and future of the caste system.